The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012)

It’s Your Turn Not to Break Me.

The time has finally come for me to wash my hands of the Twilight Saga.  This movie series and I have not gotten along in the past, and with good reason.  They don’t like me because I hate them, and I don’t like them because they’re awful.  Well, the bulk of them are anyway.  There would be no way that I would see this movie in theaters when it came out because I would more than likely hate it.  When it came out on DVD, I did not buy it because I would more than likely hate it.  And when it came to RedBox, I still put it off because I would more than likely hate it.  HOWEVER WILL I FEEL ABOUT THIS MOVIE?!  Find out as I review The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2, based on a novel by Stephenie Meyer, written by Melissa Rosenberg, directed by Bill Condon, and starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Mackenzie Foy, Michael Sheen, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Jackson Rathbone, Nikki Reed, Kellan Lutz, Maggie Grace, Dakota Fanning, Jamie Campbell Bower, Christopher Heyerdahl, Cameron Bright, Charlie Bewley, Daniel Cudmore, Lee Pace, MyAnna Buring, Christian Camargo, Casey LaBow, Mia Maestro, Noel Fisher, Guri Weinberg, Rami Malek, Omar Metwally, Angela Sarafyan, Andrea Gabriel, Judi Shekoni, Tracey Heggins, Joe Anderson, J.D. Pardo, and Billy Burke.  If you want to recap the rest of the Twilight Saga, here are my reviews: one, two, three, and four.

Bella Swan-Cullen (Kristen Stewart) awakens from a coma (though you wouldn’t know it from her acting), having been transformed into a vampire by her husband, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who transformed her to keep their half-breed child from killing her from the inside.  Also, her former love interest, Jacob (Taylor Lautner), fell in love with the baby Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy).  …So they’ll have to deal with that eventually.  First on their docket is that the vampire police department known as the Volturi – Aro (Michael Sheen), Caius (Jamie Campbell Bower), Marcus (Christopher Heyerdahl), Jane (Dakota Fanning), Alec (Cameron Bright), and the rest – have gotten word from Irina (Maggie Grace) that Edward and Bella have created an immortal child, which is illegal.  The Cullens rush to collect as many witnesses/soldiers to join their cause to stop/win a fight against the Volturi, if it should come to that.

Fuck this movie.  Fuck this movie series.  Fuck it out loud, in stereo, and in 3D.  In truth, I did not enjoy, but was okay with this movie for the bulk of it, but the very end was such an annoyance to me that it made me laugh out loud and yell, “Fuck you,” at my computer screen.  But the first two thirds of the movie was like watching one of the most annoying parts of the first X-Men movie for an hour and a half.  It felt like I was just watching a bunch of vampires get together and tell each other what their special powers were.  Bella kind of got the shaft on that end too.  “Super self-control.”  What a useful but shitty power.  Sure, it’s helpful to her that she didn’t eat her baby, but that lady can make electricity with her hands.  The one dude controls all of the elements.  He couldn’t have broken off a few elements for her to have a good power?  The best she’s got is the ability to make other people feel the effects of these powers less, and she can beat Kellan Lutz in arm wrestling.  I know that because they showed it to me for some stupid fucking reason.  I guess he also somehow develops the power to show Edward a montage/epilogue/ending credit sequence at the end of the movie, so she’s got that going for her.  Then there’s a really good battle – that feels to me like the reason I sat through the rest of the movie, or the entire series for that matter – followed by a big fuck you to the audience.  And I’m not talking about when Bella says to Edward, “Nobody’s ever loved anybody as much as I love you.”  That’s more of a ‘fuck you’ to Renesmee.

Okay, so this movie was boring most of the way through and then there was a big battle at the end that I really liked.  But it also lead to the biggest problem I had with this movie, and also requires the return of the ::SPOILER ALERT::  They pulled  that hack “it was all a dream” bullshit?!  For real?!  I resent the Wizard of Oz for starting this trend, but I thought Hollywood had decided in unison that they were done with this bullshit unless they were using it for comedy.  You show a great, epic fight where important characters in the Twilight series die brutal and emotional deaths, but the heroes still pull out a victory, and then it all turns out to be a vision of a possible future that Aro is watching through Alice.  Fuck you!  You just wasted a half hour of my time.  It was exciting and fun to watch until that point, but the movie itself nullified that by making it fake.  And, since the only fun part of your movie never technically happened, your movie can go fuck itself.  ::END SPOILERS::

Kristen Stewart is still awful.  And Bella is still stupid.  Why the hell does it take her the bulk of the movie to figure out that she should find the book that page the letter was written on came from?  I guess I would be offended if Stewart ever played a character that was smarter than I am.  I guess it’s the seed that built her that’s to blame.  Her father is stupid as well.  Jacob turns into a wolf right in front of him, but he still can’t figure out that the super-pasty, dead-eyed people that have taken Bella in are vampires.  Also, that toddler of yours is growing awful fast … probably not worth thinking about.  Also, why do these people get so pissed off at Jacob for telling Bella’s dad that she’s not dead?  I know the Volturi would kill him if Jacob had said “vampire”, but Jacob didn’t say it.  So you all just want to depress the father when there was an obvious alternative.  I mean, Jacob thought of it!  And he’s gross!  He falls in love with a baby that’s so fresh that it still smells like her mother’s vagina!  And later, while the girl still appears to be about 8 (but in actuality is about 6 months), he makes a joke to Edward about “calling him dad.”  Can you hold off on that joke until she at least LOOKS like you should be dating her?  Edward should’ve killed you right then.  That would’ve made me give this movie a positive review.  Or maybe if Edward and Bella had broken up.  Which they totally should have done since Edward says to Bella, “Every obstacle you faced, I thought you couldn’t overcome it.”  I know he meant that as a compliment, but he’s basically saying that she baffles him with how inept she appears, while still being able to make it through everyday life.  He probably should’ve thought she couldn’t overcome an acting challenge.  Then she could meet his expectations.  And the biggest problem with the cast of this movie is that my favorite part of it (Ashley Greene) was required by the story to be absent for the bulk of the movie.

I am pleased to finally be finished with the Twilight Saga, but I would’ve been much happier if Breaking Dawn – Part 2 wasn’t so frustrating.  The story wasn’t significant, and the movie spent the greater majority of the time describing what each new vampire could do and what part they would take in a battle that never really happens.  The battle that kind of happens is a pretty awesome watch, but I would say that no part of this movie that actually took place demands your attention.  You can skip this movie.  And, since I would say that only about two out of 10 hours of the Twilight series are watchable, I say you can skip the entire series.  20% is a deep ‘F’, people.  The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 gets “I hate the second one even more” out of “Old habits die hard.”

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?!

The Grey (2012)

Once More Into the Fray.

I’ve known about this movie’s existence for a while now, but I never had any interest in seeing it.  It certainly wasn’t the fault of the main actor in the movie, ‘cause that guy is this shit.  I really can’t say what kept me from having any interest in seeing it, but it just kind of looked boring to me.  I had seen it in RedBox for a while, but never felt like I was in the mood to see it.  It might be because it looked like a drama and I tend to not like those, but it also looked like it might have some action in it.  When I was looking through the RedBox this last time, I picked Chronicle because that seemed like a cool movie, and I finally submitted to the wiles of this movie and picked it out as well.  I might as well give it a chance.  So let’s see what happened as I review The Grey, written and directed by Joe Carnahan, and starring Liam Neeson, Dallas Roberts, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie, James Badge Dale, Jacob Blair, Ben Bray, and Anne Openshaw.

John Ottway (Liam Neeson) is a total fucking bummer.  He works in Alaska, killing wolves that try to attack an oil drilling team, and has had some issues with his wife Ana (Anne Openshaw) that we don’t fully understand just yet.  Whatever these issues are that keep him separated from his wife, we know they’re affecting him to the point where he tries to commit suicide, but his gun doesn’t fire.  Giving up really quickly, he goes on about his life, boarding a plane with other employees of the drilling team.  He goes to sleep on the flight, but wakes to find the plane plummeting out of the sky.  He manages to survive, along with Hernandez (Ben Bray), Diaz (Frank Grillo), Hendrick (Dallas Roberts), Flannery (Joe Anderson), Talget (Dermot Mulroney), and Burke (Nonso Anozie).  They make a fire to stay alive in the freezing cold, but soon find out that they’ve got other problems as a pack of wolves is hunting them.

I’m as torn about my feelings about this movie as I was about watching it in the first place.  I didn’t like the movie, but I respect it.  It was kind of slow moving and boring, but they did try to fix that by occasionally having someone get eaten by a wolf, or die in some other horrible way.  It builds some solid tension and is an interesting study of the personalities of these people in a similar way to Alive, without them getting hungry enough to eat each other.  At least I assume all that stuff I just said was true, having never seen the movie Alive, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happens in it.  But this movie also seems to fall into a pretty set pattern.  It deals with some interpersonal problems within the group that’s typically pretty slow and uneventful for about 10 or 15 minutes, and then they deal with some situations that will probably lead to one of the survivors losing their “survivor” title, and then back into the character study.  Some people might be able to find the personal side of it interesting, but the movie’s pattern translated to me as, “Boring part, death part, boring part.  Repeat.”  You can practically set your watch by the times when people in this movie die too.  I’m sure that was a conscious decision, realizing that the interpersonal stuff would be interesting to a certain audience, and the rest of them would just be waiting for a wolf to drag off another survivor, but it still just resonated as boring to me by the time it was over.  I already found myself bored by the end of the movie, and I was not a fan of how the movie ended.  But, since I stuck it out through the credits, it showed something afterwards that would’ve made me feel a little better if it was part of the movie proper, but I didn’t really count it since it was an after-credit sequence.

I took a good degree of issue with the look of the movie.  Part of me wants to say that the way they filmed it made it more immersive to the audience, helping us feel as if we were trapped in a blizzard as the snow was falling in our face and having us question what we couldn’t see when it was too dark.  The other part of me realizes that I was watching a movie and this stuff made it difficult to see what was going on sometimes.  If you put a thicket of trees or a flurry of snow in front of us, or just make the bulk of the scene occurring in shadow, then I just can’t see what’s happening, and that makes for an annoying movie.  The settings were all very nice to look at, but they got in the way of the scene on more than one occasion.  I found the wolves in the movie occasionally less than convincing, and they seemed to realize that their wolves sometimes looked straight out of Twilight so they would do as much as possible to not have to show them.  There was one cool and stylized scene where the wolves were in the shadows and all you could see of all but one of them were their eyes glowing in the shadow that was pretty nice, but other times weren’t.  Sometimes a wolf attack just looked like someone had a fake wolf head on a stick and they were jamming it into an actor’s leg or something, and other parts they just showed some bushes shaking to show us that we just missed the wolves running through there.  If only we had looked a second sooner!

It’s really no surprise that Liam Neeson is awesome.  He keeps that up in this movie with his quiet badass performance, reminiscent of his character from Taken, but more depressed so I guess it’s that guy if his daughter decided that she wanted to stay with that Sheikh at the end of the movie.  The other characters in the movie were all good as well.  Frank Grillo played a good asshole who I hated for the bulk of the movie, but he was going for that.

I’m fully aware of the fact that the majority of the reason I didn’t like The Grey was because of my desire to be constantly entertained.  The great performances aided in a good story that studied the tension building between the group of survivors while they periodically got picked off by their surroundings, but the picking off was too short and too spread out by uneventful boring bits that left me bored with the movie in general.  There were problems with the look that I would say were not entirely my fault, but I would say that, though I didn’t like the movie, it is worth a watch.  There are definitely people in the world that would enjoy this movie; I’m just not one of them.  The Grey gets “It’s good that it hurts” out of “Maybe I’ll turn into a wolfman now.”

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.