Elysium

This is not Halo... okay well it sort of is.

"He can save us."

Hello everyone, welcome back to The Tagline! As promised, yesterday I went to the movies to see Elysium, and I got a lot more than I bargained for. Starring Matt Damon as Max, a former criminal now factory worker, Elysium is set in the future, in the year 2154. The Earth as far as we see is an almost entirely dessicated rock, overcrowded and completely polluted. The wealthy elite live in a space habitat called Elysium, where they have magic tubes that keep them from aging or being sick, and they live in opulent space luxury. Meanwhile on Earth people struggle to survive, and mostly seem to be failing. Max is among these people and let me run you through a quick day in the life: Leave early for work, get hassled by some bangers about working. Get stopped by robot police, make a sarcastic joke, have your arm broken by said robot police. Report to a robotic parole officer, who adds eight months to your parole, and does the robot equivalent of telling you to piss off. Offers you pills for your anger. Finally get to awful dangerous factory job, get docked half a day's pay for being late because robots assaulted you while waiting for the bus. The next day, basically be forced into a radioactive pressure cooker, be exposed to a lethal dose of rads, get given some pills by a robot and told you're dead in 5 days. Welcome to the future.

Pitch Perfect

AW YEAH LOOK AT THOSE GLASSES.

"Get Pitch Slapped."

Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Tagline! It's another week and I have more movies, more rambling, maybe more anecdotal evidence that my life is an ever-changing landscape of humiliation and debasement. Okay, so there are DEFINITELY movies at the very least. Last week, people all around me reminded me that Anna Kendrick was having a birthday. Now for those of you who neither know nor care who Anna Kendrick is, well she is the leading lady in Pitch Perfect among other things. I know I shouldn't mention that she was a supporting character in the Twilight movies, but I'm going to, she did that, and now we all have to live with the repercussions of her actions. That being said, I was trying hard not to hold that against her when I went into this movie. Besides, she was also in Up in the Air, and that was a pretty good movie, something that Twilight movies wouldn't know anything about, on the grounds that they are all uniformly horrible. Well that's not true, each is awful in a special way but I'm getting off track here.

Super 8

I'd never seen this poster before. Cool.

"It arrives."

It does! Welcome back to the Tagline, where I am constantly feeling like I already wrote this review, but I find no archive of it, leading me to believe that I experience an alternate version of my blog as I sleep. Anyway, last time I savagely attacked Cloverfield, much as the monster attacked New York, and Hud attacked human decency. This was a movie produced by J.J. Abrams, about a big monster killing people. That being said, J.J. didn't write it, and he didn't direct it, so it doesn't seem fair to stick him with all the blame. For the sake of fairness, I thought I would give him a fair shake and talk about Super 8, another movie where some people have a camera and film a monster, and then stuff happens. Super 8 is a very different movie though. For starters, it doesn't use a found footage contrivance, and so at times the characters can not have cameras without it ending the movie. Also, Hud is not in the movie, and that makes it a lot better overall. If you are wondering, it may be several more days before I stop commenting about what an unbelievable chode Hud is. I'll try to reign it in but I can't make any promises. Anyway, Super 8 takes place in the 70s, and follows a group of kids who are trying to film a low budget zombie movie. This effort is spearheaded by the group's fledgling film buff Charles, who wants to film a shot at a train station in town, to add authenticity to a scene in the film. They want to get a shot just as a train is coming through. When they are filming this shot, a truck is driven onto the tracks, causing the train to derail and explode and almost kill them all. They discover that the man driving the truck was their biology teacher, who warns them to get scarce. They do right before a bunch of government vehicles swarm the scene.

Cloverfield

Experience the mild motion sickness...OF THE YEAR

"Some Thing Has Found Us."

With an intelligent tagline like that, we HAVE to be in for something good right? Welcome back to THE Tagline everyone, today as promised I will spill all of my negative feelings about Cloverfield a movie about love, a giant monster, and some asshole named Hud. Cloverfield is a film that,is shot in the "found footage from some guy who was there" style, just like the much better Troll Hunter, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. This is a nice place to start, because while they use the same style to film, in one movie that makes sense, and in the other it is a strained, and then later patently ridiculous device that makes absolutely no sense in the context of the movie. This is of course one of many elements of the movie that are either stupid or totally nonsensical. I bet some of you who have had the good fortune of not viewing this movie are wondering what it's all about? Well that's why I'm here. To hurt you that way.

The Wolverine

Huge JackedMan in: The Wolverine

"The hero. The fugitive. The warrior. The survivor. The legend."

Hey everyone, welcome to another review from The Tagline! I know I promised another round of bitter fury today, but I decided that I would save some of my vitriol for next week, just to give my hate batteries time to recharge (I run on hate batteries, they are eco-friendly). With that in mind, and heeding the generous 66% RT was offering for it, I went to see The Wolverine, the second film based solely on the eponymous Wolverine, and the 5th film in a single X-Men continuity (this becomes clear as the movie continues, and is one of the more startling aspects of the movie, more on that later). It follows Logan (Hugh Jackman, with his trendy Wolverine hair) as he attempts to cope with the aftermath of the events that took place in X3 (and I mean who can blame him, I wanted to become an alcoholic hermit in the woods too after that movie). In particular he experiences what seem to be vivid hallucinations of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) due to his guilt over killing her (SPOILERS OH NO WHAT HAVE I DONE, seriously though X3 was a waking nightmare). While visiting town so he can stab some guys in the hand for illegal bear hunting practices, Logan encounters a Japanese Ninja Punk Girl who informs him that a guy he saved from being nuclear exploded in WWII wants to see him. In Japan. Obviously. Of course, the man's intentions are... less than honorable.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Oh dear god no.

" Mankind's finest achievement. Our nation's proudest moment. A secret hidden for forty years."

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Tagline! I normally wouldn't bother to even address how shitty a Transformers movie is, but while watching a Rifftrax of the third Transformers movie, I came to realize that it was maybe one of the single worst movies I'd ever had the misfortune of experiencing. It was so unspeakably shitty, that indeed, it was hard to even watch with the MST3K crew making jokes over it (If you do not know about Mystery Science Theater, then learn you some here. Rifftrax is what Mike Nelson, Kevin Muphy and Bill Corbitt do now). I can also mention that I didn't care for the first Transformers movie either. I can admit that it was an average action movie at least, as opposed to the epic level train wreck that is Dark of the Moon. I'm now going to attempt to summarize the movie, but I expect that's going to be challenging because I'm not 100% sure about any of it. I'm going to open the wiki page about the movie and we can discover the plot together!

Troll Hunter

That's no Bjørn at all!

"You'll believe it when you see it!"

Hello everyone! Welcome back all you Tagline readers! Today I'm going to talk about another Netflix movie today, one that I've been meaning to watch for a long time, but hadn't gotten around to. That movie is Troll Hunter, and it is more or less exactly what it sounds like. As has been so popular to do, the movie is filmed in a "found footage" style, following three college students as they attempt to interview a man they believe to be a bear poacher. Of course, this man is not, in fact, hunting bears, nor is he a poacher. Instead we discover that he is hunting trolls, and that he is in the employ of the government. Through the experiences of the would be film makers we discover that Norway has all kinds of trolls in it, some of them very large. They normally keep to themselves, but for some reason the trolls are getting restless, and so Hans (the hunter) has had his hands full hunting the errant ones. You see some trolls are relatively small. Others are... quite large. Like giant large. Bigger than trees even.