Titanic (1997)

Music to Drown by.  Now I Know I’m in First Class.

I was really perplexed by today’s request from my friend Loni.  I typically review movies and video games, and have only rarely reviewed random things like hair dye.  But, I said I’d review anything and I meant it.  Today’s review is for the Titanic, or more officially the RMS Titanic, built by Thomas Andrews and the Harland and Wolff shipyard, and captained by John Smith.  I couldn’t do any personal research on this boat, but everything I’ve read about this boat leads me to decide that I cannot recommend this boat.  Sure, it was big and pretty when it first came out, but it has not held up well.  It’s practically a pile of rust on the bottom of the ocean by now!

I think I drained that joke for all it was worth, and that was not much.  I’m guessing (based mainly on the fact that Loni has a vagina) that she was requesting that I review the MOVIE Titanic.  I had seen this movie already because I’m a member of the human species, and it’s viewed as a requirement.  I was dragged to see this movie because I grew up in a household of women and it could not be avoided.  But, though I had already seen this movie, I really didn’t remember that much about it.  What I remembered about the movie was more accurately what I remembered about the actual Titanic.  So when it was requested of me, the only thing that made me delay the review for as long as I did is not having the desire to dedicate a large fraction of my day to watching a movie.  I finally decided that it’s time had come.  Thus, here is my review of Titanic, written and directed by James Cameron, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Gloria Stuart, Bill Paxton, Billy Zane, David Warner, Victor Garber, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Danny Nucci, Jason Barry, Suzy Amis, and Ioan Gruffudd.  Also, it should be noted that I will not entertain the notion that spoilers are possible in this movie.  Even if you’re one of the three people in the world who hasn’t seen this movie, I’m sure you have heard plenty about it.  And if you’ve managed to avoid that, then I’m sure you know about the actual event.  And if you don’t know that, then you’re an idiot and you haven’t understood half of the words I’ve used.

In 1996, Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) and his crew are searching the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, looking for a valuable diamond that was last seen aboard the ship known as Le Coeur de la Mer (the Heart of the Ocean).  They get excited when they find a safe, thinking it would contain the diamond, but find only papers inside.  But, as they are cleaning the papers, they find one of them to be a drawing of a naked chick wearing the diamond.  When it’s shown on the news, 100-year-old Rose Dawson Calvert (Gloria Stuart) sees the picture and calls Lovett, revealing that the girl in the picture was her back when she was young and extremely fuckable.  Lovett flies her and her granddaughter (Suzy Amis) to their boat above the wreckage and Rose unfolds her life story to a group of people that just want to know where she left her jewelry.  The story then turns to Rose back when her name was Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) who boards the Titanic on its maiden voyage with her fiancé Caledon Hockley (Billy Zane) and her mother Ruth DeWitt Bukater (Frances Fisher).  She starts a love affair with a drifter/artist named Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio).  Later, the boat hits an iceberg, Jack dies, and Rose is rescued by Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd).

Yes, I did only decide to tell the entire story of the movie so that I could make a joke about Mr. Fantastic saving Rose.  …WORTH IT!!!  And here’s another thing: this movie is WAAAAAY too long, but ultimately it is also worth it.  I feel like I had a very masculine reaction to this movie, but I was not totally against the female, lovey-dovey parts.  The love story occupied the bulk of the movie, and tended to make the movie feel a little slow and drawn out to me, but I liked that it was vaguely Romeo-and-Juliet-esque in how the two of them were like star-crossed lovers whose status was trying to keep them apart.  Also, we know that their relationship is probably not going to end well.  Speaking of which, though I thought the love story part of the movie was fine, I admittedly didn’t really get interested until things started going wrong and people started dying.  That’s when the movie got exciting and, sometimes, a little funny.  C’mon!  You tellin’ me that you didn’t snicker at all when that CG dude fell off the vertical sinking ship and hit the handrails, sending him into a crazy spin until he hit the water?  If you didn’t laugh, you just don’t know funny when you see it.  I didn’t find that quite as funny as the fact that it seemed as if Cameron was trying to build suspense right before the Titanic hit the iceberg.  Fer real, dude?  You want me to wonder whether or not the boat’s going to hit the iceberg?  I probably knew that was coming before I knew anything else about the movie, including who James Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kate Winslet were.  But I suppose it’s what a filmmaker was inclined to do, and I’m not sure just how much of my generation actually paid any attention to what the Titanic was before this movie made it a household name again.  And I can’t deny that I got a little choked up at the end of the movie.  It didn’t reach tears, but it got close.  And I also like the message of the movie.  The bulk of the movie is just about how classes are bad, but that message doesn’t go quite as far with me.  The one that resonated with me was what showed up at the end of the movie as the camera panned over the pictures from Rose’s life that she had endeavored to live to the fullest because of her promise to Jack.  Although it seems like something you should always have on your mind, sometimes I do need a movie to remind me that life is finite and you should really try to live it.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the look of this movie.  It goes for epic and it blows epic out of the water.  The launching and the sinking of the Titanic were both as epic as they should have been.  They even had some impressive transitions, like how they morphed the corroded image of the sunken ship’s bow into the recreation of the brand new ship.  Of course, there’s one thing that cannot be ignored when talking about this movie and that’s that Céline Dion song, “My Heart Will Go On.”  I remember finding that song somewhat annoying around the release of this movie, but it was really more due to the fact that it was entirely overplayed.  I feel prepared to say right now that it is a good song.  And I don’t care how gay it makes me.  It sets a great mood, and it’s actually fairly versatile, which you can tell by how often they used it in the movie.  Sometimes it was the score and sometimes it was the version with Dion singing, played fast and up tempo or slow and melodic.  But it does make me laugh on the few occasions when I see a movie that does this kind of thing.  Some movies just like the song they picked so much that they beat the audience over the head with it, demanding that they like it too.  Armageddon did it with that Aerosmith song, and I think one of the Transformers movies did it with a Linkin Park song.  At least this movie bothered to change the tempo on the song to change the mood.

I couldn’t think of much of anything to say about the performances in the movie.  I didn’t particularly find anyone that mind-blowing, but they all did very well.  And I think we all know the performance that stood out for me.  Was it the Academy Award nominated old broad?  Nah.  She did fine.  Was it Mr. Fantastic in his pivotal tiny cameo role?  Nope.  I’m more of a Human Torch person.  Obviously it was Kate Winslet’s boobs.  I could look at that lady naked all day.  And I have.  I also think there’s a chance that they revealed that Winslet would be nude in the end of the movie early on so that the male audience would sit through all the lovey crap to see the boobs.  It would’ve been off-putting at first because we’d be thinking that the nudity they were hinting at with that sketch was going to be that old lady, but then that old lady turns into Kate Winslet.  Alright, I’ll stick around for an hour or two, but you better deliver, movie!

So there’s a really long review to accompany a really long movie.  I would say Titanic holds up as one of the most watchable chick flick type movies that I know of.  You do have to sit through a good deal of a romance novel (albeit a decently written one) to get to the boobs and mayhem, but if you give it a chance it actually pays off in a way that surprised me with the expectations I had going in.  It’s mainly hindered by its ridiculous length, much like the Titanic itself.  I don’t know if that metaphor makes any sense, but I do know I will be saying that Titanic is a good movie.  Go check it out.  Titanic gets “It’s over a hundred feet longer than the Mauritania, and far more luxurious” out of “That’s one of the good things about Paris: lots of girls willing to take their clothes off.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Tombstone (1993)

You Tell ‘Em I’m Comin … And Hell’s Comin With Me!

It’s come time for me to say what my favorite movie of all time is.  This has always been a difficult question for me to answer as I usually just have a sliding scale of “Like” or “Dislike” for movies, but don’t usually make the claim of having an actual favorite.  What I determined to do was to just pick a movie that I really like and just say it’s my favorite.  I used to say it was The Crow, but eventually decided that there was at least one movie that I find completely awesome every time I watch it.  It’s never aged for me, it’s in one of my favorite genres, and it has the hands down best performance by more than a few people in the cast.  This movie would become the movie I would say is my favorite ever.  Whether or not it truly is my favorite is debatable, but we’ll see if its awesomeness is when I review Tombstone, written by Kevin Jarre, directed by George P. Cosmatos, and starring Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Stephen Lang, Thomas Haden Church, Tomas Arana, Dana Delany, Michael Rooker, Buck Taylor, Peter Sherayko, Terry O’Quinn, Jon Tenney, Billy Zane, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, Joanna Pacula, Paula Malcomson, Lisa Collins, Harry Carey Jr., and Billy Bob Thornton.

Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) and his brothers Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton) go to Tombstone, Arizona with the hope of finding their fortunes.  Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) is already doing alright for himself with gambling and shooting, but he goes to Tombstone as well to hang out with his buddy Wyatt.  Even though he’s married to Mattie Blaylock (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson), Wyatt starts developing feelings for a travelling actress named Josephine Marcus (Dana Delany).  Wyatt takes a job as a dealer at a saloon and gets some friction from a band of outlaws called the Cowboys, and more specifically their leader “Curly Bill” Brocious (Powers Boothe), Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn), Ike Clanton (Stephen Lang), and Billy Clanton (Thomas Haden Church), but the Cowboys are somewhat comforted by the fact that Wyatt is retired as a peace officer and has no interest in taking the law into his own hands.  That being the case, when Curly Bill kills Marshal Fred White (Harry Carey Jr.) while high on opium, Wyatt pistol whips him and takes him into custody.  Ike and Billy try to get Wyatt to release Curly Bill, but find themselves out-awesomed and leave.  Tensions continue to mount and, if you’ve read your awesome history of the West, you know some shit’s about to go down at the O.K. Corral.

I am still perfectly comfortable saying this movie is my favorite movie of all time.  There are definite contenders for the title, but this movie is definitely up there.  You probably can’t give a whole lot of credit to the story as it seems to mostly stick to what actually happened, or at least what is said happened around then.  Watching this movie always makes me start looking up information about what happened in Tombstone and it’s apparently hard to find solid information about it because most people in the town were biased either towards the Cowboys or the Earps.  This movie obviously takes the side of the Earps, and I’m okay with that.  It turns out very awesome, so I wouldn’t dare complain.  I’m sure it’s not 100% historically accurate, but I don’t watch this movie for a history lesson.  As it pertains to the movie, they show what they need to when they need to, and I like that.  They even do something to show the character’s personality right in their introduction to save time.  Wyatt Earp starts off by hitting a guy for whipping his horse, showing that he’s hardcore and big into justice.  Doc Holliday starts off coughing and being hilarious and awesome at a poker table.  Johnny Ringo shoots a priest in the head soon after we meet him.  Now we know who we’re dealing with.  The story is pretty damned solid too.  It starts off with just the tension building between the Earps and the Cowboys, and the Earps’ sense of justice leading them to feel they should get involved.  And the first good portion of the movie – assuming you know about Wyatt Earp and the others – is just building up for the most famous gunfight in American history: the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.  And it does not disappoint.  From what I’ve read, it’s around 90% accurate to what actually happened, which adds weight to the scene.  It’s not only awesome because it’s awesome; it’s also awesome because it feels like we’re time-travelling to watch it.  And the last big chunk of the movie is watching Earp’s Vendetta Ride, which is also very awesome.  All of the action in the movie was great.  They only went for the classic tension building before a quick draw contest twice and the rest of the action was regular shootouts and fist fights, but they were all awesome.  The Vendetta Ride was mostly just a series of montages, displaying any random images of people looking awesome while shooting guns, but it was great and time-saving.  Some of the “action” in the movie was even hilarious, and I’m mainly referring to the part where Johnny Ringo is showing off by twirling his gun around and Doc Holliday responds by doing the same with his cup.  I would say that the dialogue in the movie was great, but I think I mainly mean that Doc Holliday’s dialogue was great.  Everyone else only got to occasionally say something awesome, but almost everything Doc said was fantastic.  I think one of my favorite lines in cinema history is Doc Holliday saying, “I’ve got two guns, one for each of ya.”

I also loved every performance in this movie.  Almost every male character in the movie was a stone cold badass.  But let’s face facts: Val Kilmer steals this movie.  Val Kilmer looks like the Devil in the greater majority of this movie.  Pale skin, red around the eyes, often bleeding from the mouth, and even has that goatee goin’ on.  He was fucking awesome in this movie.  He’s hilarious and badass in equal measure.  Kurt Russell is also a bona fide badass in this movie.  He took care of the majority of his problems in this movie with sheer intimidation, not even requiring that he use a gun.  He made a little bitch out of Billy Bob Thornton and Stephen Lang on more than one occasion.  Michael Biehn was also epically badass.  The way he talked always made me think there was something supernatural about him as most people talked as if he sold his soul to the devil for his killing prowess.  I believed it.  Sam Elliott is also entirely enjoyable, and that’s not something that surprised me.  Not only is he usually great, but he seems to be made for westerns.  I think I would’ve found more conflict if Wyatt’s wife, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, was ever a likeable character.  I didn’t really care that she got left behind.  She was a drug addict and a bit of a bitch, whereas Dana Delany was fun-loving and free-spirited.  Seems like an easy decision to me.

Tombstone may not be the smartest movie you’ve ever seen, but it will probably be at least a contender for the most awesome.  The story is easy enough because it’s based on historical data, but it’s also based on some of the most awesome historical data in American history.  It’s compelling, it’s exciting, and I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but it’s pretty awesome as well.  All of the people in this movie perform greatly, but I think we can all agree that Val Kilmer steals the show.  I love this movie, and you should as well.  Tombstone gets “Make no mistake, it’s not revenge he’s after.  It’s a reckoning” out of “In Pace Requiescat.”

Who here’s shocked to hear that Chris won this one again?  Fuck this guy, am I right?

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

BloodRayne (2006)

Would You Stop Throwing Things at me?

On a day when most people are going out to see the Avengers, I chose to watch three movies spawned by Uwe Boll, a man whose top rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes pulls down a whopping 11%.  I say this only as proof that I make poor decisions.  In actual fact, I was simply unable to go and see Avengers on the opening day and will be putting it off until next week.  My anger over this leads me to want to take it out on some movies I know to be super shitty.  No better place to look than an Uwe Boll movie for super shittiness.  The man who is potentially the worst director of our time and the Ed Wood of our decade has hurt me more than many others by not only making shitty movies, but making them out of properties I was fond of from the video game world.  Today’s movie is one of these movies.  This movie is BloodRayne, written by Guinevere Turner, directed by Uwe Boll, and starring Kristanna Loken, Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Matthew Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Billy Zane, Will Sanderson, Meat Loaf, and Geraldine Chaplin.

Rayne (Kristanna Loken) is a half human, half vampire, all carnival attraction known as a Dhampir.  She is the spawn that resulted from the Vampire King Kagan (Ben Kingsley) raping her mother, and then later killing her.  She escapes from the carnival when one of the workers tries to rape her and takes it upon herself to kill a lot of the people on the way out.  But at least she gets a sweet pair of swords out of it.  This gains the attention of three members of the vampire hunting group called the Brimstone Society and Sebastian (Matthew Davis), Vladimir (Michael Madsen), and Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez) set out to find her.  With some advice from a fortune teller, Rayne sets off to find an eye, a rib, and a heart that belonged to a powerful vampire named Belial so that she can face and defeat Kagan.

Fuck you, movie.  And fuck you, Uwe Boll!  It’s no surprise to anyone that’s seen some of his movies that Uwe Boll is a terrible filmmaker.  What can surprise is how much his terribleness can seep into everything around him, making ideas that were good into shit and making actors that were great forget how to act completely.  There is scarcely anything within this movie that could stand as a reason for anyone to watch it ever.  The story of the movie is dumb and disjointed.  It’s been quite some time since I last played a BloodRayne game, but as far as I can remember, this movie has nothing to do with those games.  The only thing in common is that it stars an attractive lady vampire named Rayne.  Then it’s a bit of origin story which turns into a training thing with some junk about finding body parts of an old dead vampire.  You won’t be interested in any of it.  A lot of what Uwe tends to do is realize after the fact that either the scene does not really explain what was going on or the people that would be willingly watching this movie are stupid so he adds in some ADR dialogue over the scene to try to explain it, whether the person’s mouth is moving or not.  He does this early on when people are riding their horses through a scene and some really bad ADR is talking over the scene and even worse later when a guy is examining someone and says, “He’s dead,” even though his lips aren’t moving.  The dialogue is just as bad as the rest of the story.  There’s one part where someone is telling Rayne that, “Dhampirs are rarely the happy product of a vampire and a human,” and Rayne yells, “You lie!” at her.  So, wait…  Are you trying to make the argument that they ARE mostly from happy relationships, or did you just think this was the best time to get indignant even though you weren’t listening to me?  They also get phrases wrong, like when Katarin says something is a “bitter threat”.  The threat isn’t bitter, lady.  The threat doesn’t have emotions.  You may have a bitter ENEMY, or even just a terrible threat, but … oh what’s the point.  You’re dumb.  There’s also a lot of stupid going on in the movie, like when we cut from one scene to a random bit of Kagan biting a random young girl, then just moving on.  This girl never comes back into the story and the scene served no purpose.  It was almost like they didn’t believe that we believed them when they said that Kagan was a vampire so they had to prove it.  And how is it that, in bad movies, guards will kill anybody unless it serves the story for the people to get captured?  Sebastian and Vladimir had gone into a pile of enemies with their swords drawn and started killing them, but then let themselves get overtaken and they were captured, even though Kagan had given no orders to take them prisoner.  But don’t worry: this is an action movie!  Oh wait … the action is crap too.  There was no evidence that anyone tried to choreograph these fights at all.  They just gave the actors some fake swords and told them to get in there and swing them.  But all of the actors swung the swords as if they were really worried about hitting someone with the fake swords.  I understand that, but you’re in a movie.  You at least have to make it LOOK like you want to kill your opponent.  The sex scene is the only reason I can think of to legitimately watch this movie, but only because Kristanna Loken is hot and she has nice boobs.  The sex and the romance come completely out of left field.  I guess they could’ve fallen in love because they’d both lost their parents, but I think that would’ve just made me mad if I was Rayne.  She says that her mom was killed by Kagan and Sebastian comes back with BOTH of his parents were killed.  Alright, I guess you win the sob story game, you son of a (dead) bitch.  The ending also pisses me off, but I’m not going to waste my time putting up spoiler alerts.  I don’t want you to watch this movie.  The ending was vaguely reminiscent of the first Conan movie because Rayne is the only person still alive at the end, so she sits down on Kagan’s throne as the camera zooms slowly into her face.  Then we start cutting to various random scenes that were particularly violent from the rest of the movie, as if the movie was going to start over, but in slow motion and even more annoying.  I was about to open up my wrists until I realized that it wasn’t starting over.  But, as I think about it, maybe the ending fits the movie.  Nothing suits a terrible movie better than a terrible ending.

The ambience of the movie was also mostly crap.  The settings and the costumes were the only things that I wouldn’t judge too harshly … for the most part.  Rayne’s outfit pissed me off though.  Not at first, though.  I liked her original outfit.  It looked like it did in the game.  It was skintight and sexy.  Near the end of the movie, they present her with a new, and vastly inferior, outfit.  It looked to be leather, but looked pre-worn and really dirty, even fresh out of the wrappings it came in.  And the pants seemed to have been sized for an aging soccer mom as they did not fit snugly to Kristanna’s beautiful ass.  The weapons all looked really awful too.  Most of them were really fakey swords, a couple didn’t even look like any decent sword design, and they never captured Rayne’s signature swords.  They were close in the beginning, but then she breaks them and they’re replaced with ones that are just pieces of metal that were clearly rounded on the tips, so as to be not much more effective than fighting with butter knives.  Boll also doesn’t have a terribly good grasp on how to make sound work for a movie.  Screams sounded goofy when they should’ve been emotional, impactful musical stings were noticeably absent on scenes where they would have helped sell the emotion of a scene, and none of it sounded good.  It’s the kind of thing you don’t really pay attention to until you see it done really poorly, so you definitely notice it here.

I think you’ve all gotten the general idea of this review already, so it comes as no surprise to you that the performances were crap as well.  And that is even more tragic because they had some great actors in this movie that gave the worst performance of their lives.  I’m not talking about Kristanna Loken, of course.  She’s not known for her acting.  She’s known for the sexy.  She brings that much to some parts of the movie, especially her uncomfortable tits-out sex scene.  Her best performance to date was definitely Terminator 3 because she didn’t have to speak.  She delivers lines poorly and never really brings emotion, like when she says, “I WILL stand a chance against Kagan.”  It’s hard to explain it here, but the emphasis was on “will” so it seemed like it should have preceded a statement of more confidence like, “I WILL kill the living bejesus out of Kagan.”  It doesn’t really sound right when it’s more akin to, “I WILL give it a shot, but probably die.  Please don’t make me do this!”  Ben Kingsley is exactly the kind of person who shocks me with his performance in this.  This guy won an Academy Award!  He was in Schindler’s List!  …AND BloodRayne!  Why?!  He gives a thoroughly unimpressive performance to this movie as well.  It made me wonder if they just said, “Why bother?  Uwe wouldn’t know a good performance if I hit him over the head with the Academy Award I won for doing it.”  I would say Michael Madsen would fit into that category as well.  I’ve seen him be amazing in movies before.  I’ve also seen him not impress before.  He went with that one for this movie.  I laughed really hard at one point where he was running up the stairs with Matthew Davis in tow and an enemy jumped out of the door, basically onto Madsen.  Madsen just kept going as if it hadn’t happened, because Davis was the one that was supposed to kill this guy that clearly just popped through the door a couple of seconds too early.

BloodRayne is an awful movie.  Uwe Boll did the majority of the terribleness in this thing, offering up a horrible and disjointed story that has little to do with the source material while simultaneously displaying his ineptitude behind the camera by allowing lame fights, awful acting, and terrible everything get captured onto film.  The only thing in this movie worth seeing is Kristanna Loken’s boobs, but you can live without them.  They’re not that nice.  Plus, you can just Google that.  You could stream this movie on Netflix but … wait … No you can’t!  You are not allowed to stream this movie!  I forbid it!  If you want to make fun of a movie, any Uwe Boll movie sets you up for plenty of that.  And, if you want to get into making movies, you will realize that you can do it so much better than someone that actually makes money doing it right now.  BloodRayne gets “I would sooner rot in your dungeon than sit at your table” out of “Your form is weak, lacking passion.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption (2012)

I Will Rise Again, Like a Bad Idea

I’m extremely apprehensive going into this movie.  Generally speaking, sequels that get worse do so exponentially as the movies go along.  The Scorpion King was solid, number two was awful, so what could number three possibly be?  It doesn’t really matter, does it?  It’s been requested!  Eric wanted this movie reviewed, so I’m gonna do it!  Today’s movie has some big names in it, but ones that I have seen both in great movies and in complete shit.  It also has a WWE wrestler and a MMA fighter in it.  Now I’m nervous again.  Today’s movie is The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption, written by Brendan Cowles, Shane Kuhn, and Randall McCormick, directed by Roel Reine, and starring Victor Webster, Bostin Christopher, Billy Zane, Krystal Vee, Ron Perlman, Temuera Morrison, Selina Lo, Dave Batista, and Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson.

Mathayus (Victor Webster) is having a hard time dealing with the death of his wife, Cassandra (Kelly Hu), and also dealing with being played by three different people.  He gets through his days as a mercenary now.  Egypt is now divided into three kingdoms, ruled by Horus (Ron Perlman), Talus (Billy Zane), and Ramusan (Temuera Morrison).  Talus is looking to steal the Book of the Dead from Ramusan, and Horus wants to stop him from doing that.  Horus hires Mathayus and sticks him with a fat guy named Olaf (Bostin Christopher), just in case there was ever a time when people weren’t saying things.  They get to Ramusan and manage to stop a raid from Talus.  As payment, Ramusan offers Mathayus his daughter, Silda (Krystal Vee), to marry, but Mathayus must first rescue her.  In an attempt to rescue her, they are beaten to the punch by some ninja looking dudes that take Silda to the camp of Rebel leader, Cobra.  But they soon find that Cobra is actually just Silda, and she enlists their help in stopping Talus.  Meanwhile, Talus takes over Ramusan’s palace and retrieves the Book of the Dead, using it to summon three ghost warriors, Tsukai (Selina Lo), Agromael (Dave Batista), and Zulu Kondo (Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson).  Mathayus, Olaf, and Silda must work together to overcome Talus, his army, and his three mystical warriors to stop his campaign to rule all of Egypt.

Your plan backfired, Eric!  This movie wasn’t that bad.  Should you watch it?  Nah.  But after watching SK2, this one was actually a step up.  But, since I only watched SK2 in order to watch this movie, I guess you still did your damage.  The story of this movie is slightly worse than The Scorpion King, but it’s hindered a little bit by lack of fun.  In this movie’s case, it’s kind of intentional.  Mathayus is so mopey for the first 2/3 of the movie because of his loss of Cassandra and his kingdom that he’s got no time to be fun.  Around the end of the movie, it gets slightly more fun.  There are, of course, lots of things done in the writing that make no sense.  At one point, Mathayus and Olaf wake up to find out they are completely surrounded by tigers.  Their solution?  Walk away.  This could have been something cool.  Hell, it could have been SOMETHING.  Instead, it just served no purpose whatsoever in the movie.  The dialogue, on the other hand, is probably the worst that’s it’s been in this series so far.  Some of the regular exposition is fine, but their little “witty comments” are almost all loses.  When Mathayus and Olaf get robbed in the beginning and are beating up the robbers, he actually throws out “Crime doesn’t pay.”  When one of them falls in the fire and is running while on fire, he says “I’ll take mine rare.”  When sparring with Mathayus, Silda kicks him in the stomach and says “I take your breath away.”  And finally, when Talus is reaching his inevitable end, he claims “I will rise again, like a bad idea.”  Speaking of bad ideas: all of those lines.  And more, I’m sure.  The look of the film has it’s ups and downs.  For some ups: no shitty CG creatures.  They probably couldn’t afford good CG for this movie and so they didn’t do any.  They had some great settings, some impressive animals in the movie, decent enough fights, and the effects on the three ghost warriors were pretty cool.  They had another nondescript sword, but it was more tolerable because it wasn’t some super fancy mystical sword.  But it was a little tiny and not impressive.  Ladies?  There was also a scene where the ninjas attacked Olaf and Mathayus by jumping out of the water, and that looked pretty cool.  The problem was that they jumped out of the water that Olaf was peeing in a moment before, so dude basically just got piss all over him.  But some parts of the movie were filmed with something that seemed to be a handheld camera.  Handheld camera footage has it’s place, mainly in found footage type movies.  In most other movies, it’s just nauseating.  We’re trying to watch a fight, get a cameraman without Parkinson’s!

The performances are mostly okay in this movie.  Victor Webster wasn’t nearly as fun as The Rock was, but he was pretty good.  He was mostly brooding with a little bit of snark to him now and then, but all in all he was okay.  Krystal Vee was good looking, but delivered dialogue in a very wooden way a couple of times.  Billy Zane never really seemed like he was taking this gig seriously, acting pretty hammed up for most of his time, but he did have some parts where he was pretty good.  But when you pull off someone’s ear and start talking into it, I stop taking you seriously.  Ron Perlman and Temuera Morrison weren’t in the movie very long, but they performed their parts adequately.  Bostin Christopher, however, was in the movie a lot, and really worked on my nerves.  Not only was he a fat white guy that I imagine would get winded swinging a sword, but he also would not shut up.  He just kept talking and talking and not saying anything remotely interesting or necessary.  I know the Scorpion King movies have gotten into the habit of having someone around as “comic relief”, but you also have to make them funny.  Here’s the biggest shock of the movie: Kimbo Slice was actually good.  I don’t get it either!  You can kind of understand it from a WWE person like the Rock because they have to do a lot of talking at the camera, but from a MMA guy?  He had very little dialogue, but he had a great look for his part in the movie and I liked everything he did in the movie.  Add in some fiery red eyes and a flaming hammer and it works.  Speaking of WWE people, I was not impressed with Dave Batista.  From what I’ve seen of him in the WWE, he doesn’t do a lot of talking anyway, and he keeps that up here, but he didn’t work for me.  But he was better than Selina Lo.  She was really good looking, but very stiff in her delivery and I was thrown off by the fact that she would randomly scream in battle, but not when actually fighting people.  You can get by that by muting whenever she’s on screen.  Then it’s all good.

The Scorpion King 3 is far superior to The Scorpion King 2, but sadly both pale in comparison to the first movie.  The story is better, the dialogue is mostly awful, the performances are good enough, but some of the fights are good if you don’t get sick watching the shitty hand camera stuff.  But, even though this movie is better than SK2, you don’t need to watch it.  I don’t know why you would consider it, but you can stop it now.  You’re all set.  The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption gets “I’ll take mine rare” out of “I take your breath away.”

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Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Better to Devote Myself to Study the Other Great Mystery of the Universe: Women!

Because I cannot simply watch one, I follow my previous review with it’s sequel.  I compulsively feel the need to watch Back to the Future at least once per year and, once I have watched the first movie, I cannot keep myself from watching the entire series.  This movie took a pretty big hit critically, jumping down on Rotten Tomatoes from the 97% of Back to the Future to 64% for Part 2.  Have the mighty fallen?  We shall see in my review of Back to the Future Part 2, again written by Bob Gale, again directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring mostly the same cast of Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Thomas F. Wilson, Lea Thompson, Elisabeth Shue, Joe Flaherty, Jeffrey Weissman, James Tolkan, Flea, Billy Zane, Jason Scott Lee, Darlene Vogel, Elijah Wood, and footage of Crispin Glover.

At the end of the first movie, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is reunited with his girlfriend, Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue), just in time to have their party crashed by Doctor Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd), having just returned from the future.  The Doc throws Marty and Jennifer into the time-travelling DeLorean, telling them that they have to go Back to the Future to do something about their kids.  The worry, of course, is that Marty and Jennifer’s kids have turned into assholes, but it’s much worse than that.  They travel from October 26th, 1985 to October 21st, 2015.  Jennifer starts asking too many questions, forcing the Doc to knock her out, but he’s nicer than me so he uses a sleep-inducing device instead of the brick I would’ve chosen.  Doc explains to Marty that the grandson of Marty’s nemesis, Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), a cybernetically-enhanced bully named Griff, gets Marty’s son involved in something that gets Marty Jr. imprisoned for 15 years, which leads to Marlene, Marty’s daughter, trying to break Marty Jr. out of jail, getting her incarcerated.  Marty must pose as his son and say no to Griff, but Marty gets goaded into a fight because Griff calls him a chicken.  Thankfully, Marty uses a hovering skateboard to run away from Griff, causing them to smash into City Hall, getting them arrested and saving Marty Jr.  Marty finds a book called Gray’s Sports Almanac in an antique store and decides he should buy it and use it to make a few bucks.  Doc is not pleased about this, but gets distracted when they see that Jennifer, who they left in an alley, has been found by the police and is getting transported back to the house where she and Marty live in 2015.  Doc and Marty need to go save her because she might see her future self and there’s no telling what that could cause.  They head off to save her, throwing away the almanac as they leave, but it’s picked up by the much older Biff.  As Doc goes to save Jennifer and Marty wanders off, Biff gets into the DeLorean and drives off, reappearing shortly after in a great deal of pain.  Doc gets Jennifer and the three head back to 1985, but things are different now.  Somehow, Biff is now rich and powerful and has turned Hill Valley to haven for gambling and other bad behaviors.  Even worse than that, George McFly (sometimes Jeffrey Weissman and sometimes footage of Crispin Glover) was murdered, Lorraine McFly (Lea Thompson) is now married to Biff, and the Doc Brown of this time was committed to a mental institute.  Marty and the Doc desperately need to figure out what’s gone wrong and fix it, or be doomed to this version of 1985.

I cannot figure out how this movie gets rated lower than the first one.  At least not drastically lower as it has been rated.  I love this movie almost as much as I love the original.  It’s still a fantastic story, it still has lots of action and comedy, but not as much focus on romance for this one, and I could think of a couple of minor logic loopholes.  I also like that this movie gets a lot darker than the previous movie, mainly when we get back to 1985, find out that not only is Lorraine married to the McFly family nemesis, but that George was murdered by Biff.  I liked this dark turn for the series.  It gets us more involved in the story.  I also like how their return to 1955 lets them use the same footage from the first movie, but also shows us different angles of those scenes (like when Marty was playing guitar on stage) and scenes that we never saw in the first movie (like Biff harassing Lorraine after she picked up her dress from the store).  Of course, I thought about a logic loophole that was originally pointed out in the movie itself.  When they go back to 1985, Doc explains that they can’t go into the future to stop Biff from taking the DeLorean because they would be going into the future of this version of 1985.  But if that was the case, once Biff had given the almanac to the younger version of himself then it would have altered the timeline and he’d have been unable to go back to the version of 2015 that Doc and Marty were in.  In the movie’s defense, I have seen the movie many many times and didn’t think about that until this very viewing, so apparently who cares?  Plus, the concept of not being able to go the the proper 2015 from that timeline makes sense and the movie would’ve stopped right there with my idea included.  Another thing I thought about for this one was that they could’ve completely dodged the bullet of having to save Jennifer if Marty had just gone up to the police, let them identify him as her husband, had them make a comment about how young he looks for his age too, and they would’ve left Jennifer with him.  They seemed to forget to explain why Biff was in such pain when he got back from 1955.  He basically died by a dumpster and never really told us why.  I think I remember seeing something about it from deleted scenes, but it was a pretty big oversight on their part.  They do the thing about history repeating itself a couple more times here.  The biggest one was the skateboard chase from the first movie turning into a spectacular hoverboard chase.  The makeup effects are still very good at aging their cast in this movie, except for the ones on Elisabeth Shue for some reason.  I didn’t find her makeup convincing.

Because this movie goes into the future, it creates a danger that I’ve discussed in other movies set in the future.  You sometimes set loftier goals for the future than we can accomplish.  We still have three years from the time of writing this review, but there’s a lot to do in that time.  Power laces is something we can put on our Nike’s right now, but I don’t know who would want to spend the money it would probably cost to purchase those shoes.  Flying cars and hoverboards is a bit loftier in the goal department, and I’m not sure we’ll be ready as a culture technologically or as drivers.  Most people are bad enough drivers on the ground, I can’t imagine putting them in the sky.  I’m sure we can get rid of doorknobs right now, but I don’t know if I feel like it’s necessary to push my thumb to doors to save myself the trouble of turning a knob.  The biggest and most impossible thing is up to Steven Spielberg.  He’s got 15 more Jaws movies to make in only three years!  And you know if he rushes them out that quickly, they will mostly be much worse than even Jaws 4 was.

The performances don’t really change in quality here.  They’re still amazing.  Michael J. Fox is still fantastic, still does comedy and action superbly, but also has a little more emotional scenes to work with, but he still pulls it off fantastically.  Christopher Lloyd is still fantastic, and still does a mostly comedic performance in this movie.  Claudia Wells looked a lot different in this movie for some reason.  Oh wait, she was replaced.  Wells couldn’t do the sequels because her mother was diagnosed with cancer, so she was replaced with Elisabeth Shue.  Shue did a great job as Jennifer, but I still missed Wells.  Fox had a certain chemistry with Wells that he didn’t really have as much of with Shue, and I missed it.  But Shue still did great.  Speaking of replacements, Crispin Glover apparently asked for too much money (more, I heard, than Fox and Lloyd got paid) and was not in these movies.  I liked Glover in the first movie, but it’d be ridiculous to assume he’d get THAT much money.  And it actually worked out to be a better story that George McFly was murdered.  Also, he didn’t have anything resembling a big part in the movie, but most people don’t know that Elijah Wood pops up in this movie.  He’s one of the little kids playing the video game in the diner in 2015.  I just like to point that out, especially with how big he is today.  Jason Scott Lee (from Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story), Billy Zane, and Flea also have small parts in this movie.

I don’t know the reasons that some people bag on this movie as being so drastically worse than the original.  The original movie was amazing, and this one was too.  It’s not so bad to be slightly less amazing than something that’s so great.  I love the story and especially how it got dark in the middle, there’s still a great deal of comedy and action, and the performances have remained fantastic.  There were a couple of minor logic problems, but nothing that kept me from enjoying it.  This movie also gave me a quote that I still like using today, though it’s not an easy one to find an appropriate place for.  But I like to yell “MACFRY!!” like Marty’s boss, Fujitsu-san, did, usually out of nowhere and for no reason whatsoever.  But I like saying it.  Either way, you have to watch the entire series.  Maybe slightly worse than the original, but still amazing.  Back to the Future Part 2 gets “He’s got a few short circuits in his bionic implants” out of “Shark still looks fake.”

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Back to the Future (1985)

You Tryin’ to Tell Me that You Built a Time Machine … Out of a DeLorean?

I cannot go very long in my life without watching today’s movie, and subsequently it’s two sequels. Though the first one came out in 1985, they still hold up as some of my favorite movies – and possibly my favorite trilogy – of all time. I know that sort of spoils the review, but I don’t care. I cannot even act like it’s a possibility that I don’t like these movies. And so, without further ado, let’s get into my review of Back to the Future, written by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, Thomas F. Wilson, Claudia Wells, Wendie Jo Sperber, Marc McClure, James Tolkan, and Billy Zane.

Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a regular high school slacker. Before school one day, he goes to the house of his friend, scientist Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd), to blow up his giant speaker. He gets a call from the Doc as he’s leaving, asking him to come to the Twin Pines Mall the next morning. He meets up with his girlfriend, Jennifer (Claudia Wells), with whom he talks about their plans for the weekend, but upon returning home, Marty’s plans are dashed by the fact that the car he was to pick up Jennifer in has been totaled. He goes inside to find the culprit, Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), bullying Marty’s father, George (Crispin Glover), into taking responsibility for the accident. Marty’s mother, Lorraine (Lea Thompson), comes home later and bores the family with the story of how she met their father when her father hit him with a car, and how later they fell in love when they kissed at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. Marty goes to see Doc at the intended time and finds out that the Doc has created a time machine out of a DeLorean, one that is powered by Plutonium that the Doc stole from Libyan terrorists. Their meeting is interrupted by the Libyans, who shoot down the Doc. Marty panics and jumps into the DeLorean. In the ensuing chase, Marty speeds up to 88 mph and is transported back in time from October 26th, 1985 to November 5th, 1955. While here, he runs into a younger version of his father trying to spy on an undressing girl, when George falls into the street and into the path of a car. Marty shoves George out of danger, but gets hit by the car himself. He wakes up in the room of Lorraine Baines, later Lorraine Baines McFly and Marty’s mother. Marty leaves and finds the Doc from 1955 and convinces him to help get him back to 1985, but there’s a problem: Marty inadvertently kept his parents from meeting, which would put a damper on his plans of being born one day. Marty has to set things straight while still figuring out how he can get himself back to the future.

This is a fantastic movie as well as being the fantastic beginning to a fantastic trilogy. I think I love everything about this movie. The story is great and well thought out, jumping back and forth in time with scarcely a logic loophole to be found. It pulls off some great, suspenseful action scenes, it lands a great love story, and throws in a great deal of comedy as well. There are a good amount of action scenes in the movie, from the chase with the Libyan terrorists to the race against the clock to get George and Lorraine together and get Marty back in time to catch a lightning bolt, but to me, the best action scene is when George wins Lorraine on his own. Marty was trying to engineer a fight between himself and George to get George to impress Lorraine, but when Biff intervened, George had to decide between fight or flight to basically keep Lorraine from being raped by Biff, and he made the right choice on his own, ending with him knocking Biff out with one punch and getting the girl. That scene still gives me goosebumps, even though I know the movie so well at this point I could practically recite it. I think what keeps me interested in this movie is looking for the hidden things that they throw into the movie to show the results of time travel. The biggest and most obvious one was that the name of the Twin Pines Mall was changed to Lone Pine Mall, because Marty drove over one of the pines when escaping from the farmer’s house in 1955. In the part with the Libyans, the Doc uses a six-shooter because, as he says in Part 2, he’s “always wanted to visit the old west.” Granted, they didn’t know there would be a sequel or a part three when making this movie, but they used it. The same could be said for when the Doc says that he can go forward in time and find out who wins the next couple of World Series games, which leads to the Sports Almanac in Part 2. There’s also a little Harold Lloyd figure hanging from a clock in the beginning of the movie, foreshadowing the Doc hanging from the clock in the end of the movie. I love finding these things in movies, and a movie with time travel in it opens it up for this stuff. Another thing they do a lot in these movies is showing how history repeats itself. The conversation between grown up Biff and George is exactly like the conversation between younger Biff and George, exchanging reports for work with homework. Marty and George even sit with their hand on their head in the same way when in the diner, helping us jump on board to them being related. You see a lot more of this stuff in Part 2 though. If I was going to point out something I thought was off about the story of this movie, it would be that it’s never explained how a high school kid is such good friends with a 60 something year old scientist. I thought of an explanation though: that the Doc became friends with the McFly family because he knew Marty would be around one day, and he had already been introduced to Lorraine so he had an in.

Graphically, the movie holds up almost entirely. There was one part in the movie where the DeLorean disappears, leaving those awesome fire trails going beneath Marty and the Doc, where you can see that the lighting on Lloyd and Fox doesn’t really match up and they were probably green-screened in, but who gives a shit? This movie is amazing. And the DeLorean itself is awesome. I know for a fact that if I was of driving age when this movie came out, I would definitely have tried to get a DeLorean. I don’t know how sales in DeLorean’s didn’t jump up drastically because of this movie, which I assume they didn’t because that company isn’t still around. I also read online that the creator of the DeLorean, John DeLorean (which is his real name even though it sounds like I made it up and didn’t try very hard to do so), sent Zemeckis a fan letter because of this movie. And why wouldn’t he? They made this car one of the most famous vehicles in history! All of the other graphics hold up nicely too. The recreation of Hill Valley in both 1985 and 1955 was fantastic. Everything looked similar and seemed to have a story to tell about how it had changed over the years. 1955 really captured what I think 1955 would be like. In fact, this movie probably stands as the example in my brain of what 1955 was like since I have no other information about it. I also think the music still holds up from this movie. Yeah, the Huey Lewis music is basically two songs used in different ways throughout the movie, and they’re clearly 80’s music, but I still like ’em. They use Mr. Sandman and Earth Angel once they get to 1955, which set the mood for the 50’s well. Then you throw in some awesome Johnny B. Goode at the end, but kind of make me like the song less because I had no idea that Chuck Berry just stole that song from Marty. Bad form, Chuck! The best stuff in the movie is the orchestral themes used. A lot of the orchestral stuff is two or three songs reused, but they change them up to fit the emotion of the scene. Plus, they’re amazing.

The performances in this movie are sublime. I will pretty much love every single person associated with this movie forever. Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd especially. Michael J. Fox was so good in this movie. He played it for comedy most of the time and pulled it off fantastically. He had just as many action scenes, which he pulled off equally as well. He didn’t have too many emotional things to pull of here, though. He did a fantastic job of being very uncomfortable with what was going on when his mom was coming on to him. This performance makes it acceptable that a mother is coming on to her son because she’s not aware of it and he’s very uncomfortable with it. Christopher Lloyd was also fantastic as the eccentric Doc Brown. He was mostly played for comedy and exposition, but he was a super interesting character with fantastic personality. My favorite part about him was all the funny entrances he got to do, like when we first see him in 1955 with that giant device on his head. His wide-eyed expression was amazing. I’m pretty sure I fell in love with Lea Thompson because of this movie, and that still goes on today. She was so hot in 1955. I’d take a crack at that, even today and even though she’s 20 years my senior. Crispin Glover was as strange a character as he usually does, but still oddly appealing somehow. The best part about Thompson and Glover was how drastically their performances changed for the same character in different eras. Original 1985 versions of them are much older and downtrodden, somewhat beaten up by life but still sticking together, back in the past they were youthful, and Thompson was very cute and awkward, though not nearly as much as Glover, and in new 1985 at the end, they were older, but much more happy with each other and life. Thomas F. Wilson plays such a good antagonist in these movies that I would have a nagging hatred of him in the back of my mind, no matter how nice he might be in real life. He towers over almost everyone in the movie, has a semi-constant sneer on his face, but is also really stupid and cannot deliver cliche’s correctly. All of these people are amazing.

The reviews for the next few days were not intended to surprise anybody. I just need to watch these movies at least once per year, but I have never gotten bored of them, and I cannot foresee that ever happening. These movies are amazing. Great story, fantastic performances, comedy, action and romance all rolled into one story, and the graphics and music to make them work even better. I don’t know how you could have gone through your life without having seen these movies yet, but if you somehow have, you need to watch them right now. If you’ve already seen them, you should watch them again and remember how awesome they are. Back to the Future gets “My density has brought me to you” out of “History is gonna change.”

Hey, peeps. Why not rate and comment on this as a favor to good ole Robert, eh? And tell your friends! Let’s make me famous!