Rocky III (1982)

I Pity the Fool!

Yay!  Halfway point!  Boo!  Drastically depleting amounts of quality!  We haven’t really drudged the depths of the Rocky franchise yet, but perhaps we’ll be starting today.  The first Rocky movie was fantastic, and the second one was still pretty good, though a little too familiar.  And I’m pretty sure most of us are well aware of the fact that the Rocky franchise gets pretty awful at a certain point.  Is this that point?  We’ll find out today in my review of Rocky III, written, directed by, and starring Sylvester Stallone, and also starring Mr. T, Burgess Meredith, Carl Weathers, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Ian Fried, Hulk Hogan, Tony Burton, Wally Taylor, and Frank Stallone.

After the events of the last movie, Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) has taken the world heavyweight championship from Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers).  Along with his elderly trainer Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith), Rocky defends his title 10 times.  Another boxer by the name of James “Clubber” Lang (Mr. T) watches the champion’s progress while rising through the ranks with his vicious, brutal style of boxing.  When Rocky is honored with a statue on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Lang publicly insults Rocky and his wife Adrian (Talia Shire) in order to draw Rocky into a fight.  Mickey thinks it’s a bad fight and wants no part in it, but Rocky talks him into it.  Rocky and Mickey go into training, but Rocky has lost his edge as a fighter and spends more time posing for pictures in the gym than training.  This inevitably leads to Rocky getting the snot beat out of him by Lang, and Mickey dies of a heart attack during the fight.  In his grief, Rocky returns to the gym Mickey used to run to find Apollo waiting for him.  Apollo promises to help Rocky train for his rematch with Lang and help him beat a giant jungle cat to death and steal its eyes.  Unless I’ve misunderstood the meaning of “Eye of the Tiger”.

We haven’t yet hit the bottom with these movies, but we can kind of see where it’s going.  It’s still entirely by the book as well.  The only real change up is that Rocky starts out on top, hits the bottom in the middle, and then goes into the regular despair/training/winning formula.  And every fight Rocky has gotten into in these movies so far is supposed to be his last.  Rocky quit before his first match with Apollo Creed, and then again after the fight.  He came back to fight Apollo, which was supposed to be his last fight, but getting the title makes him keep up with the fighting for a bit.  He quits, but gets goaded into another fight by Lang.  That too was to be his last fight, but he gets beaten so he must give it another go.  Then they keep talking about how the second fight with Lang is going to be his last.  Makes you wonder how they’re going to fill the time for the next three movies, doesn’t it?  They try to keep the emotional level with the death of Mickey, but it didn’t really have the impact that I’m sure they were going for.  And though I know it gets goofier in the following movies, it’s getting there with this movie.  Take, for instance, the entire piece with Thunderlips.  And the goofiness doesn’t stop with the name of the character.  The entire scene was stupid and needless.  Then the whole training scene is over the top and stupid.  Of course Rocky is going to lose; he barely trained at all for the fight that was going to be his most difficult ever.  Then why would Mickey tell him to go into that fight when he would obviously be distracted by Mickey’s failing health?  Then we have some homoerotic scenes with Apollo and Rocky training, proving further that Stallone loves him a montage, and then the inevitable and expected conclusion to the movie.  I would say, in this movie’s defense, that the fight at the end of this movie was probably the most exciting and action-packed fight of all of the movies up to this point.  Also, this movie brought the world the classic Survivor song “Eye of the Tiger”.  Sure, it’s been super played out since this movie, but I maintain that no song has the ability to get someone pumped more than this one.

Most of the performances changed drastically, but I wouldn’t say it was for the better.  It wasn’t really a negative either, it was just curious.  Rocky doesn’t come off nearly as punch drunk as he did in the first two movies, and was mostly a lot more civilized and well-spoken, which was generally regarded as a negative thing by everyone around him.  Sly had to do a crying scene over Mickey, but nothing about what he did in that scene made much of an impact for me.  Burgess Meredith didn’t do very much in the movie.  He had about two emotional scenes, first when he was trying to talk Rocky out of fighting Lang in the first place and second when he was dying.  Meredith is still fantastic and knocked both of these out, but then he was gone.  Talia Shire is a completely different character in this movie, but it’s one I can excuse.  I could understand her becoming less shy over the years, but I can’t really get behind Rocky getting better-spoken because the opening montage didn’t show him hitting the books at all.  Clubber Lang was a big step down for an opponent for me.  He was like a cartoon villain.  He was just a gigantic asshole to everyone for no reason, with no motivation for it or any semblance of humanity, so no one would give a shit about him at all.  They might have just put a punching bag in the ring with angry eyes drawn on it and a little speaker box that would sling racial slurs at random.

The Rocky series continues its downward spiral in this movie.  It hasn’t yet reached the bottom, or even really become awful movies yet, but it’s definitely on the way.  The emotion in the movie never really hit, it was really goofy in parts, some of the characters were the exact opposite of the way that they were when we grew attached to them, and the pattern of the Rocky movies is getting really obvious.  I would still say this movie is worth a watch because the final fight of the movie is the best one yet and, come on!  Eye of the Tiger, people!  I will homoerotically train (in montage form, of course) for an epic battle with you if you dare say this song does not amp you up.  Rocky III gets “Eye of the tiger, man” out of “You don’t look so bad to me.”

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Saint’s Row: The Third (2011)

The Last Time a Big Naked Dude Said He Could Help Me, It Did Not End Well.

It’s hard for me to say that I invested a lot of time into a game in the wake of Skyrim.  But, if you forget about that particular game, I have invested a pretty good amount of time in today’s review.  That’s just how it goes for sandbox games.  Today’s sandbox game is the third part in a series the people have (rightly) called somewhat of a ripoff of another game series, one that I tend to call “overrated”.  How could I possibly enjoy this game if it’s a swagger jack of Grand Theft Auto, which I don’t like that much?  We’ll see today, in my review of Saint’s Row: The Third, developed by Volition, Inc., published by THQ, and starring the voices of Daniel Dae Kim, Danielle Nicolet, Hulk Hogan, Sasha Grey, Alex Desert, Tim Thomerson, Andrew Bowen, Rick D. Wasserman, Arif S. Kinchen, and Burt Reynolds.

The Third Street Saints (Lead by us) have kind of turned sellout, putting out energy drinks and movies and other stuff, but they still find the time to rob a bank now and then.  That’s where we start.  We join Johnny Gat (Daniel Dae Kim), Shaundi (Danielle Nicolet), and an actor trying to get into the character of a gangster, Josh Birk (Andrew Bowen), to rob a bank.  Things start to go wrong as we blow a hole in the roof above the safe and try to have it airlifted out, but we get attacked by the Syndicate and get captured.  We wake up on the airplane of the leader of the Syndicate, but we’re quick to escape.  After a battle on the plane, then one off the plane, then one THROUGH the plane, then back off the plane, we are back on the ground, minus one Johnny Gat.  In the new town of Steelport, we find it necessary to get our gang back on it’s feet, and we must go against the Syndicate to do so.

Much like the game series that inspired this one, I feel that Saint’s Row: The Third is a touch overrated, at least from what I’ve seen about it.  It’s a solid game with a lot of fun elements, but it can get a little repetitive and my copy of the game was rife with glitches.  The story is solid and filled with dialogue that is either trying to hard too be controversial and failing to be entertaining and things that are just plain funny.  Not only that, but they pepper in a great deal of pretty solid references that I appreciated.  The game opens up with the familiar Star Wars scroll.  I liked the reference, but the writing it was delivering was a really big failure in the comedy department.  In the taunts you can choose from, one of them is the Daniel-San, where he does an imitation of the Crane style from the movie.  That’s a joke anyone could make, but what got me was that the character yells “I’ll put YOU in a body bag!” while doing it.  THAT’s a solid reference.  The challenge you achieve for completing the Assassination missions is called “Everything is permitted”, which is a reference to Assassin’s Creed.  At one point, your ally wants you to overcome your fears, so he makes you drive a car with a tiger in the passenger’s seat a la Ricky Bobby.  There’s also a mission called “Stop All the Downloading” and an achievement named “Porkchop Sandwiches”, both of which are references to the hilarious Fensler Films GI Joe parodies.  Most of the characters in this game are pretty good and surprisingly well thought out.  Our teammate Kenzie is a cute and highly paranoid hacker that I just found adorable.  Zimos is a pimp with a voice box that auto-tuned everything he said, so pretty much everything he said made me laugh.  Also, Burt fuckin’ Reynolds is the mayor of Steelport.  BURT … FUCKING … REYNOLDS!

The joys and frustrations I had in this game came from the gameplay.  Over the top violence was battling against cars getting stuck in crucial moments to find out whether I would be thoroughly entertained or overly aggravating.  It’s all third-person shooter with the ability to hop into vehicles at random.  The guns are your basic variety that tend to get better as you upgrade them.  Pistols (that turn explosive with upgrades), rifles and shotguns (that can be lasers as you advance), SMGs, Rocket Launchers, etc.  All pretty typical stuff … except for the giant dildo.  Yes, this game allows you to beat down your enemies with a giant purple dildo.  There are also interesting melee things to be found, such as running up and punching an enemy to do a finisher on them, or run up and press the button to enter a vehicle to dive through a window, Bo Duke style.  This stuff all worked for me with little to no complaints.  I did get annoyed with how fast your notoriety could ramp up, sending waves and waves of enemies at you that you couldn’t hold ground against, but this get’s more manageable as you upgrade yourself.  The stuff I typically got annoyed with was the driving.  I’ve never found the driving in these games that well done.  You can drive through almost anything, but randomly there are electrical poles that will stop you in your tracks.  I also found myself getting stuck against walls a few times.  And heaven help you if you get a flat tire.  With as well-polished and fun as the rest of the game was, I found these little mistakes extra annoying.  Occasionally, mouth animations would also not match up to what the people were saying, and I found it extra annoying that the game tips didn’t seem to go away until the final third of the game.  Alright, game, I got it!  They also did a part of the game that I found very entertaining when we were put into a computer game that was being controlled by someone else.  Some parts of it were really cool and funny, but they also made the boss able to cause us to lag.  I know they did this on purpose, but people hate lag in games for a reason, so you probably should put it in your game.  On the other hand, I really liked the look of some of the trailblazer missions that looked like Tron, and I really liked the Insurance Fraud missions that came back from previous games that require you to jump in front of cars for money.  Those were good times.

Music is also a somewhat important part of games like this.  Once the Grand Theft Auto games started putting actual licensed music in their games, it added an extra level of fun.  Now we could do these ridiculous things while listening to music that we like!  This game keeps such an idea going by putting lots of licensed music in their game.  They have a very eclectic selection of music in this game, including rock, techno, reggaeton, and some music from Adult Swim TV shows.  Rap seemed to be the biggest selection (as would be appropriate for this kind of game), but I felt their Metal selection was not to my liking.  I did, however, play their 80’s music on repeat, running people over to what seemed to be the soundtrack to the Rocky movies.  I AM the best … around, and nothings going to ever keep me down.  You may, in fact, need a hero, and I imagine you are holding on for a hero till the end of the night, but you need to relax.  There’s no easy way out, after all.  No shortcut home, whatsoever.

It’s goofy, ridiculous, and bombastic, but it’s a pretty damned good amount of fun.  The glitches I encountered were few and far between, but I found them so annoying it dampened my affections for the game.  The story was nice and fun, and the gameplay was ridiculous and satisfying, but I found that there were a few places that could have used a little more polish.  The achievements will mostly come to you by the time you complete the game with very little mopping up afterwards, but you do need to pay attention to a few things so that you don’t get rid of all the other gangs when you need them for some achievements.  If you love the GTA series, but think they take themselves too seriously, this is the game for you.  Either way, there’s some good fun to be had.  Saint’s Row: The Third gets “It’s like a helicopter fucked a jet!” out of “Oh yeah?  You and how many of your … oh, that many…”

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Gnomeo and Juliet (2011)

The Story You Are About to See Has Been Told Before.  A Lot.

You know what we all need?  We all need to take some of the best tragedy stories of our time and turn them into kids movies with garden gnomes.  I think we can all agree that this needs to happen.  I had exactly zero percent interest in this movie when I first heard about it, the same amount when it came out on DVD, and the same amount when I saw it on Netflix streaming.  I chose to watch it because I like to make fun of movies that are awful.  Was this movie awful, or was I surprised by it?  Let’s find out in my review of Gnomeo and Juliet, directed by Kelly Asbury, and starring the voice talents of James McAvoy, Emily Blunt, Michael Caine, Maggie Smith, Jason Statham, Matt Lucas, Ozzy Osbourne, Stephen Merchant, Julie Walters, Dolly Parton, Hulk Hogan, and Patrick Stewart.  I mean, come on!  Look at that cast!

You know that story William Shakespeare wrote that was later turned into a Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes joint called Romeo & Juliet?  This time they’re lawn gnomes.  …  …Okay it’s a little different.  Two feuding neighbors, Mrs. Montague (Julie Walters) and Mr. Capulet (Richard Wilson), have adjoining gardens populated with garden gnomes that also hate each other.  The Montague garden filled with blue gnomes, the Capulet garden with red gnomes.  A red gnome named Tybalt (Jason Statham) and a blue gnome named Gnomeo (James McAvoy), son of the matriarch of the blue gnomes Lady Bluebury (Maggie Smith), challenge each other to a lawnmower race where Tybalt wins by cheating.  In retaliation, Gnomeo and his friend Benny (Matt Lucas) decide to vandalize the red lawn.  Simultaneously, Juliet (Emily Blunt), the daughter of Lord Redbrick (Michael Caine), decides she needs to escape the clutches of her over-protective father and retrieve a flower from a vacant neighboring yard.  Here, Gnomeo and Juliet meet and fall in love almost instantly.  Something tells me it won’t end well for these two star-crossed lovers.  But, then again, it’s a kids movie version…

Strangely enough, this movie is not that bad.  I know, I was as surprised as you!  It’s a cute kid’s movie that’s well-animated and pretty and, of course, has a good story because it’s based on a story by William Shakespeare.  I think the biggest problem with this movie is that it doesn’t really have an audience.  People that love Romeo & Juliet won’t see this movie because it “ruins” a classic tragedy.  People that aren’t familiar with Romeo & Juliet probably won’t be into the movie because it’s a kid’s movie.  And kid’s might like the movie because they’re goofy gnomes, and their parents may want them to see it as an introduction to Romeo & Juliet, but it’s really not gonna learn ’em anything about Romeo & Juliet.  Romeo & Juliet was a great play, but I think the huge tragedy at the end is what made it so famous.  This being a kid’s movie, Gnomeo & Juliet had a happy ending.  This movie probably would’ve been well-received if they hadn’t named it after Romeo & Juliet and taken the names from it.  Plenty of story’s have done the whole “star-crossed lovers” thing so it wouldn’t have been so bad if it just had similarities to R&J (I am so sick of typing the whole name).  But to take so heavily from R&J, but then to change the ending of a piece of classic literature, is not usually well received.  Once we ignore the fact that it’s based on R&J, we can enjoy the movie a little more.  The comedy in the movie relies heavily on puns – as you may gather from the title of the movie – and they’re hit and miss.  “Let’s kick some grass” and “Who’s your gnomey?” (which I still don’t get) were dead on arrival, but when the frog says to the mushroom “You look like a fun guy (fungi)” made me laugh.  Cheesiness is entirely acceptable in a kid’s movie.  The commercial with Hulk Hogan’s voice over for the lawnmower called the Terrafirminator was pretty funny, mainly because it reminded me of the Power Thirst commercials from YouTube.  I did find one part of this movie a little unbelievable.  I mean, lawn gnomes coming to life I’m totally on board with, but an English Bulldog being vicious?  You lost me.

The vocal cast of this movie is amazing.  I would’ve expected most of these acclaimed British actors would have a problem with a movie fucking with the ending of a Shakespeare play, but they came in and did a pretty excellent job.  James McAvoy and Emily Blunt did fine jobs here.  Michael Caine and Maggie Smith are the two actors I especially would’ve thought would’ve refused to do this movie, and probably Patrick Stewart as well.  But Stewart probably agreed because he got to play Shakespeare, albeit in statue form.  I especially liked Ashley Jensen as Nanette the frog.  The frog was halfway in between crazy and stupid and was probably the most consistently entertaining character.  Sadly, I think the only voice acting that didn’t really shine was one of my favorite musicians: Ozzy Osbourne.  Contrary to any impression of the man, he was very understandable.  Being not an actor, most of his lines fell flat.  But, again, he’s not an actor, and most people should consider it an accomplishment that you can actually understand what he’s saying.

As surprised as I am to write these words, here it goes … this movie’s kind of cute.  It’s got a good story going for it with a couple of solid laughs, but don’t go in thinking it’ll be like Romeo & Juliet.  Just think it’s a kid’s movie and you’ll probably think it’s cute.  If you have them, your kids will probably enjoy it.  The cast of the movie is amazing and they all perform admirably.  Give it a shot, you may enjoy it.  I give Gnomeo & Juliet “Not good, not bad, it’s FAIR Verona” out of “That was my joke!”

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