sherlock holmes

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0988045/

a cheerleader suggested that i should go see avatar. whatever, i read the screenplay a while back and was not too impressed. the trailers basically gave away the whole movie anyway. so i went to see sherlock holmes instead.

i am not what you would call a purist when it comes to the translation from book to movie, but i do think that you should maintain the core characteristics in such a translation, unless you change the names and all the characters so everybody realizes you have made a significant departure from the prior art. alas, such a departure has occurred in the new sherlock holmes film.

the movie itself is not bad, one of the better films i have seen in the theater lately. however, that is not saying a lot because the competition is chiefly from atrocities like gi joe and disappointments like 9. anyway, it is your basic action-adventure kind of film with good sets and costumes, a reasonable plot, and good chemistry between the characters. think indiana jones.

what this movie is *not* is a sherlock holmes movie. very little of the cool deductive technique that is the sherlock holmes trademark was present here, having been largely replaced with fist-fighting and explosions. i could overlook a triviality like sherlock plucking the violin instead of playing it, but making him and watson into action heros is much more of a significant shift. it actually seemed like the classic sherlock stuff was just a layer of paint over the top of the film proper. removing all that stuff, including the substory about watson and his fiancee, would have made this movie into a length more appropriate to its content.

also, sherlock's fighting style in this film is ridiculous. i daresay that a cheerleader could kick his ass, no contest.

the samurai princess

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1412334/

this is the best movie that has ever existed.

this film is lacking in all of the classic criteria, such as plot (-1), acting (-1), special effects (-1), sound (-1), music (-1), dialogue (-1), character development (-1), and visuals (-1). you might be thinking to yourself that there is no way it could overcome such a deficit and rise above *every single other film* that exists. well, let me tell you how you are wrong.

the samurai princess includes all of the following:
- a scissors leg (+1)
- a chainsaw leg (+1)
- a detachable breast boomerang-like flying weapon thing (+1)
- cannibalism (+1)
- ninja/samurai cyborgs (+1)
- multiple off-camera mass dismemberments and piles of obviously-fake severed limbs (+1)
- a buddhist nun bent on revenge (+1)
- heavy metal and a guitar that can make windstorms (+1)
- a love triangle (+1)
- hot cyborg on cyborg action (+1)
- a chainsaw rocket (+1)
- staple gun first aid (+1)
- old friends turned bitter enemies (+1)
- a love rhombus (+2)
- samurai swords (+1)
- six different kinds of what the ??!? (+6)
- a cyborg penis that bites things off (+1)
- glowing ethereal sword-wielding arms (+1)

so you can see that that is like +24 from awesomeness, compared to the mere -8 from the classic criteria, for a grand total of +16. that is a lot, especially when you figure in that we are working on a five-point scale. it is simple math.

some people might contest the points for the love rhombus because it is arguably unclear whether the two cyborg hunters have any lesbian leanings. i say, whatever. you can find lesbians anywhere if you look hard enough, so just look harder.

some day, when i rule the world, i am going to dedicate entire countries to this movie. france for sure, unless they shape up and ship me another "banlieue 13." if they blow it and make another "cité des enfants perdus," then they are going straight onto the pile of obviously fake severed limbs, no second chances. i have not really decided on other countries yet, so i will probably pick them from a hat.

for those who are wondering, antarctica is safe from the chainsaws. penguin mistreatment is no laughing matter.

come see the paradise

i only made it through the first hour of this film before deciding that if i had to hear dennis quaid say "lee-lee" one more time i was going to have to jump off the roof. since i do not have convenient access to my roof, i had to stop watching the movie.

assassination tango

robert duvall is not convincing as either an assassin or as un tanguero. or as an assassin/tanguero.

9

this picture purported a promising premise, but it was poorly paced and possessed plenty of preposterous plot points.

frailty

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264616/

not terribly engaging, but the payoff made it worthwhile.

gi joe: the rise of cobra

did you know:
- in the arctic, ice is so heavy that it sinks and can crush your underwater fortress?
- the only way to shoot down a missle is to chase it with a super-fast experimental jet that has been inexplicably parked nearby with the keys in the ignition?
- a person whose head is encased in red-hot iron would not die within seconds?
- marlon wayans is not the most annoying person in the world?

these lies and many other crimes against humanity were committed in the recently released film, "gi joe: the rise of cobra." by the way, those were all spoilers, not that it would be possible for me to ruin this movie any more than it already was.

anyway, gi joe is a horror film about two guys who are held hostage in a darkened movie theater with about 50 other people. they are forced to watch as horrible, horrible things are shown on a large screen at the front of the room. the tension mounts as their experience goes from bad to worse and their survival becomes more and more doubtful. the close of the film is especially chilling. we see the two protagonists leaving the theatre, discussing how horrible their experience was and how they will take care to steer clear of such travesties in the future. you are thinking that such a horrible movie as they have endured has been stopped in its tracks until, in a gruesome twist, we see another pair of friends walking out...talking about how much they enjoyed the action-packed film. ("...that was awesome, when the eiffel tower fell over." "yeah, and then that flying leap into the helicopter...") terrifying. i get chills just thinking about it.

this film packs quite a punch as yet another entry in the "torture porn" horror film genre, but is tremendously weakened by the banal qualities of the film-within-the-film, which is, for better or worse, shown almost completely, much in the same way that in "the ring," the complete contents of the videotape are shown in the course of telling the story. in "gi joe," the film-within-the-film is not a snippet or hodge-podge like in "the ring." rather, it is so complete that it can nearly stand as a film on its own, though it is so bad that it could not realistically be released in a real theater. if you are willing to suspend disbelief on that point, however, you have a terrifying torture experience.

in conclusion, gi joe is a relatively standard entry in the psychological-torture-porn horror genre. this would have been a stronger film if they had spent less time on graphic torture scenes and more time on background; for instance, what compelled the main characters to stay for the entire movie? i never felt like i understood their motivations, so i spent a lot of the movie wanting to yell "get out of the theater" at the characters on screen.

transformers 2: bigger, longer, more disappointing

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1055369/

i went to see transformers 2 on a day when it was hot. really hot. i sat all the way through it primarily because the theater was air conditioned.

sometimes i wonder whether i am getting too old to enjoy modern action films. for example, the shaky camera thing. my tired old eyes just cannot follow anything that is happening on screen when they do that. perhaps it is time for me to invest in eyeglasses and suspenders and a perpetually bewildered facial expression. another thing that bothers me is the shift from treating femail leads as characters with dialogue that happen to be eye candy to treating them as characters that are eye candy and happen to have dialogue. would angie dickinson (aka, "feathers" in rio bravo, 1959) have put up with a role like megan fox did? no, of course not. angie dickinson had self-respect. megan fox probably has an agent who heard the term once and whose job it is to protect her from exposure to such things. i quite frankly think that they could have seamlessly replaced the femail lead in this film with porn kiosks in the theatre lobby. this would have had two positive effects: number one, a new business opportunity for some clever entrepreneur and number two, the movie would have lost about an hour of useless drivel.

where was i? right, transformers. they are giant robots, except for the small ones, that can turn into other stuff. except some of them do not turn into other stuff. i think. the camera was too shaky for me to really tell. anyway, you probably already knew all that. did you also know that transformers are overly dramatic and amazingly stupid? if i were a robot, i could rule them all simply by *refraining from doing obviously stupid things*. i mean, really. the decepticons did exactly one thing right, the entire movie, which was to compromise the human's communications. the humans, of course, should have remembered, from the first movie, that decepticons know how to break their communications systems and moved to more LOS-based comms and steganographic techniques, but sure, i get it, they have to move the plot along, and none of their good writers were in that day. or any other day.

also, how do you *forget* about having an extra piece of the matrix floating around? if i had a piece of this matrix thing, i would not give it to megan fox to hang onto for me. oh hell no. that shit stays on my person at all times. *all* times.

in conclusion, if you are thinking that you will go watch transformers 2, i recommend that you think twice and come to the opposite conclusion the second time.

wasabi

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281364/

lots of face-punching. otherwise kind of campy. god i love face-punching.

two lovers

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1103275/

for those who were wondering, two lovers was pretty bad. there were three kinds of characters: plastic, unlikable, and one-dimensional. the plot's dramatic unveiling was not all that dramatic and did not carry any real surprises. i came close to being pissed off that the protagonist crumbled beneath his shortcomings instead of rising above them; this would have been less of an issue for me if he had not been unconditionally rewarded for being such a douche.

they might be setting up for the sequel, zero lovers, where the douchebag's wife finds out about what went on in the first movie and goes postal. i could see that as having some real promise; perhaps she could replace her arm with a series of weapons, such as chainsaws and machine guns, that could be used to fight the ninja badasses protecting whatshisface from her wrath. at the climax of the film, she could battle the douchebag, who would be armed with some kind of flying guillotine weapon. we could make this movie ourselves, right here on campus, possibly with our cellphones, operating in video-recorder mode.

pretty persuasion

the first half was like a failure of a two star comedy, but then it suddenly turned into a creepy horror movie that was actually pretty good.

throne of blood

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050613/

just as bad as "ran", but thankfully shorter.