Gone Girl Review Part 2
SPOILER ALERT (if you want to miss them skip ahead to Part 3) Plot holes aside (I actually spotted two) the movie is brilliant from a technical point of view and the first half will draw you in like a tiger pit baited with bacon. The first half is the gritty crime drama that has everyone doing things as smart as possible and are dealing with a near criminal genius. The husband manages to make some boneheaded mistakes but it’s the same kind of mistakes anyone would make in a difficult circumstances. The wife has her dark plot going (that’s the spoiler. I hope you headed my warning) and the lady cop is super smart and doesn’t miss anything. In fact during the set up and dark reveal the plot is nigh flawless and intriguing.
Then the wife starts making some boneheaded mistakes starting with making friends with white trash losers. Her carefully constructed plot unravels and she has to improvise. She makes a huge raft of errors (this is where that one big and one sort of big plot hole crops up) but somehow everyone else gets stupider. The female cop, who until then was hard driven to find the truth and a Sherlockian genius in spotting clues, turns stupid and helpless. The husband, who given the same set of circumstances any normal human would have immediately denounced his wife and run screaming into the night rather than spend ten minutes alone with her, bites his tongue long enough for her to implement her next dark plot. The film transforms into a cool innovative movie with amazing potential to another lazy Hollywood script counting on deus ex machina and a complete disregard for character motivation to move the plot along.
What were the two big plot holes I spotted? Well, we are well into the spoiler zone so I assume you are OK with me dropping them. So the wife calls up her old high school boyfriend Doogie Howser (Niel Patrick Harris but his character name is Dezi) in order to have some resources and eventually graphically cuts his throat 
(this is the pivotal scene that had the whole audience laughing ant the exact moment that the film turned into a dark comedy. The Halloween image I pulled from the horror movie t shirt collection), claiming he kidnapped her the day she disappeared and kept her as a sex slave and rape victim. However she meets up with him weeks after her disappearance in a casino (well known for video cameras). So the police made no effort to track Doogies movements? She later uses the cameras at his lake shore mansion to make it look like he raped her but there would also have been footage of her arriving happily with him weeks after her supposed disappearance. A couple hours worth of police work would have uncovered that but no one seemed interesting in investigating the death of a wealthy person with no prior record, especially when she flubbed badly in her interrogation.
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Gone Girl Review Part 3
In spite of those issues the film was definitely several steps above the usual dross foisted upon us by Hollywood, most of whom seem to think we are mouth breathing cow people who are content to chew on whatever cud they send our way. Here is a brief, spoiler free recap:
Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is a cruddy husband who comes home to find his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) missing under suspicious circumstances. She is a minor celebrity and a media storm rapidly builds around her disappearance. A tough police investigator (Kim Dickens) leads the investigation and as it progresses suspicion shifts towards Nick and his sister Margo (Carrie Coon). Plot points and twists are revealed and things get freaky as they often do in David Fincher movies.
So worth seeing? Absolutely yes, if only to help educate the rest of Hollywood as to what we the American audiences really want. Story was good for the bulk of the film, acting was great (especially Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck. I also really liked Tyler Perry), camera and film work extremely well done, pacing kind of brilliant in the sense that Mr. Fincher wanted to build a story rather than just present one, and overall a great movie going experience. 
I just don’t think it’s worthy of the tongue bath adulation that most people seem desperate to lather it with. It’s a decent flick swimming in a sea of mediocrity. It’s not the second coming of the Godfather with a script written on paper pulped from a piece of the True Cross (Godfather image courtesy of the movie t shirt category). Go see it and if you can turn off some of your higher brain functions you will love it. Personally I think it would be a better movie if you actually left before it takes it’s left turn into Mundania. At 149 minutes you could cut out 25 minutes early and still feel like you got a quality movie experience.
4 out of 5 Phasers.
The Infamous Dave Inman
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Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 22 Space Seed
This episode holds a very special place in my heart if only because it launched the best Star Trek movie the Wrath of Khan (Maybe I will marry TWOK! Shut up!). Even without the amazing movie following it up this would be one of the best episodes. Kirk is outclassed in every way by Khan physically, mentally, and sexually (yes, one episode where another stellar sexual magnet out sexy’s the Captain. Good thing they filmed this in Season 1 or Shatner never would have let that slide) and like in TWOK the only way Kirk can beat Khan is with his greater experience in the Enterprise and later in starship combat.
The base premise is cool although somewhat flawed. It made a lot of sense in the 70s to breed super men but honestly these days can you really imagine making a super human that would be able to out perform what we all know what machines will eventually be capable of doing? However I liked the idea of a crew of super beings running around conquering the universe. Too bad in Trek Into Darkness they didn’t thaw out the rest of the Botany Bay crew. I guess they were afraid to make the movie too interesting.
Anyway, awesome episode one well worth our love and admiration. The image I grabbed from our collection of Superman t shirts BTW.
the Infamous Dave Inman
Dracula Untold Review Part 1
Some stories don’t really need telling.
Astute readers of this blog might have noticed that I have backed off on the really long blogs and am opting for shorter, more to the point diatribes. The fact is with the hours a day I spend buying hot sports cars and kissing pretty ladies on the mouth I have less time than ever before for blogging. I was also given a refresher by my SEO people about how shorter blogs are both read more frequently and have more impact with the ultimate gatekeeper of the internet, Google. Therefore I have been trying to do more posts but shorter. Quality over quantity.
That being said my one true love in blogging will always be writing movie reviews so I will try to keep on doing so, albeit less often. I do also enjoy coming up with fun lists and beating up on certain TV shows I feel have somehow betrayed me so you will see a lot of that, but for the reviews I will have to be more selective. I am also going to often break them up into smaller chunks but will include handy “next” buttons so you can follow along. For reasons I don’t want to get into too much this really helps me out.
So Dracula Untold. Honestly it wasn’t horrible. Certainly better than I, Frankenstein. It also is a movie about vampires that almost manages to get through it completely without romanticizing the crap out of them. The vampires do not sparkle, nor do they debate the morality of eating people. Of the classic story remakes it is probably the best thus far. Of course when you realize you are comparing it to the likes of Hansel & Gretel, Jack the Giant Slayer, Snow White and the Huntsman, and the Legend of Oz: Dorothy’s Return you realize it is the man who skipped breakfast competing in a hot dog eating contest against a group who crushed a breakfast buffet.
But the thing is in my reviews not horrible is not the same as good, and Dracula Untold is not good. The story has gaping plot holes right at the water line, the dialog was retro 70’s Batman TV show bad without the comedy
(I found this Batman hoodie in the big comic book t shirt category), the uber PC attempt to make the Turkish invaders not look Muslim reeked of white guilt, the protagonist was ridiculously out of the league with his antagonists (anyone else like watching baby seals get clubbed? It was about that bad), the action was some of the worst ever with everything devolving into a blur of arms, swords, and bats, the struggle and gravitas implied in the trailers was conspicuously missing, and the entirety of this action/horror film was under 10 fathoms of murky PG-13 water with a cinder block tied to its feet.
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Dracula Untold Review Part 2
The PG-13 action was particularly galling. Somehow Hollywood has come to the conclusion that if they mash all the action into an incomprehensible scrum of quick cuts and uber dense CGI shots we the audience might not notice that no one seems to be bleeding or losing significant anatomy. The veins of every casualty in this film could have been filled with Kool Aid as far as I could tell and on the rare occasion they were forced to show blood (you know, that pesky vampire drinking thing) it looks like the props guy ran down to the nearest Napa Auto Parts as it all had the consistency and color of 10/40 motor oil. Black and viscous. All this to cater to the kiddie winks. 
Let me clue you parents in on something. Your kids have no business being at a movie about Dracula or anyone who’s nickname is “the Impaler”. In fact I think your kids should be at home watching Barney videos until the day they turn 18 and then join the army (either that or locked in the Skinner box of your choice. Thanks, dad. Dracula image courtesy of the horror movie t shirt collection).
The plot holes were numerous and annoying. So the dark, head vampire is trapped in a cave at the top of Broken Tooth mountain and can never leave, yet somehow managed to sustain himself on human blood for centuries and decorate his home in a skull and broken bone motif like he found the legendary Ikea “Desecrated Corpse” collection. Um, how did he get all those fools up to his dark and foreboding man hole? Vlad had to literally free climb a cliff but the vamp ate a battalion of Turkish scouts the week before. Was there an escalator on the other side of the mountain with a sign adverting great hot wings Vlad didn’t know about? So the vamp is trapped in the cave until he finds some sucker to take on his “curse” of immortality, super speed, super strength, and the ability to transform into a swarm of bats (um, can someone email the definition of the word curse to the writers please). Gee, how about the hundreds of skulls you have been playing bocce ball with for centuries? Surely one of them at one time was inside the head of a living human who might be willing to live forever, freeing you of your imprisonment.
Incidentally, do you know how long it takes to mobilize a medieval army of 100,000 men and march them from Turkey to Transylvania? If so can you write Legendary Pictures and tell them because they seem to think it can be done in three days. Also if you are doing a historical movie about the Turkish army it is OK to have them look Turkish, not like a Aryan Army rally. They are so afraid of offending the Turks (and by extension the Muslims) that most of the Turkish cast looked like they rounded up a collection of A&F models. The film also couldn’t seem to decide on an accent for any part of the late 14th century subjecting us to American, British, Russian, very indeterminate Arabic, and at one point I swear German. The casting director clearly just wanted accents and didn’t care what kind. I wish someone who spoke fluent Klingon had applied.
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Dracula Untold Review Part 3
And of course, the torture of Vlad having to suffer from awful temptation, eventually giving in to his thirst and thus falling from grace? Remember that part that was grossly implied might be significant in the trailers and for about 10 minutes in the movie? Well, somehow he only feels the thirst when he is with his wife, not when he is out on the battlefield literally killing 1,000 men and surely covered from head to toe with blood. Did not a drop hit his lips? Then, because there is no way a major protagonist could ever be a truly bad guy he has to suck the blood of his wife after she freely offers it him in order to save his country. Oh, thank god. We were a stones throw away from seeing a character make a morally ambiguous choice there. I was in danger of actually being interested for a moment, but the writers managed to prevent the audience from falling into that hole by filling it with safe, innocuous BBQ flavored styrofoam packing peanuts. Bon appetit!
My final issue is the fact that in the first half of the film Vlad manages to kill 1,000 Turkish soldiers by himself. At that point he fell into the Superman trap in that he was so powerful his ability to fight got boring. There is no struggle to be had unless someone manages to find some Kryptonite (or in this case silver) and like I have said about Superman and Kryptonite, if Dracula is faced with someone who has covered a 20 foot circle with silver coins why doesn’t he just stand 30 feet away and throw a 50lb boulder? 
(Or in Supermans case a few miles away and burn Lex Luthors arms and legs off with heat vision? Heat vision image courtesy of the comic book t shirts category) When nothing short of deus ex machina will slow down your hero he gets really boring. Also how is it Vlad has to look at obscure texts to learn about vampires but everyone else seems to have taken a college level course on it and written their doctoral thesis on ways to kill vampires?
Anyway, a brief recap. The Sultan of Turkey wants Vlad the Impalers son and 1,000 other Transylvanian boys to be his slave soldiers and Vlad has to ask the local vampire for the power to stop him. If Vlad can not drink blood for three days he wins his mortality back (um, is that really winning?) but naturally runs out of time and has to suck his wife dry. Bad PG-13 action ensues and somehow this film managed to throw out a fishhook baited to catch a sequel.
For all my complaints it wasn’t painfully bad. Luke Evans did the best he could with the lines he was given and there was a story. Pacing was good and appropriate for the story and the old vampire scene was pretty cool. Dracula did not ever glow in daylight and most of the vampires looked pretty gross. If the area of classic story/fairy tale reboots could be considered the Dachshund races of movie making as compared to the real dog track of practically every other movie type out there then this film would definitely be the fastest Wiener dog. Of course the issue of vampires being romanticized was pleasantly ignored for the first 87 minutes of the film only to rear it’s very ugly head in the last 5 when the producers dug deep into our pockets for sequel money but still. Not horrible.
So worth seeing? Sure, why not? It’s stupidly entertaining (like most modern movies to be perfectly honest). The only way you will feel ripped off is if you think you are going to see a horror film. This is a medieval super hero action film that borders on fan fiction as written by sweaty teenage girls. There is no horror to be had here. I think this movie is safe enough for a date as long as she doesn’t want to have her IQ challenged (or half her IQ challenged). Nothing will be gained from having watched this film, but on the other hand nothing will have been lost.
the Infamous Dave Inman
@NerdKungFu
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Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 23 A Taste of Armageddon
This is an episode that strikes a cord with most nerds. I mean, which of us hasn’t simulated interplanetary war on a computer at some point? The Eminiarians and Vendikarians just took it to the next level and started executing simulated casualties. It’s like if South Korea and North Korea chose to restart hostilities but instead of fighting opted to play marathon games of Starcraft II (I think South Korea might have the advantage. Starcraft image courtesy of the video game t shirt category).
This is one of those episodes that doesn’t really spring to mind when I think of my favorites but if I see it I realize I like it a lot. It’s pretty damned cool, has a great title, a jackass that Kirk gets to put in his place, and the chance to wreak havoc upon not one but two planetary civilizations. Prime Directive? What’s that again? Also the Eminiarian sonic disruptor pistols look a lot cooler than most of the Federation weapons. Thank god in Next Gen they brought back the phaser rifle (previously only seen in one episode of TOS, Where No Man Has Gone Before).
The Infamous Dave Inman
10 Endings for How I Met Your Mother that would have been better then the garbage they wrote.
If you read my last post you might have gleaned that I was a little miffed at the god awful ending the “writers” plumbed out of the depths of their sweatiest ass. In spite all the many reasons they gave me to hate that show (most of them rhyming with “Med Tosby”) they actually managed to get me to care about how it ended (still not sure how that happened) and so when they basically took everything the show was building up towards and shot it into the sun in order to do…something (really, guys, what was the point?) I felt more than a little betrayed. However, like some kind of powerful nerd deity I destroy with one hand and create with the other so rather than just harp on how many balls that ending sucked I will instead come up with some suggestions on what they could have done instead. (SPOILERS incoming)
- The mother doesn’t die and Ted is just boring his kids because his wife has already heard all his stories 100,000,000 times. Barney and Robin are together and didn’t divorce just because Robin has a job that requires a lot of travel.
- Ted actually jumped in front of the train at the train station and has totally imagined his wife and kids and the last 20 years. He is actually in a coma waiting to die in the hospital and hallucinating constantly (my personal favorite). Meanwhile the bass player for the wedding band meets a certain nerd blogger and amateur movie reviewer and moves in with him in the Bay Area.
- Ted finally came to grips with the fact that since he has no male genitalia metaphorically he might as well embrace it and finally got his gender reassignment surgery and adopted two kids with his husband. You see this works because HE is now the mother and “How I met your mother” is really a metaphor for him meeting his true self and coming out of the closet. I like this one a lot too.
- He and Barney are now single bitter old men who are big time LARP and fantasy guys and spend their times making up stories about how their lives should have been. The kids are just a department store mannikin and a Resusci Anne Ted stole from a CPR class. Barney stops being cute and starts being super creepy.
- Lily freaks out one night and murders Marshal. Ted adopts their kids while Lily goes to the nut house and is really telling them about the events leading up to their mother going bonkers.
- Ted has been abducted by aliens after impregnating his wife and they have been probing him for years. His life with the kids growing up is all fantasy he has been developing in his head to help him deal with his ongoing vivisection. Meanwhile Marshal becomes obsessed with aliens and finding Ted and now lives in a trailer outside of Rialto, CA and wears a metal hat to protect his brain from the transmissions.
- A series of DNA tests prove that Barney is actually the father of Teds (and Marshals) kids and he is telling them the story before he and Marshal drive over and beat Barney to death with pick axe handles. Robin left Barney after he used a series of their sex tapes to launch his porn web site www.Legend-Derrieres.com.
- Ted is about to commit both his kids to a rehab clinic for massive drug use and is trying to get them to relax, little realizing the very reason they both dove head first into drugs was the massive boredom they experienced listening to his stories over the last 16 years. At the clinic Ted runs into Barney who has been committed for sex addiction.
- Ted discovers that his wife is really a super hero and she has passed on her super genes to the kids a la Incredibles. She and the kids fight crime while Ted tends house in a French maid costume and is trying to convince his kids that at some point he had some form of manhood with this story. The kids really do not buy it and basically treat him like a talking Roomba
(the image comes from a great Incredibles logo t shirt we have in our collection). Barney is the super villain. - The mother does not die.
That’s just off the top of my head. Imagine what I would have come up with had I thought about it for more than an hour. Of course I think an hour is a lot longer than the actual writers used but whatever. If you have a suggestion or a better ending feel free to post it in the comments section.
the Infamous Dave Inman
I finally got to the ending of How I Met Your Mother and DIE TED MOSBY! DIE!
DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!
SPOILER ALERTS So season 8 has been pretty awful in every way possible. Getting through it was like eating light bulbs. It was like trying to pass a golf ball sized kidney stone along with the wrist watch your doctor accidentally sewed up inside your bladder. It was as grindtastic as possible without actually getting an appendage caught in a meat grinder (and in retrospect I kind of wish I had had that happen instead).
So everything I liked about the show was gone and replaced with everything I hated about it. Gone was Barney Stinson hilarious playboy. Instead we get Barney Stinson, blushing groom. Gone was Lily and Marshal, generally cool couple and funny reality check. Instead we get Lily and Marshal fighting, remaking Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and trying to prove which of them could be the biggest doormat. Honestly, those were the only parts of the show I liked. Of course the parts I hated were still in full effect. Ted Mosby, the poorest excuse for a male since Hedwig, was all over the screen like vomit on a prom dress and the story, normally at least pretending to take place in a regular pacing, crammed 22 episodes over three days with flash backs, flash forwards, and flash sideways like Doctor Who was tripping acid.
Then we finally get to the ending and after meeting his dream mother that we sat through 8 seasons listening to him whine about only to find out that after spawning his children she…dies? THERE IS NO MIDDLE FINGER BIG ENOUGH TO PROPERLY EXPRESS MY FEELINGS FOR THIS ENDING! 
Whoever wrote that “twist” needs to be strapped down to Dexters kill table in order to pay for the crime of murdering my faith in humanity (image courtesy of the my collection of Dexter t shirts). Oh, in other twists that make me hope the show writers all burn in hell Barney and Robin get divorced, Barney knocks up some bimbo and transforms into super dad, and the series ends with Ted once again asking out Robin. This whole thing screams of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
In summary, Ted Mosby die and writers burn in hell. Thank you.
the Infamous Dave Inman
Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 24 This Side of Paradise
Not my favorite by a long shot. I never liked any of the episodes that force Spock to change his character (except for Amok Time, of course) and this one was the worst. For a guy who only mates every seven years this guy has his love interests, but the hippy spore people were lame.
Also once they managed to get the spores out of everyone why did the colonists really want to leave? As far as they knew Starfleet had just left them to die a horrible, painful death and these spores not only helped them out, they made them continuously happy. There are housewives today who spend every week at the pharmacy trying to medicate their way to such bliss, and drug addicts on the street who do it illegally every day. How do you think Walter White made his money? (Image courtesy of the Breaking Bad t shirts category)
That aside, another great fight scene where Spock really shows Kirk who’s boss. All the shoulder rolls in the universe are not enough to slow Spock down when he is on full on beat down mode. Next time bring more than a length of pipe Kirk (oh wait. Next time Kirk will be on the business end of a lirpa. Oh, well).
the Infamous Dave Inman
