Review: Green Lantern

Look everyone's been ripping into Green Lantern because either they're fanboys and it doesn't live up to their expectations, or because it wasn't as good as Dark Knight, or because it has "clunky writing" as Rolling Stones' Peter Travers puts it. Eh, I guess all those things are true. It isn't a fanboy's film, and Dark Knight created a new standard for superhero films, and it does have some dialogue that doesn't work too well, but I found it really entertaining.

He has super powers. It's hard to not be entertaining. Unless you
turn into like a green troll as your super power. Man that would suck.

Green Lantern is the story of the irresponsible, but born-to-do-this fighter pilot, Hal Jordan. Then he is selected to be part of an elite fighting force, the Green Lanterns, who protect the universe from evil with  a no-fear attitude and a magical green ring that can conjure anything the wearer’s imagination can conceive. Will Hal become a hero or walk away? Hm. I wonder.

From this poster I deduce he chooses hero.

 I've been very apprehensive from the start about Green Lantern. I saw the  trailer and noticed a few things: first, Blake Lively. Anybody seen her acting? Yeah, not great. I don't care how much you like Gossip Girl or The Town she isn't what makes either of em any good. Second, the suit looked a little fake. Third, Ryan Reynolds. 

Yeah. You know why. You know.

So as it turned out I ended up being right. The suit was really tight and a little unbelievable even if it is created by Hal's magical green lantern powers. And Lively seemed to ruin all of her lines, clunky writing or no. In addition it was predictable. Like I called the villains and their backstories, and I'm not even a fankid. Plus I called the ending and the sequel story. And I’m not even a fankid. 

Hal: So you've never been able to act? Wow
Whatshername: Nope, never. But they keep hiring me. I'm pretty I guess.

ALSO RYAN REYNOLDS

"Hey there. It's me, Ryan Reynolds, just doin' some of my best
work ever in Blade Trinity. I stole Wesley Snipes' own movie from
him. I know. I should be dead. But I'm too awesome."

Did you know he has some magical ability to make any movie better? Yeah that’s right. I hate predictability and I loathe bad acting, especially by “strong female characters” and Reynolds pretty much makes up for all of it. He’s funny, he’s entertaining, he’s good lookin’. Done.

Wow, look at that. No, not at his abs. Look at the fact that he’s making this review like ten thousand times better. I know. Amazing.

Other reviewers have been complaining that the effects are boring or not very good. My dad complained that Hal Jordan didn’t do a lot of hand to hand combat. But every action movie has some rolling on the floor fight with the good guy getting the crap beat out of him before making a comeback and defeating the villain. Personally I thought it was interesting to see how Hal Jordan used his superpower, instead of a cliché fight with the bad guy.

ALSO RYAN REYNOLDS

Blake Lively's best acting: pretending to be unconscious

Oh did I mention that already? Sorry.

Look, nothing’s going to measure up to Dark Knight. Maaaaybe the next Batman might have a shot, might, and it’s directed by Chris Nolan himself. But the Iron Mans? Eh. The Spiderman sequels? Disasters. Honestly, I’m hoping Captain America  will be awesome, but the trailer makes the dialogue sound a little hokey, and the relationship between Captain America and Whatsherface seems a little cheesy. The new trailer looks aight, and the villain is played by the incredible, the talented, the wonderful Hugo Weaving (Lord of the Rings, V for Vendetta), but I’m not gonna lie it does kind of look like some kind of weird government propaganda, and Weaving looks a little plastic as the villain.

"Americaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!"

 Green Lantern was fun. I laughed, I liked Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan, it was short and sweet and didn’t drag. And it wasn’t some movie about saving the rainforest. I’m all for political messages in movies, but sometimes when the superhero turns out fighting global warming itself it’s kind of weird. This had a regular villain, who’s super evil and wants to destroy everything, and a great hero who wants to save everyone. Bing bang boom, done.

"I'm a hero. Look how serious my serious face is. Also I have great hair."

If you have low expectations, then see it. If you don’t then don’t, okay? Not that hard.

Rating: PG-13

Trivia: A Central City sign can be seen in the film. Central City is the home of Green Lantern's superhuman ally and close friend, the Flash.

IMDb

Whoops, how did this get in here?

Yep, that's a rescue pup. 

Distinctive Face: Jude Law

Incredibly unoriginal people.

Lately I've been bored with my amazement (that definitely conflicts but I just don't care) that celebrities can manage to look exactly alike. Jessie J is cute I guess, and her song that calls us to "forget about the pricetag", which I don't think for a second she actually means, is okay, but why did she pick a look that makes her look like everyone else? I mean, Ke$ha's gross but at least she doesn't sound like everyone else.

I just barfed glitter onto my face. Cute, right?

I mean, even J Biebs has that hair...wait. No. HAD that hair. But he's got his own color, and guys obsessively copy his hoodie and skinnies style while totally denying they are wearing purple because the Biebs does it.

I am adowable

His looks are the only thing he's got goin' for him. Well, except for those killer vocals, and playing four instruments, and that charm, oh, and a legion of crazed fangirls. Other than that. It's just his looks. Moving on.

Jude Law.

Definitely a distinctive face. On top of that he has a distinctive voice, also acting ability.

Law began acting in 1989 in TV movies, and it wasn't until 1997, nearly ten years later, when he finally landed an actually-worth-mentioning role in the biopic Wilde. The role gave him a fantastic number of opportunities, nearly all of which he took, completing seven films in the next two years when he would have his true "big break" in Anthony Minghella's twisted thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley. In addition to giving us this

Matt Damon in a neon green speedo

it also gave us Jude Law. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor by the Academy, the Golden Globes, and a bunch of other people, walking away with the BAFTA that year as well. MTV, in appropriately ridiculous fashion, even nominated him for Best Musical Performance for his saxophoning in the film (and that's not even a sexual metaphor. He seriously learned to play sax).

After that Law had his pick of great projects. He did a war film, Enemy at the Gates, worked with Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition, Steven Spielberg wanted him for A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Anthony Minghella got him back for the Civil War drama Cold Mountain.

Most don't know but A.I, in which Law plays a prostitute robot, was the baby project of legendary director Stanley Kubrick for over a decade, and was continued by Steven Spielberg after his death. It had to be epic. Kubrick was waiting to make the film until the main character, an almost-human robotic boy, could be played by an actual robot. Spielberg did one better and got acting prodigy Haley Joel Osment for the part, as well as recruiting John Williams for the score. (Why is he a child prodigy? Osment suggested that because he was a robot his character shouldn't blink. The director agreed, and Osment gave one of the best performances of his career. All while not blinking.) The end result was a heartwrenching futuristic Pinocchio tale about love and humanity, and Law as the plastic sexbot Gigolo Joe was perfect.

DO. NOT. BLINK.

Cold Mountain garnered him rave reviews, and more nominations - this time for Best Actor - from every major guild, including the Academy, the BAFTAs, and the Golden Globes. Law hasn't been nominated since then for a major award, but he sure has been enjoying himself with comedies, period pieces, biopics, dramas, and romantic comedies. Lately he's been hugely successful acting opposite Robert Downey Jr. in Sherlock Holmes. The guy is on top of the world. His IMDb page shows not one, not two, not- skip to the end- but six projects in the works (including a Sherlock sequel).

In addition to acting on the big screen, Law is also a stage veteran. In 2009 he portrayed Shakespeare's Hamlet to sold out crowds in London. His performance earned him a Tony nom for Best Actor.

Pretty much, he's great.*

Let's do a photo and wrap this up, shall we?

It's the chin. Also his receding hairline.

*Also he's kind of a man whore. He has four children by three different women, none of whom he is currently seeing.

His IMDb page is here

Music Artists: I call you Copycats.

I love Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream", I like "California Girls", and I love "Firework". And Lady Gaga is one of the greatest pop artists of all time, no question. Is it too much to call her the Shakespeare of her time- inventing new words and catering to the mob rather than snooty royalty? But honestly, these two spend so much time trying to be unique that I'm constantly sighing over how boring they are. All the overdone make up, the glitter and paint, untoppable unstoppable "creativity" seems mostly to just make them look more like...everyone and anyone else. I liked early Gaga better than the Monster, and I liked Katy Perry better, well never; it was her voice, not her image that made her great- she should quit with the Gaga ogling and let her voice speak for itself.

Review: 127 Hours

127 Hours was the film that started the series, "I'm Most Excited About". It's actually part of what got me back to writing on this blog at all, and I finally saw it.

Despite the common misconception, the film is
not actually 127 hours long.

127 Hours, directed by Danny Boyle, stars James Franco as the mountaineer/climber Aron Ralston. Ralston drove into Utah's canyons one weekend to hike a trail he knew well. It just wasn't his weekend. He slipped and fell into a canyon; a boulder came tumbling down with him and pinned his hand to a rock wall. Ralston was trapped. He had limited water, virtually no food, and only rope, carabiners, and a pocket knife as tools. He knew he was going to die. After five days he was waterless, severely dehydrated, and his hand was decomposing still attached to him. His only choice is to slice through skin, snip nerves, sever arteries, and saw through his muscle to amputate his own arm.


This movie was amazing. Remember when I Am Legend came out, and everyone was like, "Who wants to watch a movie of just Will Smith wandering around?" This concept is kind of like that. 70 of the film's 90 minutes are of one guy trapped in the bottom of a canyon. He literally cannot move from that spot. So what's so interesting about it? 

This guy.

James Franco owned this movie. First off, can we talk about how awesome James Franco is for like two seconds? This guy in running at a breakneck pace through life. He's an extremely successful actor who has worked on comedies, as well as several Oscar award-winning films, not to mention - oddly- General Hospital. He has a Bachelor's Degree, a Master's Degree, and has been accepted toYale University to earn his PhD in literature and creative writing. He's attended schools for a degree or just for the hell of it, including UCLA, Columbia University, NYU, and now Yale. He acts, directs, produces, and writes. He's had a book published, hosted the Oscars, been named Sexiest Man Alive, hosted Saturday Night Live twice, had his art displayed in LA art galleries, produces funny home videos for the comedy website Funny or Die, and frequently paints. He's obviously brilliant. 

Also he looks like this

Franco took this role, and became putty. He molded himself to not fit Ralston, but to become him. When the dust settles after his fall and he realizes he is trapped, that moment of realization? The horror in his face is unbelievably awful. You feel his desperation, and his pain, and when he films his last goodbyes to his family you aren't seeing a close-up on James Franco; you're looking into the eyes of a dying man.

So. James Franco. Also 127 Hours is brought to you courtesy of director Danny Boyle, who also directed the 2008 international megahit Slumdog Millionaire. These guys slaved away for hours on a set the size of Harry Potter's closet-room at the Dursley's. The set was so claustrophobic that Franco resorted to the not-weird-at-all behavior of hiding his textbooks near him so he could remind himself during breaks that he wasn't actually going to die on the set. As I've explained to you before, Aron Ralston did actually film himself hallucinating, recalling memories, and saying his last goodbyes. The footage is so disturbing and so personal that it has never been released to the public. Only Franco and the director were allowed to review the footage to accurately portray Ralston and his state of mind.

Which was pretty much "[every cuss word evar] + I AM GOING TO DIE"

Boyle does a fantastic job of breaking from Franco to show us his hallucinations, to relive his memories, to truly let the audience have this experience with him. As he is an audience to his own recollections, so are the viewers. I noticed a deliberate use of sensual elements to convey a sense of time and place to the audience. The use of color, the super-saturation or the absence of sunny color is a superb storyteller, as are the sound effects- slurping water, echoes, and the like.


The idea is to trap you in that canyon with Ralston. You are supposed to feel this experience with him. Because the story isn't about him being trapped, it's about his escaping. The guy epic-ly cuts off his own damn arm with a dull pocket knife, after breaking the both bones of his trapped arm because he knew he couldn't chip through them with his blade. He is still stuck in the bottom of a canyon with a bleeding stump of an arm, but manages to get out of the canyon, rappels down a cliff, and starts hiking out of the desert. Dehydrated, hemorrhaging, and starving.  

The tourniquet and knife Ralston used to amputate his arm

In the video below the real Ralston describes his experience of being trapped....



This film is something you should see if you can stomach a little gore. Honestly, I was expecting a nasty, splurting (I just made up that word) gorefest of an amputation, and that's not at all what it is. This is a film about hope, about humanity, about adversity, about triumph. You shouldn't miss it.


Director: Danny Boyle
Length: 94 min
Rated: Rated R for language and some disturbing violent content/bloody images.
See the IMDb page here
Trailer:
.

New Transformers 3 Trailer

THIS is what a trailer should be like. Editing, sound, epic. It's all there.

Music Video Meanings: 21st Century Girl

Here's the video in case you haven't seen it. Watch it first and then read on.

So I really liked the beginning of the video. I'm definitely feelin' the mysterious vibe okay, and she's like in a desert and picks ups some dust and a butterfly appears out of it and flies away. Then she's running across the desert with her friends, and also a pack of wolves, but she's all dressed to the nines and you're going "Oo pretty!" and then things start to get weird.

Well first Willow Smith starts to sing-talk in a Ke$ha voice, which is weird enough, but then her friends start pulling stuff out of the desert earth. And the video starts out with Willow appearing out of the dust, and then the butterfly, and heck, she pulls a guitar out too. But her friends are pulling out weird things. The whole video starts to take on this anti-nature theme that's not even cool. Like the guitar is cool, but her friends pull out parking meters. Parking meters. Seriously, I don't get how that's awesome. You start pulling stuff out of the ground, and you pull up the parking meters?

Then they pull out a sweet car, and you're like "Now that's more like it!" Nope. The next scene is her friends as child slaves pulling these heavy metal chains over their shoulders that are connected to...a...house. Okay, so the kids are now slaves pulling giant-ass skyscrapers out of the ground, probably blistering up their hands on those chains. Meanwhile, all of nature is being destroyed as they slave to pull up the chains of these buildings.

And then Willow Smith turns into some kind of nine-year-old dictator singing that she's going to take over the world and her friends/slaves are like pulling up more buildings behind her. Then they roll back the desert floor, and there's streets, and then they have a dance party in the streets of what's now a city 'cause the desert is gone, and Willow's like the cool friend obviously,  and the music is kinda fading out and you think that's the end, but then Willow starts whispering to a toddler, who makes a butterfly out of dust and starts chasing it.

WHY IS THE BABY ALONE? And for that matter, why is Willow wandering around in the metropolis she's created? Either she's going to get mugged, or they're living in a deserted city, which is just super creepy. And wait, where is that toddler's mom? Why is the baby running around by itself? That child is totally unsupervised, which is just horrible parenting practices.

I wish this video made more sense, you guys, but I see no other option but to interpret this video as Willow Smith declaring herself a tyrannical empress and making her friends do backbreaking slave labor.

"Uh, excuse me, where are you going?
You are my slave and you haven't
finished mining rhinestones for
my fingernails yet."

Review: Sucker Punch

Directed by Zach Snyder, the director-demigod of slow-mo action, and tons of CGI, Sucker Punch is an action movie with no heart. Remember 300? Yeah, that movie had heart. Like here's this army of scantily-clad men standing up for freedom and stuff by running around with swords cutting off extremities and watching the blood spurt. Ah, that's heart. This movie was supposed to be something similar. Scantily-clad barely-legal girls fight for their freedom by standing up to the Man. Literally, though, they're standing up to the men subjugating them. That's heart, right? Well it could be, but somehow it gets ruined.

Look, Zach Snyder's movies are all about the awesome special effects and the action and what's happening on the screen. I mean did you see 300? It's all blood and guts and abs and swords okay, the plot kind of gets lost in the mix and you don't really care about it by the end, you care about a single theme: freedom. But Sucker Punch kept trying to push its plot back into the picture and make it about this twisty Inception-dream story, and we all just wanted to see Emily Browning fight some dragons, okay.

And you know what? The plot looks awesome from the outside! This girl

gets committed to an insane asylum against her will, and is treated like crap by the people inside

like this creeper, and so escapes into the fantasy of her mind to escape

Wow, sounds pretty amazing right? Yeah, well it would be except Emily Browning just really doesn't sell her role as Babydoll. At least a third of the movie is close-ups on her face, no joke, and she seems incapable of making any other face besides this

Seriously. That photo of her crying up there? It's the only time she ever has a different look on her face.

"Being in an insane asylum makes me dress like a sailor and have perfect skin
I guess? I'm not sure though because I'm just so sad"

It's so annoying it was hard to identify with her, or look at her, or focus on anything except her sad face all the time. She's supposed to be a tragic character, but seriously. So like, if this were a drama that would make sense. But um, it's not. It's an action movie. Speaking of that...

I'm confused by Snyder making Sucker Punch a PG-13 film. It's an action movie in which scantily clad insane asylum inmates are forced to be hookers, and are beaten for insubordination, so they escape into their minds to fight...well, anyone who happens to be there. They slit throats, hack off limbs, shoot people in the face, and by the end of the film these hooker/inmates must have a kill count of like several hundred guys. If you want to kill that many people, and make a movie about hooker/inmate/killers, you're going to have to have an R. Otherwise you water everything down and it's booooring. How could I have been bored during a Zach Snyder movie?! I was just a teensy bit disappointed.

"AAAAAAGH CANCEL CHRISTMAS!"

I recall naming this as one of the movies I anticipated most this year, and the movie is just like the trailer, so I was right about that, but the badass factor went way down with Emily Browning.

"OMG I'm half naked, I have a sword and pistols, and I'm
STILL BORING. How is this possible, Zach Snyder?"

Actually, the other girls were great, even Vanessa Hudgens, but particularly Sweet Pea. In truth I wish they'd cast Abby Cornish as Babydoll.

This is why.

In that same post I recall writing something like, "Five girls, who have starred in a few movies, including High School Frickin' Musical are about to become the newest team of action heroines. Hopefully they think for themselves instead of blindly following the orders of some guy on the other end of the phone, like a few Charlie's Angels who will remain unnamed. " My "hopefully they don't do THIS 'cause that'd be lame" turned out to be EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID.

"Hey, I'm a totally unnecessary character, what's up?"

This guy shows up in like every other scene to tell the team of action heroines their mission. Honestly, I could not believe the amount of time they spent standing around listening to exposition by this guy. I thought Babydoll was going to be the leader, and have some great lines. Like remember Leonidas yelling "THIS IS SPARTA!" It was like the catchphrase of the year. But no, instead this guy shows up and after telling the girls  their mission in the most horrible monotone like it's the intro to a video game quest, he spouts off one or two one-liners. I think the writers thought it was like, gonna be cool to have this old ninja guy saying stuff to these girls, but mostly it was just... boring. There'd be this dramatic pause as the five girls are about to rush an entire army of Nazi demons (yeah, they make it into the movie) and the old guy's like "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."

Wow.

Profound.

Thank you for that lil' tidbit as we head out to battle to DIE. Couldn't you say something like "Give them nothing! But take from them everything!"

Look, I didn't want to have to say this, I really didn't. But I'm sensing a certain decline that starts with M. and ends with Night Shyamalan. And I really hope that's not what's happening, because I like Zach Snyder, I really do! I love his effects and his vision, and the themes, and the action, but something just isn't translating to the screen.

In conclusion. It's entertaining if you know what you're getting into and don't expect much but what looks like a Zach Snyder video game adaptation.