Eragon

It was tough to pick a tagline for this one, because they're all so very choice, but I'm going to go with this one, now seriously hilarious in retrospect:

"The First Chapter of the Inheritance Trilogy"

Looks cool right?

There were signs all over this movie that they intended it to be (as seen above) the first in a trilogy of movies. Why not right? A movie based on a series of best selling books, there's a dragon, and you have a cast of relative competence (mostly...sort of... I guess...) But oh, how very wrong they were. To say that this movie was not good, well that would be the understatement of the century. There is essentially no element of this movie that could rise to the level of 'adequate', and most of it is abysmal. Let's start with the basics, and work our way to the grisly crescendo that is the movie's conclusion.

Prometheus

"They went looking for our beginning. What they found could be our end."

Giant Evil Head

     The much anticipated and long delayed prequel to the original Alien (which ultimately seemed to be more of a reimagining/reboot) has finally hit theatres. Was it worth the wait? Ehhhh I don't know. This movie, while visually stunning, well paced, and full of the sorts of things you'd expect from say, Alien, is just that. This movie more or less IS Alien, in every single god damned way. Only this isn't 1979, and Alien has already been made. I think viewing this as a remake is the only way to redeem it, but even then all it does is set up for a movie that maybe I'd want to watch.

Snow White & The Huntsman

"..."

Ok, so I have no tagline for this movie, because it had no tagline. I like to think that Kristin Stewart's blank expression fills in for any witty one-liner for the movie. This will be part one of my "Charlize Theron is having a crazy month" series, part two will be when I talk about Prometheus in my next post.

Return and Dark City

After not having updated this blog for three years, I decided I wanted to again. So without further ado, let's start with a movie I liked that never got recognized for anything.

"A world where the night never ends. Where man has no past. And humanity has no future."

Looks fun, right?

For those not familiar, Dark City was a movie that came out in 1998. Without spoiling too much of the plot (the circumstances of the plot are revealed slowly over the course of the movie) a man wakes up in a bathtub, with no memories, and finds that he is being accused of committing serial murders, which his present circumstance suggests he committed. He comes to realize that the city he lives in is controlled by mysterious beings who have power over its shape. This leads him into a race to find out what's really going on in the city, and how he figures into that plan. It's a really interesting sort of plot that makes you think you're watching one kind of movie, until you realize that it is totally different.

Ice Spiders

"Where Nature Stopped. Science Evolved"

I was just sitting here writing and watching the Sci Fi channel, when this movie came on. Now I expect very bad, very corny things from ole' Sy Fy but this has got to be one of the most ridiculously cheesy movies I have ever been exposed to. As a result I will now expose you to it.

Special Post: Bad Advertisement Part 2

Last time I talked about bad advertisements, today I want to talk about weak ass taglines that find their way onto the slipshod DVD boxes for movies. Now I would have to figure that most of the time, if you're at the point of picking up the DVD box, you've already decided to buy the movie, but if you hadn't decided say to buy the movie Push, this tagline probably wouldn't encourage you to buy it:
"HANG ON TIGHT as a gang of superpowered paranormal operatives takes you on a white-knuckle thrill ride."

....what? I'm of the understanding that the back jackets of these are typically written by people who otherwise have nothing to do with the movie or its production, but still, it might be a good idea to watch the movie... or maybe a trailer before you start writing about 'white-knuckle thrill rides'. I was convinced I was buying a movie, not a roller coaster. This line manages to take what I think is a pretty original movie, and make it sound like the most played out, utterly lame movie ever. The entirety of the back jacket is either misleading, stupid, or just plain untrue.

This is probably not a decisive factor in buying a DVD, but I just found the description of the movie so devoid of content, that I felt it deserved inclusion in my little report. My next entry will return to movie reviews. Look forward to the white-knuckled thrill ride!

Special Post: Bad Advertisement Part 1

So recently I saw the movie Knowing, which if you haven't seen or heard of is about a guy who discovers a piece of paper in a time capsule that has predicted every world disaster for 50 years. It predicts 3 more, one of which is 'everyone else'. Now I'd pretty much avoided this movie because I thought it had looked completely idiotic and generic in the previews I'd seen constantly on tv. I found when I watched it that it was actually an ok movie, and not a generic disaster movie, ala Deep Impact, The Day After Tomorrow, etc.

So that got me thinking, the idea behind advertising is to encourage people to see a movie, but to what degree do advertisements sometimes hurt the movie's chances of being watched? I'm going to first look at trailers. Later we'll move on to other forms of advertisement or promotion.

I've already mentioned Knowing, I had a similar experience with Paranormal Activity, which I only ended up seeing upon urging from a friend. While the movie was one of the scariest I've ever seen, and makes brilliant use of its tiny budget, the trailers look entirely hokey. They use this one 3 second clip (which is from the very end of the fucking movie, more on that later) and then the audience being all scared, and that's supposed to make me think 'ooh spooky!' What it looks like, in the trailer, is a body on wires being carried into the room, and big fucking deal. I'm not sure how they could make the trailer more enticing, but that was definitely not the way. While I didn't know that this shot was the very end of the movie, I still found it irritating after the fact, just like in Surrogates where the trailer also uses footage from the very end of the movie. You have a whole movie to choose 20 seconds from, and you feel driven to use the climax? Just terrible.

Another similar issue that leads to me not wanting to see a movie is bombarding me with 8000 trailers every day showing the movie over and over. I recall at one time the same Transformers teaser being played 3 times consecutively. Even more annoying than this was the 2 weeks leading up to the release of Jennifer's Body. I got so sick of Megan Fox asking me if I wanted it, and I could recite the clips from that stupid trailer for you. I wasn't really hot on the movie to begin with, but I sure as hell didn't go see it after that. I wanted nothing more than to forget about the damned movie for months, so that I could enjoy what my tv looks like without devil megan leering at me and then trying to eat me.

So what have we learned? Choose your footage carefully, choose what you say carefully, and dont say it on the same channel more than 50 times an hour. And watch out for Megan Fox, because she will eat you.