Anchorman 2: the Legend Continues Review
3/4 of a great movie.
I admit it right up front I never saw the first Anchorman. At the time I wasn’t doing reviews and honestly movies set in the 70’s give me a queasy feeling. Actually most period movies set in times when I was alive kind of bug me for some reason. One of my therapists once told me I have a fairly extreme case of narcissism (in case you couldn’t tell by reading this blog) and one of the symptoms is I tend to be trapped in the moment emotionally. There is no past or future only the everlasting now. This tends to make me not be very nostalgic and fairly dismissive of past eras (it also makes me suck at forward planning, but plans are for suckers). My opinion of the decades that I have been alive can be summed up as follows:
60’s = Smelly hippies.
70’s = Bad hair. Bad clothing. Bad music. Bad porn. Everyone smoked.
80’s = High School Hell, the Musical. More bad hair. Leg warmers. Dolphin shorts. Mostly bad music (with some really great music). Fear of dying of AIDS.
90’s = Grunge. Beavis and Butthead. Trial of the Century. Massive apathy.
00’s = Reality TV. My mom meets the internet. Paris Hilton. The lost decade. Hanging chads. Fear of dying in a terrorist attack.
10’s = Still in progress, but the prognosis is not great.
Bottom line doing a period film set anytime between 1959 and now is a sure path to me missing the film from a massive fear that I will be reminded of how much American culture sucks. I skipped the first film but have heard so much about it I decided I needed to see the sequel. Is it fair to judge a sequel without having seen the first one? To that question I answer with an emphatic maybe. On the one hand I never fell in love with the characters and could very easily be missing a bunch of the jokes; on the other hand all movies should stand on their own merits. Nothing I pay $12.50 for should have a prerequisite.
(As an aside, I’d like to offer a marketing tip to team at Paramount Pictures: if you are going to release a sequel to a film it might just behoove you to have the original available on NetFlix in the months prior. I seriously was looking to watch it but there’s no way I was going to buy it on DvD, have no interest in Hulu, and Amazon Prime can officially bite me. Had I been on the fence about seeing this film watching the first might well have pushed me over to the watch it side.)
Anyway, Anchorman 2. Very very funny for the most part, although the whole thing took a left turn in the last 20 minutes down a dark alley and got mugged and violated by the Ridiculous Fairy. I’ve seen this before in Will Ferrell movies; he has a comedy gem and is writing gold but in the last 1/3rd of the film he feels the pressure of the building comedy crescendo and ramps the story up to the next level, bursting through the stratosphere and leaving the audience desperately scrambling for oxygen.
I have no clever insights or amusing anecdotes sparked by this film, so let’s just get into the story itself shall we? Ron Burgandy (Will Ferrell-Zoolander, Megamind, Casa di mi Padre) and his now wife Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate-Married With Children, Up All Night, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitters Dead) are now in NYC as TV newscasters. 
They get called upstairs by head anchorman Mack Tanner (Harrison Ford-Star Wars, Indiana Jones, 42 Kiss a Wookie image courtesy of the Star Wars T Shirt category), who promotes Veronica while at the same time firing Ron. This leads to natural conflict as Ron can’t let his ego go and leaves Veronica with is young son Walter (Judah Nelson-Portlandia, Adopting Terror, Major Crimes).
He ends up back in San Diego MC’ing the show at Seaworld (one of the funniest scenes IMO) when he is approached by Freddy Sharp (Dylan Baker-The Cell, Spiderman 2 and 3, Trick or Treat), a news producer for the newly formed all news network GNN. Ron signs on and they goes on a quest to find his old news crew and bring them back. He finds insane sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner-Thank you for Smoking, Get Smart, the Office) selling “Chicken of the Cave” at a fast food place, reporter Brian Fontana (Paul Rudd-Role Models, I Love You Man, the 40 Year Old Virgin) making a great living as a cat photographer, and psychotic introvert weatherman Brick Tamlan (Steve Carell-the Office, the 40 Year Old Virgin, Crazy, Stupid Love) at his own funeral. They each have a great piece of the collection montage and then go into a slow motion RV crash that had me holding my sides laughing.
Once in NY Ron gets the 2am time slot and has a bad run in with head anchorman Jack Lime (Dames Marsden-X-Men, Superman Returns, Enchanted). They bet on who gets the highest ratings that day. Ron and his crew work to put together a show and come up with all pro-America, dogs, and sports bloopers. He wins the bet and is skyrocketed to the top of the network. Meanwhile Ron is having trouble with his estranged wife and his relationship with his son.
At that point the story starts to unravel. Will Ferrell gets trapped in the “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” loop and ends up going blind, bottle feeding a baby shark, and gets into a massive melee with every news organization of the 80’s. While each one of them had their funny moments the story, which until then had felt fairly cohesive, devolved into a bunch of SNL skits.
The stars.
Honestly very funny. There were a few moments when I felt pain from laughing so hard. Two stars. There isn’t a single actor in this film that I haven’t been a fan of at some point in the past. Even the bit characters had talent pouring out of them like a lot of stuff pouring out of something in a comical euphemism (I honestly drew a blank right there. I guess I can’t be brilliant every night). Two stars. The woman playing Linda Jackson (Meagan Good-Brick (ugh. Not my favorite movie for personal reasons), Think Like a Man, Stomp the Yard) was making me really wish I wasn’t so inept in the dating world, if you catch my drift. One star. I was also very impressed by Christina Applegate. Why hasn’t she done more since Married With Children? One star. I will give a bonus star for RV wreck and another one for the Chicken of the Cave scene. Two stars. Total: eight stars.
The black holes.
The movie got pretty stupid by the denouement in my opinion. One black hole. A lot of the film hinged on the audience having seen the first film and that is a mistake in most sequels. One black hole. I think that’s about it. Two black holes.
A grand total of six stars. A funny, fun movie. However nothing on here really demands a big screen (the RV wreck maybe but that’s it) so feel free to wait for the alternate media outlet of your choice. This film kind of screams “Quiet movie night with your significant other on the couch” (guess it’s a good thing I saw it in a theater then) so do it that way. Date movie? Sure. Nothing really off putting in here, none of these guys are super studs (maybe James Marsden, but his screen time is limited and his character is a d-bag) so you won’t suffer in comparison, and if you play your cards right you might be able to get her laughing so hard her clothes fall off (another case for movie night on the couch). Let me know how you managed to pull that off. Bathroom break? Honestly the final battle scene (yes, battle scene) could be totally missed (unless you have a burning passion for satire at the expense of 80’s news broadcasting) but that is kind of towards the end. The bottle feeding baby shark scene was pretty much entirely to give Ron a line later on in the film so I’d say that is your best bet.
Thanks for reading. I also saw 47 Ronin recently and will write that up soon. Follow me on Twitter (or don’t. Most people don’t so join the crowd) @Nerdkungfu. Comments on this film or my review can be left here and off topic questions or suggestions can be sent to [email protected]. I hope your Holidays are going super good, and in case I blow off the next few days have a Happy New Year (Is 2013 over yet?).
Dave
The Host Movie Review
The Host-ess with the Least-ess.
There was definitely some kind of brain parasite thing happening in that theater. I just think it came from Hollywood, not outer space.
When I saw the trailer for the first time I thought it could be decent. The premise seemed OK like a more modern version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Then I saw it was based on a book by the bane-of-all-teenage-girls-IQ Stephanie Meyer and realized that the awful re-imagining that she did for vampires in Twilight she was about to do to aliens. She is like a virus that moves from nerd sub genre to nerd sub genre, infecting each one with sizzle chested man/boys and pasty bland emotionless fembots who the man/boys are desperate for for no discernible reason (when all available evidence kind of indicates that they should be more into each other).
The good news is that Kristen Stewart now has some serious competition in her quest to be named the blandiest porridge in the history of cinema (and humanity). I guess Hollywood has determined the optimum formula for vacuuming disposable income from teenie bopper girls purses and a big part of that is an actress who’s scenes could be more or less handled by a cardboard cutout of herself. However, I don’t want to be unfair to the actress Saoirse Ronan (Hanna, The Lovely Bones, Atonement). Her character is supposed to start out as an emotionless automaton and I guess I have seen her act in other films. We have plenty of proof outside of Twilight that Kristin Stewart is the acting equivalent of watching paint dry, so I guess I will have to see Saoirse in something else before casting my vote.
If I were to compile a list of Stephanie Meyer’s shortcomings as an author it would be a novel unto itself. However, there are a couple things that really stand out here. One is the fact that she does absolutely nothing to establish any motivation for any of the characters to do anything whatsoever. I will show some examples later on but I think when she writes she has a sub plot going on in her head that somehow doesn’t show up on the screen. Perhaps she does more to establish why Wanda would want to die or the head Seeker didn’t just jump to another body in her novel but I promise I would literally eat that book before reading it. When characters do something that goes against all previously established behavior and experience you need to lay out some kind of reason for them to do it besides the fact that it moves your anemic story along.
I am a fan of things that expose the masses of humanity in general and young ladies specifically to nerdy things, which is why I more or less gave Warm Bodies a bye. However, as an introduction to the world of Sci Fi this film is Babies First Alien Movie (as well as Babies First Dialog, Story, and Plot). The thing that people who don’t really get science fiction (I’m looking at you, Ms. Meyer) seem to always miss is that the word science is in there. In other words, while having something be fanciful is totally cool there has to be some kind of link to reality. 
This is why on Star Trek they talk about the Warp Core, or in the Empire Strikes Back they spend half the movie trying to fix the dilapidated hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon (Falcon image courtesy of the Star Wars T Shirt category). In this film they more or less created a sci fi-ish world with no attempt to establish how it was created or how the aliens even function. The story is left riddled with plot holes and demands too much of your suspension of disbelief.
Let me elaborate a little on the plot holes. OK, so alien dandelions come to Earth. They can take over a human by cutting the side of the neck and entering the brain of the host. They arrive in a big grid that looks like a slow motion Lazerium show. How exactly did the very first alien get in the first human? Without a host they are about as effective as a mild fart and can be crushed in a person’s hand, so how did they even get a foothold on this planet? OK, so let’s assume the first human they met up with was some kind of idiot and ingested one. The aliens (called Souls) are all hundreds of years old and act like one of them dying is the worst thing in the universe. They live in total peace and harmony with everything and hate violence. How exactly did they conquer the planet? Did all of humanity forget how to use guns? There is a scene early on where four Seekers are coming up with a guy. He has a revolver and uses it to kill himself rather than be taken, but all the Seekers ever seem to use is a knock out spray that has a range of about a foot. It is shown later on that bullets kill infected humans and last time I checked 6 bullets > 4 Seekers so why didn’t the guy just cap them? If a Soul dying is the worst thing ever what happened to the billions they must have lost trying to conquer this planet?
See, I would buy a parasite that conquers the planet if the movie makers had made the slightest effort to establish the parameters of how this happened but I guess that would have taken away from valuable emotionless screen time. Telling us that the Souls have conquered the world loses credibility when you see one get knocked out by a little girly man and bundled into a truck for vivisection.
I want to bitch about one more thing before I get into the story. The point of the movie is the main character gets infected by a Soul but is able to communicate with with her. The Soul uses the girls noise hole to speak but the girl trapped in her head just speaks in her head. This could have been done any number of ways but the movie makers did the laziest thing possible by just playing the girls voice loudly every time she needed to say something. Have you ever gone to the movies and had some bratty 16 year old girl yelling at the screen every three seconds right next to your ear? If so you know what watching this movie is like. I would have been much happier with a subtitle of some kind. The funny thing is the voice over emoted about 100 times the emotion as the actual girl on the screen.
Anyway, the story. Humanity has been conquered by glowing dust bunnies who turn your eyes silver and live in total peace. A young girl named Melanie (Saorie) is captured and infected with one named Wanderer. Apparently these aliens are the universes biggest tourists ever and travel from world to world like retirees going from Las Vegas to Branson. Malenie can still speak to her and occasionally act out. Wanderer is interviewed by a Seeker (Rachel Roberts-In Time, S1m0ne, How to Seduce Difficult Women) who wants to use her hosts memories to track down the other rebel humans who appear to pose no threat whatsoever to the ruling order. Melanie is concerned with protecting her brother (Chandler Canterbury-Knowing, the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Repo Men) and her boyfriend Jared (Max Irons-Red Riding Hood, Dorian Grey, Being Julia). Melanie convinces her parasite to help them and they escape and drive off into the desert, where she wrecks the car and leaves them stranded. They wander the desert and get picked up by her Uncle Jeb (William Hurt-Iron Man, Dark City, a History of Violence) and a bunch of rebel humans.
They all want to kill her but Jared is there and still loves her. She gets taken back to their cave. One guy in particular named Ian (Jake Abel-Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, the Lovely Bones, I am Number Four) wants her dead but then falls in love with her for no reason. At that point she is a bland actress being wooed by two different hot young guys for whom she has similar emotions (does that at all sound familiar?). Meanwhile the Seekers are on their asses. Turns out the humans have been vivisecting infected humans in an attempt to get the parasites out (finally a plot point I can agree with) but it only results in the death of both. Wanderer (now shortened to Wanda) shows them out to coax the Souls out with love instead of scalpels but in payment wants to die (?? Remember all that missing character motivation? There was a lot of it but this was the highlight). Now all the humans have to do is capture every infected human on the planet and happy the aliens out of them. Win! Also Stephanie pulls another inanely happy ending out of the deepest recesses of her ass.
The stars. Hmm. I’m at a loss. The acting was crap. The sci fi tertiary at best. The story sucked. The action was extremely limited and about as exciting as watching Youth Soccer when you don’t have a kid playing. I suppose I like William Hurt. One star. Also the Seekers used chrome plated Lotus’s as police cars which technically makes them the coolest cops since Robocop. One star. Total: two stars.
The black holes. The acting was crap. One black hole. The sci fi tertiary at best (do me a favor and treat sci fi with respect, not a cheesy tool with which to build a lame star crossed romance on). One black hole. The chemistry between the two guys and the girl needed some coffee (or a massive dose of crystal meth). Pulseless. One black hole. What action there was looked like they added it only under protest. Somewhere along the line a producer with a few brain cells said “Hey, there is absolutely nothing going on in this movie except some lame chick talking to herself. Film a gun fight quick!”. One black hole. Plot holes a go go. One black hole. The pacing dragged on and on. 125 minutes and you will feel every one of them. One black hole. The voice over inner voice thing drove me nuts the whole time. One black hole. No character motivation. One black hole. An extra black hole for the whole “coax them out with love” thing. Made zero sense. One black hole. Plus a really pointless and stupid ending with an obvious hook at making a sequel. One black hole. Total: ten black holes.
So a final total of eight black holes. It is at times like this that I find myself happy with the American movie audience. You see this movie tanked hard, opening with less than 1/6th of the sales of Twilight. Should you see it? No not really. It is everything you hated in Twilight sans vampires. If you are a sweaty Stephanie Meyer fan I suppose, or just want to have the barest exposure to science fiction without the danger of actually meeting some nerds. However, if you are that type of person I don’t know what you are doing here anyway. Have fun at your mall of choice. Date movie? Only if you plan to become the lamest couple ever. Bathroom break? Literally anywhere you like, and by that I mean feel free to go on the movie projector. Someone in the audience will thank you.
Thanks for reading. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Feel free to post comments on this movie or my review here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. More to see soon so check back later this week. By the way I am just back from WonderCon where I had a great time. I met a bunch of really cool artist and comic publishers and am going to try to throw them some link love. I met this girl named Stephanie Gladden who does a cool comic called Girls of Monster Paradise. She used to work at Cartoon Network and her art has a very Johnny Bravo look to it that I appreciate. Check it out.
Dave
The Hobbit Review
Ever feel like there is just not enough padding and filler in your life? Looks like Peter Jackson heard you!
This is another review I had to take a full day to think about before writing up. I saw it at midnight on Thursday/Friday night with a bunch of other fanboys (some of whom clapped at the end of it. Can someone please explain this phenomenon to me? You clap to show an appreciation to the performers or presenters of something. Do these idiots really think the producers of the movie are in the theater with us, or perhaps the ushers fill out reports to the studios as to how loud the clapping really was? If not than this is clearly an pretentious attempt to show the world exactly what kind of a douchy fanboy you really are).
By the way, if you are reading this review and have never read the Hobbit I don’t know what the heck you are doing here, but I am going to be pretty generous with the spoilers in a minute so be warned. I am assuming you all know the story at least half as well as I do.
I generally consider it a warning sign when a movie’s actors and producers really overmarket the film prior to release, and it looks like once again I am right. The week leading up to this release you couldn’t flip a channel without seeing one of them on some interview or talk show.
I’ve decided I need to look at this from three different perspectives; fan of the movie series, fan of the novels, and non fan who stumbled into the theater with no previous LOTR experience. Honestly, while this movie is very pretty it kind of lags from all three perspectives.
As a fan of the movies it really isn’t much when compared to any of the three LOTR films. The story is bloated and convoluted while at the same time feeling truncated, the characters grossly underdeveloped (especially when compared to the Fellowship characters), and the movie attempts to maintain the very serious tone of the three main movies while at the same time add in a ton of Three Stooges-esque slaptstick comedy. The forcing of every LOTR character and reference into this film is done with all the subtlety of using a croquet mallet to insert a catheter. They crammed in Frodo at the beginning as part of the prologue and I guess I was OK with that. It didn’t strike me as too glaring out of place and maybe there actually are Elijah Wood fans out there (and if you do exist please stay away from me and my family). When I saw Elrond I thought “Sure, he was in the Hobbit. Looks like a good move”. Then when the shoved in Lady Galadriel I thought “OK, I suppose if they are going to have one of the main Elves why not have the other one? Odds are they brought her in to add a little femininity to what is otherwise a massive sausage-fest”. But then they force fed us Saruman FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER and discuss the danger of Sauron (who got no reference in the book whatsoever) while discussing a Morgol-blade they captured from the Witch-King of Angmar (no joke. I wish I was joking) and at that point I decided I and the rest of the audience was being pandered to. I just wish I knew what brand of baby powder Peter Jackson was using when he changed all our diapers for us.
While we are on the subject of pandering and treating the audience like we are all brain injury victims, I also want to rail on the presentation of Saruman in this film. I guess they decided we are all to stupid to understand the corruptive nature of time and evil and so presented Saruman as evil and despicable as possible. It’s like watching Chancellor Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith act exactly like a Sith Lord and wondering just how stupid every other character (who are all actively looking for a Sith Lord) in the film really is. If Elrond, Galadriel, and Gandalf (collectively acknowledged as the wisest beings in Middle Earth) couldn’t figure out that he warranted watching by is behavior at the meeting they all deserve to be crushed by Mordor for being moronic.
The last area where this movie lags behind the other three is in characters. In the LOTR series each of the Fellowship and supporting characters is a cool individual with a distinct personality that resonates well with the others. Aragorn, Gandalf, Legoalas, Gimli, and each of the hobbits is distinctive and intriging. Even Boromir was really cool, and supporting characters like Faramir added a ton to the story. In this movie the cast consists of Gandalf, Biblo, a fatter Aragorn (Thorin Oakenshield, if you want specifics), the dwarf with the white beard, the fat dwarf, and the other 10 dwarves who devolve into a faceless mass rapidly. Half of them look like they were rejected by the casting director of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for being too goofy and cartoony, and the other half look like humans. The cool thing about Gimli is he looked every inch a dwarf. In this film the dwarves look like a healthy mix of SAG extras and homeless people picked up off Hollywood Blvd. There is nothing about character here at all for any of them. Even Thorin is a 2 dimensional photocopy of Aragorn, and when you see them as a group they look exactly like a group of full sized humans.
As a fan of the book I am slightly more pleased, but only slightly. They attempted to keep the more fanciful tone for parts, and in general kept to the story. However, they surgically grafted on a ton of parts from the Silmarillion and another ton of parts they flat out made up and closed all the sutures with a mix of used dental floss and old yo-yo strings. Remember how in the book the dwarfs were more or less wandering through Middle Earth and dealing with whatever random trolls, goblins, and giant spiders they happened across (kind of like a driving trip across West Texas)? The book is a single adventure. If it were an RPG game it would be termed a “dungeon crawl”. Travel to the Lonely Mountain, steal as much gold as you can carry, and ride off into the sunset to spend it all on good wine and bad women. There are no portents of the ultimate doom of Middle Earth. Not so here, however. I guess the film producers decided our soft brains would never accept a motivation for our main characters as simple and morally grey as just getting rich. Instead we are fed a massive undercurrent of conspiracies, evil powers manipulating things from afar, and portents of incoming doom that is totally at odds with the lighthearted nature of the book. As I have said many times before, it’s OK for a movie to not rest on the ultimate fate of the world.
Where the movie suffers the most, however, is from the perspective of a guy off the street who is not really a massive fan of anything and only wants to see decent film. For this hapless individual the movie is a huge, slogging, incoherent mess. The pacing movies like a giant amoeba crawling across the ground, getting around objects with occasional bursts of speed as it squeezes though a narrow passage but in general progressing with turtle-esque velocity. There are a ton of irrelevant scenes to pad out the script run time, including a massive block dedicated to the completely annoying Radagast the Brown as he spends 10 agonizing minutes (from the audience perspective) nursing a sick hedgehog back to life (God I wish I was joking). There are flashbacks within flashbacks (the only one which would have been really cool was the attack of Smaug. Would have been cool had they actually shown Smaug. It was pretty much just stuff burning and glimpses of giant clawed feet and wings. Thanks for wasting my time on something that was covered in the book by three lines of expository dialog). Also, if there is one thing that sucked about the books that they managed to avoid in LOTR trilogy it was the insuferable singing. I defy you to find any reader of the books who has read even most of the lines of those songs. As soon as you see the indented italic passages that is any sane readers cue to skip to the next real paragraph. In the main movies they touched on it only briefly, with elves singing in the background. Here it is the perfect excuse to kill another five minutes of screen time and some audience brain cells.
However, the thing that surprised the hell out of me was the fact that the CGI and special effects appear to have taken a serious downgrade since the last movie. I know this magical 48 frame deal that Peter Jackson is so bent out of shape about is somehow supposed to enhance the visuals, but in fact the movie looks a lot worse. The monsters all look more cartoonish (especially the trolls and the eagles), the lighting effects are from hell (take a close look at the candles when you see them), and the battle scenes play out like a really good video game. If I could go back in time I might tell Mr. Jackson that maybe a huge epic film like this is not the time to experiment with new film techniques. I know all this is supposed to be for 3D but I am not a 3D fan and a couple years from now when I am looking at this film on my non-3D TV it will suffer for it.
I’m not going to waste a lot of time on the story. You all should know it. Bilbo gets shanghaied by Gandalf and the dwarves to steal back gold from Smaug in the lonely mountain. They all get captured by trolls who are tricked into turning into stone. They have a run in with Radagast (?) who tells them about an evil necromancer (??) who is resurrecting the the dead, including the Witch-king of Angmar (???). They are being chased by Thorins old orc enemy Azog the Defiler (???? For the record, according to Tolkien Azog was slain by Dain at the Battle of Azanulbizar years before this story took place, and it was his son Bolg who fought at the Battle of the Five Armies. This was changed to give us a tangible enemy to focus our soft brains on I guess). They get captured by the Goblin King in the Misty Mountains and Bilbo finds the Ring. They all escape and fly off on giant eagles. The movie ends (at pretty much the ending of chapter 7 from the book. Pad much?).
The stars. The riddle scene between Bilbo and Gollum was really, really well done. Two stars. The acting was exceptional from the characters that had any kind of development. One star. Andy Serkis was brilliant again (if you don’t know who Andy Serkis is, shame on you). One star. For all my issues, it’s still a Tolkien movie. One star. The only CGI that didn’t make me want to fix the film with a set of crayons was the Goblin King (either that or we meet him so far into the movie that by then my eyes had gotten used to it). One star. Two of my favorite character will always be Gandalf and Gollum, and both were used to great effect here. Two stars. I know I am being kind because I am a fanboy, but I will have to give two more stars for it being generally entertaining as long as you can stay awake. Total: nine stars.
The black holes (each one of these feels like a kidney stone made of burning coal, BTW). Padded. Pad pad pad pad pad pad pad. One black hole. For all the padding, the story felt really shortened and underdeveloped. One black hole. No real character development or interaction to speak of. One black hole. Twisting the story in order to give it a bigger meaning and darker overtone (completely unnecessary). One black hole. Lack of a real tone. Trying to combine slapstick with LOTR seriousness. One black hole. The fact that the dwarves never looked like dwarves, even when surrounded by elves. One black hole. Shoving in Azog for no reason. One black hole. In a lesser movie I would give a separate black hole for forcing in each of Galadriel, Saruman, Sauron, Frodo, and the Witch-King in order to forcibly remind us where this movie comes from, but here I will just do one. One black hole. The movie more or less ended at what felt like halfway through Act 2. One black hole. Special effects and CGI that weirdly reminded me of the Never Ending Story (1984). One black hole. You feel every one of the 169 minutes, with lots of worthless boring scenes that afford you the time to reflect on how lame all of this is compared to the LOTR. One black hole. Total: eleven black holes.
If you had told me two years ago that when I reviewed the Hobbit I would end up giving it a total of two black holes I would have laughed in your face. I’m baffled as to how much they could have missed the mark given the source material. 
I am going to do a separate blog on this, but the parallels between this series and Star Wars is pretty astounding (Old Republic logo courtesy of the Star Wars T shirt category). A talented director (or his supporting staff) creates an epic three part series that draws in millions of fans from accross the globe and then, given an unlimited budget opts to make a prequel series that spends more time highlighting the advancements in technology than story and is rife with either flat (Anakin) or annoying (Radagast=Jar Jar IMO) characters, all of which more or less ruins the franchise. Should you see it? Absolutely. It is a Tolkien movie and definitely is a must see for any nerd. That really isn’t the question. The question is will you want to see it a second time. I saw each of the LOTR movies at least twice in the theater (the Two Towers is saw three times I think) both in regular and IMAX, bought the movies when they came out in DVD, and the bought them all again when the super deluxe extended versions came out. I feel no need to see this one again. In fact, on some levels I am kind of dreading the next two movies now. It’s kind of like taking a college class on a subject you are REALLY interested in but the professor is the most boring teacher in the history of education and has a giant, gross mole on his face that you can’t help but stare at.
Date movie? Yes if she is a fan, hell no if not. She will fall asleep, I promise you. Bathroom break? Your don’t want to miss the riddle scene. Pretty much anywhere in the first 45 minutes (this slow movie takes it’s time ramping up to a snails pace) works. There are a couple camping scenes in the last half, and the scene where the dwarves are walking out of Rivendale (cough cough) could be missed.
Thanks for reading, and my apologies for harshing your buzz if you were looking forward to this. This honestly has been the most painful review to write I have done to date. I really wanted to like this film, but Peter Jackson appears to have been drinking from the same Kool Aid that George Lucas quaffs, and I’m not here to lie to you. Post your comments on this film or my review here (please, if you can convince me I am wrong and this film is actually more than the messy afterbirth of the LOTR I will thank you). Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu, and if you have off topic suggestion or questions feel free to email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Skyfall Review
Something is falling.
I saw this movie last night and can see why everyone is gushing all over it like it is the Earthly manifestation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It is a good film, but all day something about it has not been sitting well with me. It has all the elements of a great Bond film: a really good Bond actor (Daniel Craig, the best since Connery IMO), an excellent director (Sam Mendes-American Beauty, the Road to Perdition (a very underrated movie)), some hot chicks, a budget big enough to create anything the director really wanted, and Judy Dench. All the pieces were there to make for a great movie, but something about it bugged me like a high pitched tone in the background that you don’t really notice but will drive you nuts and then, once you do notice it, you can’t here anything else.
There are some obvious things for me to bitch about. The story is at the same time extremely simple yet labyrinthine. It frog jumps from plot point to plot point in random directions and every time they need something to propel the story along it just manifests itself out of the ether. I guess it fair to lay a lot of that on the writers (Neal Pervis and Robert Wade) neither of whom have written a Shawshank Redemption. They were both in on Casino Royale, which is to their credit, but they also did Quantum of Solace and were involved in the abysmal Johnny English Reborn, so I guess the need to get paid supersedes the need to create amazing. However, I have seen many movies with weak stories and I can say my current disquiet is not really from that.
I suppose another obvious thing is the fact that it goes a big 143 minutes yet seemed like 400. The action scenes are great, but in between them there are a lot of very slow expository scenes and long shots of car bumpers. Cloud Atlas went 172 minutes yet honestly this one seemed significantly longer. This issue I can lay at the feet of the editor and director, but I have seen badly paced movies that don’t bug me like this one did.
No, what I finally realized was bugging me was the fact that this movie isn’t really about James Bond. James Bond is a smooth, sophisticated, sexy, well dressed guy we could all aspire to be. His life is awesome and I could only dream of living it. The Bond in this movie is conflicted, alcoholic, unshaven, in terrible physical shape, and dressed like he shops at the Walmart outlet store. His love interests are limited at best and he spends more time playing out his Oedipal issues with Judi Dench than chasing tail. His character would actually be really cool if he were doing a Die Hard movie or anything starring Jason Stratham, but calling him James Bond is like calling the whino the local mall got to play Santa Claus Saint Nick. 
The problem bugging me is the same problem I had with the whole Star Wars prequel: Lucas took one of the coolest, most bad ass character in the history of film (Darth Vader) and remade him as a whiny little bitch with daddy issues who you know deserves to get his lunch money taken every day at school (Who’s Your Daddy image courtesy of the Star Wars T Shirt category). This isn’t the James Bond I was looking for.
Actually, now that I think about it this is exactly the same issue I had with the last Batman movie. Bruce Wayne is not supposed to start the movie off as some kind of invalid. It bugged me then, and I guess it is bugging me now.
I know. My issues. I will give massive props to this movie for calling out a lot of classic James Bond moments, including the original car with the machine guns. Very cool. The action was generally good, especially the opening chase sequence. Honestly, I’m not here to dump on this film, and realistically it is the best of the Daniel Craig Bonds thus far. I just have some problems with the character.
It starts off with James Bond (Daniel Craig-the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Layer Cake, Casino Royale) chasing a guy with a MacGuffin (in this case a hard drive with a list of every secret agent in the world or something. Why does it always have to be the biggest thing ever every time? How about one where it is the secret ingredient in Coke?) in Turkey and assisted by a very hot girl (Naomie Harris-28 Days Later, Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man’s Chest). He fights the guy on top of a train and his assistant accidentally shoots him in the chest. He falls hundreds of feet into a river and down a waterfall. Then, with no word of how he survived and hid away from the greatest secret agency in the universe looking for him (remember that mention of plot stuff just being ignored? Turkey is not uncivilized. If some local fisherman pulled a guy out of a river with two bullet wounds in him they would call an ambulance, not nurse him back to health in secret) and spends his time drinking on a beach. Meanwhile, M (Judi Dench-J. Edgar, Casino Royale, the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is being called to the carpet over losing the list of all the secret agents in the world. She has her office blown up and it looks like there is someone with something personal against her.
Bond travels back to England and in spite of being recently shot and on an alcoholic binge is approved for duty by M, who seems to want to see him killed or something. I want to go on a little tangent here, and since this is my blog I will give myself permission to do so. About this time he digs out fragments of the bullet in his chest with a pocket knife and has them analyzed. They turn out to be made out of depleted uranium and since there are only three guys in the world who use them (how exactly does MI6 know that?) that leads him to the guy they are looking for. Here’s the deal on this ball of stupidity. DU rounds are generally made in 30mm or larger, mainly because they are used for anti tank rounds. There is no advantaged to using them in a hand gun, unless you want the gun you wear under your arm next to your heart and lungs to be radioactive. Oh, yeah. They are radioactive, which means that if James Bond has had them in his chest for three months I hope he has made peace with God because there isn’t a lot to be done for radiation poisoning. Also, if you were a bad guy and had enough depleted uranium to make a bunch of bullets you could become insanely rich selling the material to terrorists to make a dirty bomb. Sorry, but I expect smarter from a Bond film.
Anyway, James is on the case and travels the world. Eventually he comes face to face with the bad guy and, in another move that actually gets my approval and appreciation, it is a Bond villain cut from the same cloth as Goldfinger and Oddjob (well, cut from the scraps of cloth left over from the great villains and then stitched together with dental floss, but still). I don’t want to get too much into him or the rest of the story as there are some spoilers I could be dropping and won’t be responsible for that. I will say he pulls the old classic by not shooting Bond first chance he gets. Awesome. Bond beats up guys, shoots guys, blows up guys, and has bitchy, passive aggressive arguments with M.
The stars. Daniel Craig has definitely inhabited the role of Bond, and has made it his own. He is a very good actor, and it shows here. Two stars. The rest of the cast pulls out some great acting, especially the new villain and Judi Dench. Two stars. A lot of the action was really good and believable. One star. Naomi Harris is very easy on the eyes, as is the other girl. One star. Bond film. One star. The classic Bond car. One star. Generally entertaining. One star. Total: eleven stars.
The black holes. The reinventing of James Bond into John McClane. One black hole. The massive skips in plots in order to make the writers jobs easier (Hey, coming up with connection plot points is hard!). One black hole. Pacing alternated from fast and exciting to excruciating and dull (I literally had to struggle to stay awake at one point, and I stayed alert through the entirety of Cold Light of Day). One black hole. The whole depleted uranium thing, and a few other plot holes. One black hole. The new Q should have a flashing sign over his head that says “I’m a hipster duechebag inserted into this film in order to appeal to moronic young adults.” One black hole. The only character who really qualifies as a Bond girl is M. One black hole. Total: six black holes.
A grand total of five stars. Worth seeing in my opinion, but don’t go expecting to see the Bond you have always know. If you were to treat this as a stand alone spy movie I think you would get a lot out of it. Nothing on the screen screams for huge, so if you were so inclined I don’t think you would miss anything by seeing it on NetFlix. Date movie? Sort of. Nothing here to really turn an average woman on except for Daniel Craig, and odds are you are going to suffer badly in comparison. There is better out there for you (Wreck It Ralph). Bathroom break? Any scene were James is not actively shooting or chasing anyone will do just fine. The scene where M is being lambasted by Ministers stands out in particular, but it is kind of short.
Thanks for reading. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu for valuable insights into my personality (or just notifications every time I write a review). Feel free to post any comments on this movie or my review here. Off topic questions or suggestions email to [email protected]. There’s a bunch of movies I have let slide by I might go see like Flight or Silent Hill. Of course, Breaking Dawn is coming out on the 16th and you know I am rigid in eager anticipation for that one. No way will that drain my desire to keep on living.
Dave
Won’t Back Down Review
Ever see a cartoon that looks and acts like a real movie? Now you can see a real movie that looks and acts like a cartoon!
I wasn’t sure which movie to see the other night. I was torn between this one and the House at the End of the Street. They both looked annoying, but since I have been watching S2 of the Walking Dead lately I figured I had had my fill of horror this week. Also HATES looks chock full of exactly the lamo teenage cutesy kids that make me wish for the annihilation of the human race. When I realized my dream girl Maggie Gyllenhaal was in this one I figured “How painful could this be?”
The answer, unfortunately, was pretty painful. I will be the first to admit that I am not the target demographic most chick flicks strive to attract, being the most macho man you will ever meet who loves Cyndi Lauper music and plays with toy soldiers. However, the last two years of movie reviews has expanded my appreciation of movies outside of my normal genres and I like to think that while I might not enjoy a movie type in particular in general I am capable of recognizing quality work when I see it and in my opinion, I did not just see it.
The movie runs a massive 121 minutes and believe me, you will feel every one of them. The pacing drags on like trying to push your car to the gas station and accidentally left your parking brake on. The “drama” is so tertiary and uninspired that you might forget to keep breathing. The story attempts to show character development, but the main issue with that is the main character Jamie Fitzpatrick (Maggie) is so cartoonish and over the top that she literally eclipses every other character on the screen with her. It’s like trying to create a beautiful Lite-Brite flower but the light in the center has been replaced by a 400 watt flood. The only character who is even remotely interesting is Nona (Violet Davis), the teacher, but she is only able to shine in scenes where Jamie is absent.
This is not a criticism on Maggie Gyllenhaal, whom I consider a talented actor, but rather on writer/director Daniel Barnz (the Cutting Room, Beastly, Phoebe in Wonderland) for his creation of a working class super woman who crushes every obstacle in front of her with the relentless wheel of her steamroller personality. Her ability to beat down every problem in her path gets ridiculous and manages to more or less drain the drama from the entirety of the film.
The rest of the characters (with the exception of Violet Davis) are two dimensional cartoon characters as well, but none so much as the villain. Barnz wanted to create a movie about improving grade schools in America, so who does he tap for the villain? A selfish and uncaring school board? A corrupt city government? Local gangs and drug dealers making the school a living hell? No. How about…the teachers union??? Really? He makes the bad guys literally the teachers and the head of the union a selfish egomaniac who is only in it for those big teacher bucks. 
That is like creating a Death Star and crewing it with Care Bears (instead of having it be defeated by them. Empire logo from the Star Wars T Shirt collection). The only way he could have made the main bad guy more pointlessly evil is if they had raided his house and found he had been fertilizing his garden with dead babies. It seems pretty obvious that Barnz has some kind of axe to grind with organized labor.
The story. Jamie Fitzpatrick (Maggie Gyllenhaal-Stranger than Fiction, Donnie Darko, the Dark Knight) is a working class single mom who dresses like a stripper does during the day and works two jobs to support her child Malia (Emily Alyn Lind-Enter the Void, the Secret Life of Bees, J Edgar), who goes to THE WORST SCHOOL IN THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION! I’m not kidding about this. It’s almost like Barnz wanted to drive some anti-teacher union message home and took every example of horrible education ever and rolled it into one school. Also, Malia’s specific teacher Deborah (Nancy Bach-Dogma, Black Dahlia, the Bread, My Sweet) is painted as another stupidly evil and exploitative character for no reason. Basically Darth Vader to the union leaders Grand Moff Tarkin. Anyway, Jamie wants Malia to actually learn to read and tries assorted things to get her into another school or another class but is shut down by the most exciting movie antagonist possible, bureaucracy.
Meanwhile teacher Nona Alberts (Viola Davis-the Help, Disturbia, Solaris) is trying to find inspiration and help her own challenged son Cody (Dante Brown-America, Prodigy Bully, I Heart Shakey) with school. Jamie finds out about an obscure law allowing parents and teachers to take over a school if they think it is failing and doesn’t let the fact that it has never ever worked before sway her. She and Nona go through a long (long, long) process of collecting signatures and recruiting teachers. Meanwhile, the big, bad teachers union shows up in the person of sympathetic front woman Evelyn Riske (Holly Hunter-the Incredibles, the Piano, Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou. Am I the only one who finds her accent and slight lisp really sexy?) and Satan level evil union head Arthur Gould (Ned Eisenberg-Limitless, Last Man Standing, Million Dollar Baby). They do what they can to stop the pair from helping the school with a clear objective of destroying kids lives (Gould even says something to the effect of “When kids start paying union dues I’ll start to care about them”. Duh).
Honestly, that’s the story. The rest is a long, drawn out grind towards the inevitable and heartwarming ending. Minor obstacles are overcome, but they are more speed bumps than barricades. The final dramatic scene is the school room board meeting where the vote is split straight down straight white people verses alternative lifestyle and minority people. Then, with the magic of a jump cut scene, the school is miraculously transformed into the greatest educational institution since the founding of Harvard (it’s amazing what you can accomplish with some editing software).
The stars. I fell in love with Maggie Gyllenhaal when she did Stranger that Fiction (if you happen to read this, Maggie, I would risk extreme injury for the chance to have dinner with you), and she remains as hot and cool as ever (if disappointingly clothed). One star. I thought both she and Viola Davis did a good job with the mediocre roles they were handed, and the Nona Albert sub plot was as close as I came to being interested in this film. One star. I also thought both Emily Alyn Lind and Dante Brown did a great job as kid actors. One star. Total: three stars.
The black hole. Paced like standing on line at the DMV in Hell. Two black holes. Ultimately boring, with nothing really to sink my teeth into story wise. One black hole. Over the top, cartoonish characters with little to no depth. One black hole. Demonizing an organization that really doesn’t deserve it, and staffing it with Satan’s minions. One black hole. Painfully predicable in every regard. One black hole. Stupidly manipulative on almost every level. One black hole. Using a film to foster a political agenda. One black hole. Total: eight black holes.
A grand total of five black holes. Not really worth seeing in a theater IMO. I’m not saying you will wish for a clean death. It’s not THAT bad. It’s just that this is the film equivalent of eating 0% unflavored yogurt. No flavor, no texture, and while it may help sustain you ultimately you are spooning spoiled milk into your mouth (guess what’s on my menu for lunch today? I hate dieting). You might actually enjoy it, if you think that the teachers unions are directly responsible for the downfall of the American education system or enjoy the idea of wading through a massive bureaucracy to accomplish a nebulous goal. Date movie? Probably not, unless your date is hyper active and you have tried everything short of rufies to calm her down. Bathroom break? This film is so bland and uneventful I can’t for the life of me remember a specific point that seems more worthless than the rest of the film. Feel free to cut out any time. It’s a long movie, so odds are you will have to.
Thanks for reading, and sorry for such a tepid review. They can’t all be winners, and blase movies inspire blase reviews. There’s a lot of new stuff out right now, but none of it really excites me. I’ll go see something soon. I suspended my watching of all the TOS episodes so I can finally see S2 of the Walking Dead on NetFlix. Awesome. I am working on a new Star Trek post soon that should be fun however. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. Post any comments on this review or movie here, and if you have off topic suggestions or questions feel free to email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
A follow up annoying question from Star Wars
This is kind of an addendum to the question that came up yesterday about the fact that hiding a kid from his father while giving him the very distinctive last name of Skywalker is kind of dumb. I was thinking about it last night and came up with another related question.
As everyone knows Luke grew up with his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. In Episode 2 they are introduced as the step son and girlfriend of the Virgin Mary Skywalker. However, they did not have the last name of Skywalker. If they were going to adopt Luke why would the not just give him whatever their last name was? Couldn’t they have dropped the whole aunt and uncle thing and just claimed he was their son? It might have saved them a lot of trouble in the form of a screaming, burning skeleton death. Leia’s adopted parents did so, so you can’t say there was some kind of galactic cultural imperative to keep all last names in order.
Also, ever wonder how most blaster wounds just burn a circle in a guys chest but somehow Owen and Beru were incinerated? Were the Stormtroopers carrying flamethrowers?
The Millennium Falcon shot I got from yet another of Dave’s Star Wars t shirts.
Jason
Lego movie incoming?
Dave did a little weird happy dance when I told him about this rumor. He really is a dork. Apparently Warner Bros wants to make a CGI animated movie based on Lego toys.
I’m torn on this. On the one hand, kids of all ages and dorks like Dave will probably enjoy it quite a bit. On the other hand, Lego has toys, video games, t-shirts, telephones, keyboards, and pretty much anything else you can use to fleece your fan base. They are effectively the Kiss of the toy world. Do they really need to make a movie?
I also kind of expect the lengths they will go to to include every aspect of the Lego universe will get annoying after a while. Also, will this movie be about Lego toys that run around like Toy Story, or will it be a world adventure where all the characters happen to be Legos? In other words, is it going to be derivative or just lame?
Dave is threatening to throw stuff at me so I will wrap it up quick. This image from Dave’s Starwars trilogy t shirts was the best I could find for a Lego image. You would think he would stock more Lego stuff given he has been collecting them since he was three and will talk about his collection forever at the drop of a hat.
Jason
Snow White and the Huntsman Review
Not bad if you can swallow a few plot holes.
I saw this right before leaving for Italy and I hope you can forgive me if I have taken my seeing and enjoying this fabulous country more seriously than sharing my opinion of the film. On the one hand I feel guilty about letting this (and a bunch of other movies like Prometheus and Rock of Ages) sit on the shelf. On the other hand really I feel no guilt whatsoever. This is the first real vacation I have had in years.
Anyway, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. It does have it’s issues, each hanging over the script like a veritable Sword of Damocles except instead of swords each thread suspends a medium sized bag of dog poo. If you stand in one place too long eventually you will be struck by one.
However, if you can keep moving along with the pace of the movie you can avoid most of the poo and just have to deal with the lingering stench. This film is definitely several steps above the other, more schizophrenic Snow White remake Mirror Mirror. At least it tried to maintain a consistent tone. The acting ran from mediocre to very good, and the story didn’t land too far into lala land (it did, however, take a nice trip through the Valley of Plot Holes).
I’ll get into some of the more egregious plot holes when I do the black holes, but there is one that annoyed me throughout the movie. The Evil Queen Revenna (Charlize Theron-Hancock, Young Adult, the Italian Job) has a spell that helps her stay young and hot as long as she is the fairest in the land. The magic mirror tells her Snow White (Kristin Stewert-Twilight, Twilight, and more Twilight) is destined to out do her in the looks department. Unless as part of the aging process Kristin Stewart was destined to get a full body, face, and personality transplant there is no way she could ever be more fair than Charlize Theron. Charlize is a super hot woman who breathes sensuality into her role with every breath while Kristin Stewart is basically a Real Doll that can move.
Anyway, the story. Honestly, just reread my Mirror Mirror review and you more or less have it, only with the King actually dead. In another impact crater sized plot hole the widowed king meets Revenna after rescuing her from a fake army, they get married 24 hours later, and he dies of natural causes (being stabbed in the chest repeatedly is a natural way to die, right?) in bed with her that night. Somehow no one but some duke we never really get to meet calls shenanigans on this and the kingdom is placed under a terrible curse.
Fast forward 10 years. The magic mirror tells the queen she needs to eat the heart of Snow White in order to remain young forever. She has been keeping Snow White locked in a tower all this time (where somehow she is in awesome shape, can fight with a blade, and is a great swimmer. The tower must also be home to a 24 Hour Fitness) but instead of simply walking up there and gutting her she sends her idiot brother to fetch her. Snow White managed to escape through a sewer and runs into the Black Forest.
At this point the queen does not send in her entire army but rather recruits a local huntsman (Chris Helmsworth-the Avengers, Thor, the Cabin in the Woods) who is the only human to enter the forest and survive or something. He obviously doesn’t want to do it but is coerced by being told Revenna can resurrect his dead wife (zombie wife!). They enter the forest, find Snow White, he has the painfully obvious change of heart, and the rest of the movie is a quest to kill the queen.
The stars. I thought Charlize Theron was excellent. As I said in my review of Young Adult the one role she excels at is the cold, heartless bitch and honestly it rings a lot more true here. One star. While derivative the story was engaging and interesting. Nice twist on a lot of the old story. One star. Excellent visuals and CGI. Everything works well visually. On star. Charlize Theron is always easy on the eyes. One star. I thought Chris Helmsworth did an admirable job with what he was given, and seems to be the only character to actually describe a full arc. One star. Pacing and direction were good. One star. The fight with the troll was excellent. One star. I thought the Seven Dwarfs were pretty cool, although none of them were allowed to develop. One star. Overall very entertaining. Two stars. Total: ten stars.
The black holes. While none of the plot holes were truly gargantuan, they were numerous. Two black holes. I can tell you from personal experience the last thing you want to assault a castle wall with is heavy cavalry. Just dumb. One black hole. The idea that Kristin Stewart is supposed to be fairer than Charlize Theron is laughable, and in this movie her performance was wooden and formulaic. One black hole. 
A dumb fatalistic sub plot lifted directly from Star Wars (and not good Star Wars. I’m talking Episode 2. Republic image courtesy of the Star Wars T-Shirt category). One black hole. As cool as Queen Revenna was, her dopey brother was dumb and annoying. He was like having Shemp from the Three Stooges shoved into the Godfather. He did nothing but screw up. One black hole. Total: six black holes.
A grand total of four stars. Not bad. Well worth seeing, and some of the visuals do cry out for a large screen. However, I think if you have a decently sized TV you could probably survive with NetFlix. Date movie? Meh. Sort of. It wouldn’t be a mistake, but it also wouldn’t be my first choice. Bathroom break? I’d say the scene in town introducing the Huntsman as a drunken brawling loser. Not a lot added to his character there, especially since he more or less doesn’t get wasted enough to impact the movie again. If that is too soon in the movie I’d say any of the scenes involving the duke and his son. Felt very much like filler.
Thanks for reading. I get back from Italy tomorrow about 4pm and may well celebrate by seeing a movie. However, I have some horrible films to see. Rock of Ages and That’s my Boy look to be excruciating. However, as astute and regular readers I’m sure you have figured out the bad ones make for the funniest reviews. I am looking forward to seeing Prometheus, and next weekend promises to be very cool movie wise.
Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have comments about this review feel free to post them here. If you have questions or suggestions that are off topic you can always email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Dumb movie question from the Phantom Menace
I know the terms “dumb question” and “Phantom Menace” go together too easily and I am just picking low hanging fruit here, but this is another question that has bugged me for a while. Remember when the Trade Federation guys wanted to kill Qui Gon Gin and Obi Wan on board their floating space donut and gassed them for like 10 seconds? Why didn’t they let the gas sit in there for like three days? Or use a gas that didn’t look like smoke and have a distinctive odor? How about a nerve agent that is absorbed through the skin? Or just vent the room out into space? Hell, just reduce the O2 content of the room slowly and let them pass out. Did Lucas really feel the need to use a white easily identified gas out of a hissing vent in order to make his scene happen?
For that matter, what is wrong with just using a bomb? If I were trying to kill a Jedi I wouldn’t us an easily deflected blaster. I would use a 12 gauge shotgun, or the blaster equivalent. Sure, he might be able to deflect 50% of the shells, but that still leaves a lot of lead in the air. This is pretty much why modern military doesn’t use swords any more.
The Empire logo I found in Dave’s Star Wars T Shirts. One of the coolest logos ever IMO.
Jason
No mercy for Anakin Skywalker
So I was thinking about Star Wars Revenge of the Sith. It was probably the best of the three recent ones, although that doesn’t really say much. However, something about the ending has always bugged me.
Here’s the thing. Anakin Skywalker gets horrible burned and dismembered by Obi Wan, the man who raised and trained him from age eight. Now either Obi Wan was feeling bad about the ending to which Anakin had found and was taken by emotions for the young man he raised from a child, or he felt that Anakin had been to far corrupted by the Dark Side and was beyond redemption. If the former then he probably would have sought medical help for young Anakin in hopes of saving his life. If the latter he probably would have given Anakin the coup de grace in order to end his suffering.
What I sincerely doubt he would have done was leave Anakin to twitch off an die a horrible, agonizing death. Sure, he got picked up by the Emperor but Obi Wan had no way of knowing that was going to happen. If I ever lose three limbs and suffer burns over 90% of my remaining body for God’s sake put a bullet in me. I guess Lucas has never heard of a mercy kill.
Of course the Who’s Your Daddy picture comes from Dave’s Star Wars t shirt collection. Hilarious.
Jason
