Carrie (2013)

I Can STILL See Your Dirty Pillows

I love my Film Criticism class.  At first I was a little bit resentful that I showed up for class to find that we were watching the 1976 Carrie movie.  I had already seen and reviewed this movie!  And more than that, I didn’t really like it that much.  But after the movie, I found out some very exciting news: our midterm was to watch the new remake of the movie and compare the two.  I had already considered seeing this movie out of potential morbid curiosity.  But even better than that, I’d have to assume I’ll just be able to pull my midterm right out of this review.  But you guys will get the Director’s Cut of my midterm about the movie Carrie, based on the novel by Stephen King, written by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, directed by Kimberly Peirce, and starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Judy Greer, Portia Doubleday, Gabriella Wilde, Ansel Elgort, Alex Russell, and Barry Shabaka Henley.

Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a shy weirdo that gets abused by her schoolmates for not understanding what’s happening when she gets her first period in the shower.  To top that off, her mother (Julianne Moore) abuses her because she thinks Jesus gave her a period as punishments for her sins or some such nonsense.  But Carrie starts to realize that she’s not just an ordinary creepy girl.  She starts to realize that she can do things with her mind; a phenomenon she finds is called “telekinesis.”  But, more important than that (if you’re a high school girl), is that Tommy Ross (Ansel Elgort) asked her to the prom!  Sure, he asked her at the behest of his girlfriend, Sue Snell (Gabriella Wilde), because they felt sorry for Carrie.  But Carrie still has a problem: Chris Hargensen (Portia Doubleday).  Chris is the head of the bully girls that pick on Carrie, and she resents Carrie because picking on her got her punished and banned from the prom.  And that’s just good logic right there.  Chris devises a plan with her boyfriend Billy (Alex Russell) to make Carrie pay for the punishment that she brought on herself.

I should do remakes more often!  I just got to copy and paste that whole thing from my other review!  Now, my midterm essay is supposed to be more about the differences between the two movies, so this won’t be my typical review.  But I’ll still get the review in there somewhere.  Let’s start with the story.  The story was almost exactly the same.  This movie claims that it stuck closer to the original novel than the original movie, and that just makes me think I wouldn’t like the novel.  I don’t particularly care about either story.  But the differences that I noticed actually made me like the story a little bit more.  The fact that Carrie’s mom had a job didn’t make that much sense to me.  It seems like it’d be hard to keep a job with that level of crazy going on.  I thought the ending of the original movie was much more effective, but this one was apparently more like the novel (at least according to Wikipedia).  The scene afterwards worked much better as well.  First of all, the sequence happened in a dream, so Carrie might not actually have decided to come back from the dead.  But if she did, it just makes much more sense that she could maybe have survived bringing the house down on her head instead of bringing the house down on her head, being dug out, prepared for burial, buried, and then coming back to life as it seemed the remake was implying by having Carrie’s gravestone start cracking.

The look of the movie would obviously have improved over time just because of advances in technology (not to mention the extra $28.2 million the remake had to work with).  Most everything in the movie just looked a lot better.  I like that they kept the fact that Carrie starts and ends the movie covered in blood, but they did it differently.  The original started with the shower scene which this movie still had, but this one started with Carrie being born.  I guess that makes it more symbolic that not only the movie but Carrie’s life started and ended covered in blood.  I thought the prom scene in this movie was much better too, even before it gets to the “bloody prom” part.  They still have the scene where Carrie and Tommy dance in this movie, but thankfully Peirce didn’t make the strange choice to film the two of them dancing in a centrifuge as De Palma did.  But I liked it much better when it got into the “bloody prom” part.  It was much more brutal as I imagine it should have been in the original.  The original movie had Carrie attacking people with a fire hose.  In the remake, Carrie crushes people with bleachers, throws heavy decorations at people, electrocutes them, and lights them on fire.  The ensuing car crash was also done much better.  It made more sense that they would have tried to run Carrie down because she kept them from leaving town.  In the original, they just kind of show up and the movie doesn’t really bother trying to tell us their motivation for running her down.  Then it was also graphically better when she slams the car to a stop.  I did think it didn’t make sense because the speedometer made it seem that they had gotten up to about 100 mph trying to run her down but they didn’t fly through the windshield until Carrie slammed the car into the gas pump.  I think going from 100 mph to 0 so instantly would have sent them both out of the car.

One thing that came up in class was the fact that De Palma filmed some of the scenes in a very perverted fashion that really didn’t seem to fit the movie.  Things like the shower scene and the detention exercises seemed more like they were out of Porky’s than out of a horror movie.  There was a little bit of that in this movie, but I only noticed it in the beginning when they were playing volleyball in the pool and they were filming all of the “high school students” underwater and below the belt.  I guess it helps that this movie was directed by a woman instead of a man.

There were a lot of differences in the performances in this movie.  Chloë Moretz did a decent enough job, but I didn’t feel she could really touch the quality of work Sissy Spacek put out in the original.  Spacek’s Carrie was afraid of her powers for most of the movie.  Moretz relished them almost immediately.  I thought it was a bit of a stretch for this movie to want me to believe that this girl would lose her mind when she got her first period but think it was cool that she has telekinesis.  She apparently has pyrokinesis as well because she can weld locks with her mind, and she also has some amazing baby gender-detecting ability.  I guess she did get a lot more practice with her powers in this movie than Spacek did, which I also thought was weird.  Seeing her practice with her powers made this feel more like I was watching a prequel to X-Men.  The strength of her powers also varied as needed by the movie.  At one point she’s lifting a car, but minutes later she can’t push her mom off of her?  On the other hand, I thought Julianne Moore did a much better job than Piper Laurie.  Moore played it a lot more real and Laurie played it almost cartoonishly over the top.  It makes sense since after I read that Laurie thought the movie was a satire of horror movies after she read the script, but the character works much better if she doesn’t cause the audience to laugh at some of the things she does.  It made me think that my dream team would’ve been Spacek as Carrie and Moore as the mom, if that would’ve been age appropriate.  Maybe with some clever editing…

I also thought they made some strange changes in the other girls of Carrie’s school.  I thought the role reversal was weird between Sue and Chris.  The Chris of the original (Nancy Allen) was a hot blond, and Sue (Amy Irving) was the cute brunette.  In the remake, Sue was the tall, hot blond (Gabriella Wilde) and Chris was the cute brunette (Portia Doubleday).  I guess anyone can be a bully, but typically the tall, gorgeous blond is the mean one, having been spoiled by being able to get her way her whole life with her looks.  I also thought that the bullies weren’t as cartoonishly mean to Carrie as they were in the original.  When Carrie sucks at volleyball, Chris makes a joke about it but is generally encouraging.  Carrie didn’t get hit in the face with a baseball cap because of it.  And when Carrie was freaking out in the showers, the girls thought it was strange that she didn’t know what a period was, but they seemed to be genuinely offering her tampons until she kept freaking out about it.  Chris did start to become much more unlikeable when she filmed it and put it on the internet, and even more unlikeable when she didn’t delete the video from her phone before going into the principal’s office.  No one likes a stupid person.   I also thought it was interesting that the roles were reversed between Chris and her boyfriend Billy, who I thought was The Situation for a good part of the movie.  Chris was the manipulator in the original movie, and Billy was in this one.

The Carrie remake was scarcely different from the original.  In some ways it was improved, such as in the look and in the greater majority of the performances.  The only performance I liked in the original movie was Sissy Spacek, and the only performance that was not improved on for the remake was the very same role.  The story was basically the same.  If you were forced to make a choice between the two of them, I guess I would recommend this one, while still saying that Spacek is worth checking out in the first movie.  But if you don’t need to choose, then I’d say you can get by skipping both of them.  Carrie gets “You know the devil never dies, keeps coming back.  But you gotta keep killing him” out of “There are other people out there like me who can do what I can do.”

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Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

I Try to Have Fun.  Otherwise, What’s the Point?

Today’s movie was way more difficult to see than it should have been, and Friendboss Josh is to blame.  We had been trying to see this movie for nearly a month before we could finally find the time.  First he couldn’t go because of a “butt thing.”  I’m still not sure what he meant by that.  Was it a proctologist appointment or a sex thing?  Probably both.  Then his girlfriend, the Whitney Bird, lit the bathtub on fire.  Seems impossible, right?  I mean, the thing shoots water.  The next week he was abducted by aliens.  He called it a family reunion, but when I hear about a collection of Mexicans, I just assume.  The last week was my fault because I had a creative writing class to attend where I learned how to make up ridiculous stories to cover for your bad memory about past events and how they kept you from movies.  Then Friendboss Josh and I went to see Kick-Ass 2, based on a comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., written and directed by Jeff Wadlow, and starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloë Grace Moretz, Jim Carrey, Lindy Booth, Clark Duke, Donald Faison, Steven Mackintosh, Monica Dolan, Robert Emms, Augustus Prew, John Leguizamo, Olga Kurkulina, Daniel Kaluuya, Tom Wu, Andy Nyman, Morris Chestnut, Claudia Lee, and Iain Glen.

After the events of the first film, Dave Lizewski has retired from his hero persona Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but quickly finds that regular life is not to his liking.  He decides to take up the mantle of Kick-Ass again, but this time he’s not going to rely on the fact that he can’t feel pain and actually get some training from the younger, but far better trained Mindy Macready, also known as Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz).  Elsewhere, Chris D’Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) is still sore at Kick-Ass for killing his crime lord father in the first movie.  He reacts by dropping his hero persona, Red Mist, and instead becoming the first real-life villain, the Motherfucker.  When Hit-Girl’s guardian, Detective Marcus Williams (Morris Chestnut), finds out that she’s still fighting crime, he makes her promise him that she’ll stop, and will stop hanging out with Dave.  Lacking the help and training of Hit-Girl, Kick-Ass joins a hero team called Justice Forever, led by Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey), and including Night-Bitch (Lindy Booth), Doctor Gravity (Donald Faison), Battle Guy (Clark Duke), Remembering Tommy (Steven Mackintosh and Monica Dolan), and Insect Man (Robert Emms), but continues to try to get Hit-Girl back to her calling while she’s trying to understand how to be a normal girl.  Oh yeah, and the Motherfucker is trying to kill them all.  They should worry about that too.

I was a really big fan of the first Kick-Ass movie.  Going into this one I was made nervous by how poor the reviews were for the sequel, but I found the movie much more enjoyable than the other critics.  Not as good as the first, and there were some problems, but it was still worth watching.  But I’m fond of the idea of real life heroes since I semi-constantly consider it myself, but soon find that my superpower is extreme laziness.  The story was nothing entirely special, but it was interesting.  There was the whole revenge plot that drove the movie, but also the real life scenarios of Hit-Girl trying to figure out being a regular kid.  Most of that seemed like it would be really insulting if I were a lady.  Especially the whole conversation in the bedroom with the other high school girls talking about how hot and bothered they get for some Beiber-esque gay boy (redundant?) they watch on TV.  And then it works on our hero, Hit-Girl!  I’m not saying this deduction about women isn’t accurate, but it does seem vaguely sexist.  And accurate.

The performances in the movie were well-realized.  I liked these actors in the first movie; how could I not like them again?  The answer: shut up!  I’m writing a review here!  This is not a discussion!  Aaron Taylor-Johnson did a great job as Kick-Ass.  He plays it very grounded in reality, as it should be played.  But he’s also a bit of an asshole.  I understand that Hit-Girl was badass and that you probably weren’t going to get much better or be able to save the day without her, but on another level you’re trying to convince a little girl to continue risking her life.  Also, he wasn’t really that bright.  You keep hearing stories about this villain the Motherfucker and all the bad things he’s doing, but you don’t even bother to go look at his Twitter feed or his Facebook page to see what he looks like and maybe piece together that he’s that kid you were friends with and then killed his father?  It’s been a while since I’ve seen the first movie, but I feel like you might have his street address.  Speaking of the Christopher Mintz-Plasse character, this motherfucker’s whining was really getting on my nerves in this movie.  Lots of people’s dads are killed by bazookas, but they don’t all need to whine through the whole movie like a petulant teenager … like the one you’re portraying in the movie…  It was just annoying, okay?!  Chloë Moretz remains quality as Hit-Girl in this movie, but it did bother me that she was not being Hit-Girl through most of the movie.  I understand the emotional reason for it, but I also wanted more of her kicking ass.  Even though one of her moments of ass-kicking was really gross (the moment with the Sick Stick for instance) and one of them was unrealistic for this type of movie (the “last resort” thing at the end).  Jim Carrey was very good in the movie, and I was also very happy to see John Leguizamo again.  I feel like I haven’t seen him in years.  I had no idea who Olga Kurkulina was before this movie, but she sure was scary in it as Mother Russia.  Her scene of laying waste to all those cops was epic.  And since we’re on the subject…

One other thing I noticed in this movie is that the cops were the absolute worst.  I dislike but understand that they decide to put a stop to all people wearing costumes, but it seemed like they only caught the ones doing good.  Worry about them second!  Even if you have the opportunity to catch one that’s trying to do good, instead go after the ones that just killed 20 of your guys on a residential street.  THEN worry about the good ones.  Even when they were trying to do good, the cops sucked at it.  Bad guys break into a funeral and lay waste to everyone and the cops (with guns) are so much more useless than the regular people with baseball bats, sticks, and purses filled with bricks.

Kick-Ass 2 might not have measured up to the first movie, but it certainly exceeded the critical response I have seen for it.  It’s a solid movie with a story that’s nothing too mind-blowing but is definitely good, some pretty great action when it happens, and some great performances.  I’d recommend seeing this movie in theaters, but you wouldn’t be hurting too much if you waited for a rental.  Kick-Ass 2 gets “This 15-year-old girl just owned your ass” out of “Robin wishes he was me.”

WATCH REVIEWS HERE!  YouTube  OTHER JOKES HERE!  Twitter  BE A FAN HERE!  Facebook  If you like these reviews so much, spread the word.  Keep me motivated!  Also, if you like them so much, why don’t you marry them?!

Dishonored (2012)

We All Start With Innocence, but the World Leads Us to Guilt.

The true inspiration for today’s review was that terrible holiday known as Black Friday. Technically, it started a while before that with a number of people telling me how awesome this game was. But that didn’t actually inspire me to buy the game because it still didn’t look that interesting to me, and them talking it up was only going to make it worse. But there was something that could make it better. It could go on sale for $25 on Black Friday. And it did! Now, I hate Black Friday, and if it was my choice I wouldn’t have been there at all, or this game would have to wait for me until about 1 pm because there’s no way in Hell I’d get up early for it. Since I was forced to be there, and I was in the vicinity buying a game I wanted much more than this, I decided to relent and pick up a copy of Dishonored, developed by Arkane Studios, published by Bethesda Softworks, and including the voices of Chloë Moretz, John Slattery, Billy Lush, Susan Sarandon, Lena Headey, Brad Dourif, and Carrie Fisher.

We are the bodyguard of the Empress of Steampunk world. Our name is Corvo Attano and our voice box was apparently damaged at a young age, rendering us completely speechless. This becomes problematic when the Empress is murdered in front of us (because we’re also very bad at our job) and her daughter Emily (Chloë Moretz) is kidnapped (because we’re EXTRA bad at our job), and we are unable to tell people that we didn’t do it. We get all nice and framed for this, but we get freed by a group of Loyalists, led by Admiral Havelock (John Slattery). Then we are set on a mission to shake up the corrupt government and free Emily, the rightful heir to the throne.

You people need to knock it off with the whole overenthusiasm thing. You talk up a game that is “Okay” at best until it is made out to be the game of the year and the game can only suffer for it. I think the problems I had with the story made for the bulk of my problems with it. Actually, it was more how the gameplay changed the story, but we’ll get to that after a few other points. The first thing that struck me is that the story is kind of bland and mostly about political conspiracies, and anyone that knows me knows that there’s not a whole lot I find more boring than politics. The idea of the silent protagonist feels a little antiquated now as well, and it seems like it would have at least helped with some of the problems my character got into because of it. They say that the purpose of the silent protagonist is to get the player more involved with their character, but that hasn’t really proven to be the case, has it? I didn’t give two flying fucks about Corvo. I didn’t feel like I was him, nor did I get particularly involved in his story. If you really want to get me involved in a game, you need to make one about a guy playing video games, masturbating, and occasionally writing reviews that one or two people read. Then again, I wouldn’t buy that game either, and anyone else that did might get too depressed by it. And the other side of that argument is that there are plenty of games that have protagonists that speak that I got involved with. Ezio Auditore talks, Marcus Fenix talks, Nathan Drake talks. When my roommate asked me what my 5 favorite games would be, 4 out of 5 of them had protagonists that speak. The only one with a silent protagonist in that list was Final Fantasy 7. How about you have a great story to get me involved instead? There were also tons of things in the game that annoyed me because they didn’t make sense. When I was walking the streets on my way to a masquerade ball, why would guards attack me when I was wearing a mask? If that mask is good enough for the guards at the party, the other ones would surely have known about it or I’m sure half of the guest list was killed on their way to the soirée. And why did the guards keep trying to kill me after I exposed the Lord Regent and they took him to jail? Shouldn’t they all have figured at that point that I was framed?

I need to talk about the gameplay before I can combine it with the story to tell you what really annoyed me about the game. The gameplay itself was fine, but it’s really nothing I haven’t seen before. It feels like it wants to be, but it isn’t. And it ends up being a little boring to me, as most stealth games are. You have to do a really good job on your game to make stealth games feel like more than just waiting in shadows for someone to turn their back. They added in some powers, like the Blink ability, that makes it interesting when you can teleport behind someone to stab them up good. But if sneaking didn’t work out for you, there didn’t seem to be much by way of consequences for it. Fighting was fairly easy at first, being not much more than block and stab. Later it gets a little more complicated because the enemies dodge more and have guns, but fuck them ‘cause I can stop time now. The upgrades to your equipment never seemed to help that much, but the upgrades to your powers maybe helped too much, making the game a little too easy when you could see your enemies through walls, teleport right behind them, freeze time if you were in a pinch, and call in an army of rats if that wasn’t working. Also, the AI wasn’t that bright, which adds to the easiness. There was one part where I was flat out spotted by a number of guards and I backed up, falling down about 10 feet off a ledge where I could hear the guards say, “I guess it was nothing.” Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. The biggest problem with the gameplay I had was that I couldn’t play it for more than an hour at a time without getting so bored I had to turn it off. I’m sure the game wouldn’t take that as a compliment, and it wasn’t intended as one.

The biggest problem I had with the game was how the gameplay affected the story. They let you know about halfway through the game that killing people turns the story dark at the end. Fuck that shit! Killing these enemies just makes sense. A: it’s mostly self-defense because if any of them see you, they will try to kill you. B: it makes the game easier because you don’t have to keep watching out for them after they’re dead. C: it’s more fun! All I heard about this game before I bought it was that it was basically about cutting throats. That is literally all I knew about it before I played it. Then you’re going to punish me by making me corrupt an innocent little girl and make everyone hate me and be shitty to me because I played the game the way that makes sense? Fuck you! The Spiderman game I’m playing now doesn’t punish me for webbing people and punching them in the face. Assassin’s Creed doesn’t wag its finger at you for stabbing the people that deserve it with your wrist blades. I understand punishing me for killing innocents, but I wasn’t doing that. At the end of the game, the formerly nice boat driver that took me to my missions was so shitty to me he pretty much said he hopes I get killed, and just to help that along he’s going to fire his gun to get the attention of everyone on the island before he departed. And Emily is drawing pictures of me standing atop a mountain of corpses with a sword dripping with blood as she talks about how she’ll kill anyone that opposes her when she becomes Empress.

I don’t have very much to say about the look of the game. It looks good. I had no complaints. It’s just a Bioshock-esque steampunk world, but it’s so bland and dark to set the mood that it ends up being visually disinteresting and adding to the boredom I already had for the game.

This is also not a great game for achievements. I’m leaving the game with just over 300. Most of the achievements are for completing missions without killing anyone and without getting spotted. I find that course of action too frustrating and boring to actually make an attempt at it. I probably would if I found the game more interesting, but I just don’t care. I was vaguely interested in finding out what would happen to the ending if I had played this game the shitty way, but that question could be answered by a quick trip to YouTube. It wasn’t worth it.

Dishonored suffered from the high expectations set by the people I know. Seems to be a running theme in some of my reviews, doesn’t it? This game was okay, but certainly not as spectacular as some people acted like it was. The story was pretty good if you’re into that kind of thing, and the gameplay is fine but in no way innovative. But I’ll tell you what no one told me: this game is, in fact, not at all about stabbing people and slicing throats. Go into the game with that idea and the game will hate-fuck your skull. Instead, play this game if you like falling asleep while waiting in the shadows to hug someone that’s trying to kill you until they fall asleep and you can move on. That’s how the game wants you to play it. Also, I guess the other option is to just not play it. I’d recommend that one. Especially with it still at $60. I paid $25 for it and I didn’t think it was worth it. But I am going to trade it in for $15 dollars, so I recommend buying it when you can find it for $10. Dishonored gets “It can take one to sublime heights or harrowing depths” out of “Are you chasing something, or running away?”

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Dark Shadows (2012)

Reveal Yourself, Tiny Songstress!

Today’s movie was requested by my roommate Richurd. When he requested it, I suggested that he may have to wait until November for me to review it since it didn’t really feel like a horror movie. “It has vampires, witches, and werewolves in it!” he exclaimed, and then proceeded to beat me savagely. Once I awoke, I relented and agreed to review the movie as part of the October Horrorthon. The movie itself was one I knew about when it came to theaters, but had exactly zero desire to watch it. I didn’t know the source material and every commercial for the movie I saw fell flat on its face by way of comedy as far as I was concerned. But it’s a request and so I bring to you my review of Dark Shadows, written by Seth Grahame-Smith, directed by Tim Burton, and starring Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Bella Heathcote, Michelle Pfeiffer, Chloë Grace Moretz, Helena Bonham Carter, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Gulliver McGrath, Christopher Lee, and Alice Cooper.

In 1760, the Collins family moves from Liverpool to Maine to set up a fishing industry, naming the town Collinsport. They make lots of money and all is going well … until their son Barnabas (Johnny Depp) seduces the maid Angelique (Eva Green). She confesses that she loves him, but he does not feel the same. Also, she’s a witch. She takes it out on his family, getting them killed by a falling statue. Barnabas eventually falls in love with Josette du Pres (Bella Heathcote), but the jealous Angelique bewitches her and makes her leap from a cliff. Barnabas tries to follow her, but finds that Angelique has turned him into a vampire. She then gets a mob to lock him in a coffin for 212 years. That’s when a group of construction workers inadvertently frees Barnabas, allowing him to return to his family – matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), her brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), her 15-year-old daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz), Roger’s 10-year-old son David (Gulliver McGrath), David’s psychiatrist Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), and the manor’s caretaker Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley) – just in time to greet David’s newly-hired caretaker Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote), who is Josette’s reincarnation. But Barnabas will soon find that Angelique is still very much alive, and still very much scorned.

The best thing I could say about this movie is that it lived up to my expectations. The worst thing I could do is define those expectations. But I’ll do it anyway. I can’t say that Dark Shadows was a bad movie, but it’s very far from a good one. If its intentions were to be a horror movie, it was too goofy. If it wanted to be an action movie, it was too boring. If it was to be a mystery & suspense movie as Rotten Tomatoes claims it to be, then I probably shouldn’t have been able to go into the movie knowing exactly how it would turn out. Sadly, I think it wanted to be a comedy, but it also wasn’t funny. It tries to go for a lot of wordplay and dry wit that I’m sure made the British version of this stuff popular (assuming that it ever was, which I have not looked into), but the jokes used in this movie were too dry and lacked wit … or were just stupid. A lot of the movie after Barnabas returns to the 70’s just feels like the pitch for the movie was, “What if Austin Powers … wait for it … were a vampire!” Oh look at him as he doesn’t understand things because he’s been away for a long time! He thinks Alice Cooper is a lady! HILARIOUS! And on top of all that, the movie just wasn’t interesting. The family wasn’t likeable until the very end when they finally became more interesting, but I was long lost by then. All that being said, this is a Tim Burton movie, so the look of the movie is generally worth notation. It has a cool, creepy, dark look to the whole movie, but at a certain point I’m going to require more out of Tim than that. Also, I don’t know if it was intentional because they wanted to pay homage to the British version, but Johnny Depp looked goofy the entire movie. I was not buying that look.

The cast in this movie was filled with amazing names … who didn’t seem to want to try that hard. This is not a surprising performance for Johnny Depp. It’s a little bit like Captain Jack Sparrow without a drinking problem. Michelle Pfeiffer did not seem altogether invested in the movie. Eva Green was a little over the top, but so was her hotness. Chloë Grace Moretz was never interesting to me until the very end where she turned into something interesting … and then did nothing with it. Jackie Earle Haley came close to being funny a few times. I also didn’t like Gulliver McGrath, but more for the way he was written. How the hell is a kid going to see ghosts for his entire life, but freak out when he finds out the guy that’s been living with his family for a few months while being perfectly nice to him is a vampire?

I kind of feel like I wasted a bit of my time by watching Dark Shadows, but hopefully you don’t feel that you wasted time reading my review. This movie was not funny and not interesting, the actors didn’t seem into it, and I wasn’t either. I had/have no interest in the source material, so I have no idea if it holds up, but I do know that there’s not a lot of reason to watch this movie. It’s not an awful movie, but there are better ways to spend your time. Dark Shadows gets “It is with sincere regret that I must now kill all of you” out of “They tried stoning me, my dear. It did not work.”

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.

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

It’s Love.  It’s Not Santa Claus.

I’m having trouble remembering who suggested today’s movie to me, but I’m fairly confident that it was a lady.  That’s based mainly on the fact that I don’t think most men would want me to watch today’s movie out of anything other than torture.  If I had to guess, I think it was my friend, the Lady MacBalls.  She’s got the required lady parts (I assume) to have suggested this movie, and with her hormones all crazy from the tiny MacBalls growing in her belly, denying her request could’ve meant a very painful death for everyone’s favorite film/video game reviewer.  It was in my best interest to oblige.  But fear of death with not sway my opinion of the movie.  I’ve far too much integrity for that.  So let’s see what I thought of (500) Days of Summer, written by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber, directed by Marc Webb, and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Chloe Moretz, Geoffrey Arend, Matthew Gray Gubler, Clark Gregg, Minka Kelly, and Rachel Boston.

Aspiring architect Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) works for Vance (Clark Gregg) at a greeting card company when Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) is hired as Vance’s assistant.  Tom’s friend and co-worker McKenzie (Geoffrey Arend) talks Tom into attending a karaoke party, gets really drunk, and tells Summer that Tom is attracted to her.  Over the course of the remaining 500 days, we watch as Tom and Summer’s relationship goes up and crashes down.

As a guy, I started watching this movie wanting to hate it at least as much as I hate my friend, the Lady MacBalls.  But, by the end of the movie, it had won me over.  It’s not perfect.  Most chick-flicks aren’t because they’re well aware of the fact that putting a sappy romance in a movie is well enough for women.  But this story was charming enough, with some good ideas and an interesting look, and even had some funny parts to it, although I’m pretty sure the joke in the movie about someone having Brad Pitt’s face and Jesus’ abs is a Daniel Tosh joke.  I think the difficulties I had early on in this movie stemmed from its vaguely pretentious art style and the premise of the story.  They threw in little artsy cutaways that I found a little tedious, but I at least appreciated the ones that showed us what day we were watching since the movie cut back and forth between different points in the relationship.  There was a very good use of music to the movie, like when Tom was really happy after his first night with Summer and had a good song to accompany him in his jaunty walk down the street that turned into a brief dance number.  I got a little annoyed by the look of the movie near the end, when Tom was revealed to have a chalkboard on his wall that he used to sketch buildings on.  Come on, movie!  Who has a chalkboard wall … and how the hell do I get one?!

The premise of the movie annoyed me at first because it was so clumsy.  It seemed like it really wanted to be clever by making the girl take the typical guy part of not believing in true love, whereas the guy was the lady in being the overly romantic one.  No one’s ever thought of that before!  I also got annoyed by the silly things that caused people to fall in love in the movie.  Summer says she likes the same band as Tom.  BOOM!  I love you!  Summer falls in love later because someone likes the Dorian Gray book she’s reading.  I grant that a girl like Zooey Deschanel telling me she liked Metallica would pique my interest, but I still acknowledge that it’s a poor basis for my undying love.  Later, when Summer is telling Tom about former boyfriends, she says that she dated a guy she called the Puma because he had a big dick.  Is that a thing?  Why wouldn’t you call him “The Blue Whale” or “The Black Guy”?  This is probably not a good thing to have realized about myself, but I started to like the movie near the end, when I could relate to Tom more as an embittered guy who lost faith in the idea of love.  I’m not saying that this is an accurate description of me, but … uh … y’know what?  Nevermind!  Either way, it was interesting to watch the way he felt about Summer change so completely during and after their relationship through the scenes cutting back and forth in time.  I also completely agreed with Tom when he went off about how cards were a waste of time because they were just putting on paper the things you should be saying.  It also enforced the idea that women are lying jerkfaces, since Summer saying that she didn’t want to be anybody’s girlfriend actually meant that she didn’t want to be Tom’s.  I think the moral of this story will be one that can help me out in the future.  Every time I have to listen to a girl complain because “the one” just broke up with her, I’ll tell her to watch this movie.  At first it seems like it’s crapping on the idea of fate because Tom is so sure that Summer is the one, but then the end brings it back around for a happy ending that should shut them bitches up.  Apparently me TELLING them that a person obviously isn’t the one if you’re not dating them anymore is not good enough.  So go watch this movie, bitch.  It’s pretty good.

I liked all the performances in this movie.  Of course, there also wasn’t anybody in this movie I didn’t already like going in.  I’ve liked Joseph Gordon-Levitt for a long time, and though he was often a mopey bitch in the movie, that was what was called for.  I’m also pretty sure that I’m better with women than he was in this movie, and finding someone I’m better with women than is very hard to do.  For instance, I would never respond to a woman who was asking if I needed office supplies with, “You know what I want.”  Then again, he eventually got her, so I guess I’m the asshole.  Zooey Deschanel spent most of the movie being the kind of girl I wouldn’t like, but she made it more likeable.  I’m beginning to think that Deschanel doesn’t accept a role if she can’t sing in the movie, but I like her nonetheless.  I’m also a fan of Geoffrey Arend.  He tends to be pretty funny in all of his roles, and this one was not different.  Chloe Moretz’ character would typically annoy me, being the smarty pants kid that’s trying to help her brother through a breakup, but with how stupid Tom seemed, it worked.

Despite bordering on the pretentious and having a few things that were too obvious, I found myself charmed by (500) Days of Summer.  I liked the overall message of the movie, I liked the actors in the movie, and I liked the movie overall.  It’s probably a good movie for people to watch after being dumped, and I’ll let you know for sure if it ever happens to me.  I’d recommend this movie even if you haven’t been dumped and would probably say it’s my second favorite chick flick, though that is coming from pretty weak competition.  You can rent this movie from Netflix, but cannot stream it presently.  I give (500) Days of Summer “I think you’re just remembering the good stuff” out of “People don’t realize this, but loneliness is underrated.”

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.

Let Me In (2010)

I’ve Been Twelve For A Very Long Time

Today’s movie is a movie I’ve been putting off for a while now. It’s a remake of a Swedish movie I really liked and I was worried that they messed it up. Yeah, that’s right. I’ve seen a foreign film or two. What of it?! I liked the original so much (even though it was in Swedish) that I wanted to see the American remake but the friend of mine that turned me on to the Swedish one told me the remake was shit. But I still wanted to see it and now I have. Let’s talk about Let Me In – the American remake of the Swedish film Let The Right One In – and it was written and directed by Matt Reeves, and stars Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloe Moretz, Richard Jenkins, Elias Koteas, Cara Buono, and Sasha Barrese.

In Los Alamos, New Mexico, Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a strange, lonely 12-year-old boy. One day he sees an older guy and a young girl move in to the apartment complex he lives in. While sitting outside, the young girl, Abby (Chloe Moretz) approaches him and tells him they can’t be friends, but they slowly become friends anyway. One day, we watch Abby’s father, Thomas (Richard Jenkins) go out and kill a guy in a ritualistic fashion, draining his blood into a jug, but he trips and spills most of it. Later, Owen and Abby are talking in the apartment’s park area and her stomach starts making noise like she just ate at Taco Bell. Shortly after, Abby is crying as a jogger approaches. She tells him that she fell down and hurt herself and asks if he’d carry her. When he tries to, she pounces on him and eats him. Turns out this young girl is a vampire, and technically not a girl. She/he/it – let’s just make that “shit” instead – eventually confesses it to Owen and it causes their relationship to get a bit rocky. Things begin to escalate as shit’s need to feed starts drawing police attention back to shit, and Owen must figure out where he stands in the situation.

Let’s talk about the original a bit. Let The Right One In was the rare movie that I can like even though I have to read subtitles. I hate reading subtitles and it will hurt my opinion of almost any movie that makes me do it. But Let The Right One In managed. And I would say that Let Me In manages not to screw it up too much, regardless to what my friend had told me. The main reason it didn’t screw it up – and what could also be one of the biggest negatives of the movie to some – is that this is almost the same movie with different actors and in English. The look is the same, the story is the same, the characters are mostly the same; it’s almost the same movie. They changed it to New Mexico, probably because no one in America could pronounce the name of the town the original happened in, and it otherwise changed nothing in the movie. All of the settings looked exactly like the original movie. The apartment building, the school, the lake, the forest; all looked the same. They changed the names of the characters, but the characters themselves are the same. So the best and the worst thing about this movie is the fact that it’s the exact same movie. I liked the original and probably wouldn’t want it to have changed drastically, but, on the other hand, why do it? I can watch the original, and I can probably find it in English. So if you’re not going to change it at all, why bother?

I like the story of this/these movies a lot. It’s a horror movie but also a little bit of a love story. Even though they’re only twelve (more or less) and one of them has no gender, the two of them are kind of in love and have to overcome this minor problem of Abby’s need to kill people for food. Vampires have been done to death by this point, but it made me happy to see a return to a more classic interpretation of vampires than, say, one that makes the vampire glitter like a sparklefart when outside. How do these movies handle it? They fuckin’ burst into flames! The way Satan intended! Abby isn’t able to handle regular food, she goes nuts at the sight of blood, is super strong and pale, and – a much less used part of the myth – must be invited into a house or she’ll start bleeding from the eyes. I also like the question that’s in the background of this movie: is what Abby does wrong? You immediately jump to the fact that she’s killing people as a bad thing, but she’s also just trying to survive. Owen thinks she’s evil at first but slowly gets on board with it. I think I could too. I could befriend a vampire and (though I wouldn’t help her do it) I would look the other way as long as she didn’t try to eat me.

The look of this movie is mostly well done. It, of course, is very similar to Let The Right One In, but it duplicates it nicely. Its really dark at night and almost bleached white during the day, but neither in a way that made it hard to watch. When I found out that it was supposed to take place in New Mexico it got me wondering just how often it snows down there. I’ve not spent very much time in New Mexico, but this entire movie is covered in snow. I believed it when it was in Sweden, but I would normally assume New Mexico is not a snowy place. I could be wrong. If nothing else, it’s probably a pretty sunny place during the summer and thus probably not the best place for a vampire to move. As much as it pains me to defend the Twilight series, at least they went with a notoriously cloudy place for the vampires to live in. The negative side to the look of the movie was the visual effects. They were not that great. The two occasions where Abby viciously attacks someone for food it’s a pretty poorly executed computer generated creature. Also, Abby’s evil vampire face was not that well done. I thought this was odd because I’m pretty sure this movie had more money going in than the original but they did them better. Some of the gore was well done though.

I don’t pay much mind to sound in movies, but I did notice it was typically not good here. It was really loud and grating to build atmosphere, but it was typically louder than the really quiet characters. You can’t make your background music so loud when characters only ever whisper to each other. The music that the characters played was all 80’s music (because it takes place in the 80’s) and so I liked that.

The performances were mostly solid. I didn’t like the main kid in either this movie or the original. They’re really peculiar and effeminate and I don’t like it. You kinda want to feel bad for the kid because he’s getting picked on, but he might not get picked on so much if he weren’t a skeevy perv that looks through a telescope at his neighbors getting it on. Also, he kinda looks like a chick. I like Chloe Moretz though. I think she’ll haveta work pretty hard to go against her role as Hit Girl to make me dislike her. Plus, she did a fine job here so it wasn’t even really chipping away at her lofty Hit Girl performance. One thing bothered me about her character though: if you can’t get cold, and you tell people you walk around in the snow in shorts with no shoes because you can’t get cold, why the hell do you wear a jacket? I might be nitpicking. I liked Richard Jenkins as Abby’s “father” too. Everyone else didn’t make much of an impact on me though.

Regardless of what Jordan told me, this movie was not bad. I might actually be willing to call it good. There were solid performances supporting a great story and a nice atmosphere, but lost me a bit with some bad visual effects and some annoying sound. But I think what Jordan had been saying was that the worst part of this movie was that there was no reason to make it. If you don’t mind reading subtitles, watch Let The Right One In instead. Even if you do mind reading subtitles, so do I, and I still liked the original. But, if they bother you SO much, I think you’ll be okay with this one. I’ll give this movie “I need blood to live” out of “You kill people.”

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