Sunday, February 11, 2018

Wonder Woman (2017), Spiderman: Homecoming (2017)

I love superhero movies!  Pretty sure I have seen them all.  Yep.  All of them.  Ever.  So.  My opinion is not that of your average critic, no sir ree bob!  Uh, if your name is Bob.  And if it isn't, it's just a figure of speech.  Don't go on and on about it.  Hey, what do you call a guy with no arms and no legs, floating in the ocean?  Bob!  That's right, disabled humor!  Yeah.  Good times.

Wonder Woman (2017) is a touching coming-of-age drama about a young Amazon girl named Diana.  Diana is a princess of Thermiscrya, a small island in the Atlantic Ocean that nobody knows about, or can pronounce the name of.  Thermiscrya has no men, so Diana pretty much falls for the first man she sees, a man named Steve Trevor.  Steve Trevor is an American Spy, working for the British government, who stole some German chemical weapon plans.  Can Diana help Steve get back to World War 1 in time to stop the Germans from killing millions of innocents, and will their budding romance blossom into something more?

Yeah, sounds like the plot of a Lifetime movie of the week, doesn't it?  Worst origin story, ever.  The movie does get a smidgen better, though it's a very slow-starter.  Gal Gadot plays Wonder Woman, and she's pretty, and the camera loves her.  Chris Pine plays Steve Trevor, the scrappy love interest who looks good in a dress...  uniform.  Yeah.  Acting was passably okay, special effects were decent.  Hmmm, what else did I like about the film?  The plot was, uh, vaguely understandable, I suppose?  Look, I am trying hard to like this thing, and totally failing.

First off, I hate origin stories.  Really hate them.  It's 5 minutes of story that someone decided to drag out into 2 hours, just to set the stage for a sequel that might not ever be made, because the origin story was 2 hours of drawn-out crap.  This is all Wonder Woman's origin story, and it's seriously all about WW1, when Wonder Woman actually fought the Nazis in WW2, according to the comics.  Yet this one is set in WW1, and has Wonder Woman using a shield and sword to stop the germans from developing chemical weapons that will kill millions of people.  I guess they were too worried about mimicking Captain America's story, where a guy named Steve Rogers uses a shield to stop the Germans from developing secret weapons that could kill millions of people...  in WW2.  Gee, that sounds REALLY similar!  Good thing they put Wonder Woman in WW1, otherwise, these two heroes would have run into each other, and had the craziest Marvel / DC crossover since the Tunguska blast of 1908!  Actually, I'm not sure what year that was, and I don't think it had anything to do with comic books.  Hopefully.

Also, I am a little confused about one thing.  Wonder Woman's bracelets play a HUGE part in the story, like so big I don't want to give anything away about them.  But...  there's absolutely no origin story for the bracelets whatsoever.  Magical metal, superglued plastic, alien artifacts, gifts from the gods, where did they come from?  Nobody knows!  Just BAM, they're cool, so we're putting them in the movie and making them do stuff.  Awesome.  Thanks for that wonderful recap.  I'm not even going to go into why the rest of the movie doesn't make much sense, or why Wonder Woman's a bit of a dope.  Go watch it on HBO and see for yourself, if you want to.  Definitely not rewatchable for me, unless you like staring at Gal Gadot.  She's easy on the eyes.  Moving on.

Spiderman: Homecoming (2017) is a touching coming of age drama about a geeky, awkward nerd trying to get a date for the Homecoming Dance.  I'm kidding, it's totally a romantic comedy about ...  a geeky nerd trying to get a date for the Homecoming dance.  Yeah.  Other stuff happens, but yeah, that's basically it.

Okay, about the only thing this movie got right was the origin story.  "So you got bit by a radioactive spider?"  "Yep."  DING DING DING!  ORIGIN STORY OVER!  WE HAVE A WINNER!  WELL DONE!  Then everything just went to hell in a handbasket.  Spider-man is a total joke in this movie, which is played for laughs, rather than dramatic effect.  Despite having no healing ability, despite the fact that his "spider-sense" should have warned him about 99% of the time to GTFO of the way, Spider man ends up being thrown around like a super-ball, put through walls, bounced off buldings, buried under rubble, and crash-landing in a plane, and just gets up like he bumped his elbow on a  doorknob.  "Ow, but hey, I'm fine, where's the bad guy?"  Seriously, this should have been a Spider-Pig cartoon, because there's no way even Wolverine could have survived all the shit Spider-man goes through, and not even a damned scratch!  Wtf?

I'm not really sure what the people who released this movie were thinking, other than "Hey, the first reboot made three movies, the second reboot managed two, let's see if we can ruin the franchise in one movie!"  "Challenge accepted!"  Guys, you totally nailed it.  Ruined it in one.  Nicely done.  Spiderman: Homecoming is on Starz if you want to watch it, and Robert Downey Jr. pops up in a few cameo appearances to try to save this movie, but I don't think even Thor could have lifted this Mjolnir-sized piece of shit off the ground.  About the only bright spot in this movie is Michael Keaton, who manages to somehow elevate a third-rate super-villain wanna-be like the Vulture into a major player.  If this was the Vulture's origin story, it managed a decent job, but for Spiderman, it's awful.  Not watching this again if you paid me.

Damn.  And I like Superhero movies!  Ugh.  Both DC and Marvel failed me this weekend.  Oh well.  Catch you guys next time I find something horrible to watch.  If I was waiting for something good to watch, I might never post again.  :-(

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Cloverfield Paradox (2018), Altered Carbon (2018)

W00t!  Reviewing two things that came out just this year, and it's only February!  I am on the cutting EDGE of movie critiqueing!  Sure, about 50 other reviewers already reviewed the Netflix series and the movie that came out right after the superbowl, but fuck them!  I'm old, and have chronic pain and depression, so shit takes me a few days, okay?  Fuckin nags.  I'm going to review Altered Carbon first, because it came out last week friday, before the Cloverfield movie.  Plus, it was just a wee bit better.

Altered Carbon (2018, fuck yeah, bitches!) is about a soldier called back from the dead after 250 years by a technology called Altered Carbon that allows people to live more than one life, sometimes in another body, by storing and transferring a person's consciousness, memories and life experiences in something called a "stack" (which is implanted into the spine like a substitute disc).  Takeshi Kovacs served 250 years dead (which also serves as a prison, apparently) for terrorism, but now he's being tasked with solving the "temporary" murder of his new boss, what they call a "Meth."  A "Meth" is short for "Methuselah," basically a rich person who uses their great wealth to buy themselves extra "sleeves" (bodies) so that they can live out many lifetimes, instead of the poor folks who still typically die after living just one or two lifetimes.  Trouble is, Takeshi died fighting for an end to the whole concept of living more than one life, and now has to come to terms with working for the very kind of man he died fighting against.  Along the way, Takeshi's past comes back to haunt him, in more ways than one.  Can Takeshi solve the riddle of the Meth's temporary murder before it's too late, or will he just say "Fuck it!" and go back to the prison of eternal death?

Altered Carbon stars Joel Kinnaman as Takeshi Kovacs, which might be considered white-washing by some folks, but in a world where everyone switches bodies at the drop of a hat, it's hard to tell who's who anymore.  James Purefoy is Laurens Bancroft, the "Meth" who thaws Takeshi out of cold storage.   There's a good supporting cast, although the only one I actually recognized from other things is Hiro Kanegawa, who plays Captain Tanaka.  The acting is decent, and the special effects were good, but mostly, Altered Carbon leaves me with lots of questions.  Perhaps some minor spoilers to follow.

How is being dead defined as "prison time" if you're actually dead, and don't notice any time passing?  Doesn't that mean poor folks go to prison forever just by being too poor to afford a new "sleeve (new body)?"  If people can be reincarnated into new bodies, or even their old bodies after the bodies have been repaired, then why does anyone need to pay for being reincarnated into a new body, when their old bodies can just be fixed?  If the "Envoys" were the greatest fighting force in the galaxy, how did they get slaughtered by a bunch of Protectorate soldiers in their first and only battle?  If the big thing about being an Envoy was being able to overcome "sleeve-sickness" right away, then how does Ortega's grandmother get over her sickness and start playing with her grandkids in the time it takes Ortega to walk home from work?  How is it the Envoys live in a forest in a cave with a tree growing in it and eat on wooden tables, but somehow managed to build a sophisitcated "needle-casting" setup all the way out in the boondocks without alerting anyone else on the planet?  How did the Protectorate manage to focus the direct-download "Rawlins virus" without actually knowing where the Envoys were?  How did Reileen manage to get away and tip off CTAC, when Quell mounted a rescue mission just to rescue Takeshi so he wouldn't give away the plan?  How is it the thug that inhabits Takeshi's cloned body is able to move around like a ninja, when the thug was just a big dumb bruiser in his old body?

How is it that in all their exploring, human beings never found anything alien except the "songspire" trees, and some Virtual-reality torture-worms?  How is it the Neo-Catholics can object to using "alien technology" (paraphrasing Ortega's mom) to live multiple lives, when the technology was actually invented by humans?  How does inventing "Altered Carbon" help the "explorer" who invented it to explore, when you need a "stacked" body (no, not a body with big breasts, I mean a body that has an Altered-Carbon-stack in the spine that allows it to back up the body's memories) to needlecast into, just to get to another planet?  What's the point of having a satellite to backup your memories into, if needlecasting is actually faster than light?  If it's not faster than light, wouldn't it take years and years to needle-cast between planets?  Doesn't the technology have to be carried to a planet before people can start needlecasting onto it?  If the technology to exist for more than one lifetime is so expensive, doesn't that mean those living outside of a major city, or on undeveloped planets, don't have access to it?  Wouldn't that also mean that the only "exploring" the "explorer" could do, would be exploring major, already-well-established cities?

And that's just the questions off the top of my head.  I think I avoided any major spoilers with my questions up there, but who knows?  I am familiar with the term "suspension of disbelief," but when the series contradicts itself and its own introduced technology, am I supposed to cast aside what was set forth in the last episode just because the latest episode introduces new information?  (shrug)  On the plus side, Altered Carbon has lots of fighting and nudity in every episode, which is great.  I read an interview with Dichen Lachman about her nude sword-fighting scene in the series, and I think it's awesome she feels empowered by it.  Just that aspect of the series alone gives me reason to suggest you go watch it on Netflix, but was I bowled over by the series?  Did I find it the next "Blade Runner?"  No, but I wasn't that impressed with Blade Runner, either.  I don't automatically associate every sci-fi movie movie I watch with Blade Runner, but that's just me.  I watch a lot of horror and sci-fi, and I tend to think of each offering as it's own unique presentation, without trying to compare it to other things.  Still, if you like watching gun battles and sword fighting and naked peeps (without looking too closely at the plot or technical aspects), you could do worse than Altered Carbon.

On to the next review!  The Cloverfield Paradox (2018, double-yeah, bitches!) was apparently something Paramount sold to Netflix at a discount, which Netflix decided to slap their name on and vomit up onto their service as quickly as they possibly could.  Short summary, the entire Earth is in despair over a lack of renewable energy (not sure what happened to solar and wind power?), but somehow, humankind still managed to build a gigantic particle accelerator in space to explore the atom-smashing options to create unlimited energy.  Unfortunately, when the team finally succeeds in their mission, ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE!  Yes!  I haven't said that since October!  Wheeee!  :-D

There was a buttload of awesome actors and actresses in The Cloverfield Paradox (also called the God Particle, presumably before the Cloverfield folks got their hands on this movie and made it even worse), but the acting isn't what brings this movie down.  This thing starts out so slow I thought I was going to doze off before anything happened, and then when it did, the addition of the Cloverfield mythology only made this movie into a clunky mess.  The events going on at the space station could, by themselves, have been woven into a decent horror flick, much like the "Life" movie last year or the year before, with a similar concept.  The whole side-plot of the woman trying to get back to her husband could have been completely left out, and the movie would have been better for it.  In fact, all the scenes that involved what was happening on Earth, especially the Cloverfield-inspired scenes that seem tacked on willy-nilly, could have been left out.  It might have made the movie a decent horror flick, but in the end, it was just a mess.  I was left feeling like the one man's severed arm, somehow still alive and intact, sitting in a glass jar and tapping its fingers impatiently, probably waiting for the movie to finally end.  And, when they go out of their way to say that they can't fire the particle accelerator without the station engineer, how tf did they just go ahead and fire it up without the engineer anyways?  Makes no goddamn sense.  Someone needs to take that severed zombie arm and bitch-slap the producers with it.  Wtf is wrong with you guys?

You know, there was an old position that was listed in the credits in a lot of the older movies, called "Continuity."  Continuity is short for "making sure the fucking movie makes sense," and it's a position that seems to have been cut from any of the more recent stories I've seen in the last, oh, 20 to 25 years or so.  Does anyone even watch these things after they make them, to make sure they turned out okay?  Or does the director just finish filming, have a wrap party, and toss the rolls of film at the editing department, who then edits the thing while still hung over?  I can't say.  I'm not in the film industry.  But damn, seems like there's a distinct lack of common sense out there nowadays.

I can't recommend "The Cloverfield Paradox" (or "The God Particle") to anyone, mostly because the movie pretty much sucked.  If you haven't seen it, don't.  And honestly, the next time I see a title with anything "Cloverfield" in it, especially given that the movies involved don't seem to have a goddamned thing to do with the original "Cloverfield" movie (that I didn't really find all that awesome to start with), I think I'm just going to take a pass on it, and go watch something else.  To me, "Cloverfield" is short for "senseless piece of crap with a monster that only shows up at the end for no discernable reason."

That's all for tonight.  Join me again this weekend, when I finally get to see Wonder Woman on HBO for the first time (hey, I don't go to the theaters, ok?), and I'll try and get the review out before the end of the month.  Did I mention I am old and slow?  :-/

Thursday, February 1, 2018

Throwback Thursday - Razorback (1984)

First post of the new year!  Sure, it's a month into it, but Happy New Year, anyways!  2017 wasn't a very good year for me, but 1984 was a great year for movies.  I can't recall all the awesome movies they made that year, but I found one more!

Razorback (1984) is an Australian-made horror movie that opens with an outback grand-dad putting his toddler grandkid down for the night.  The grandad hears something outside, and picks up his gun, because everyone in Australia owns a gun, or at least they did in 1984.  Next comes some hairy, grunting thing that blows through the grand-dad like he was a made of tissue paper, slams through the wall of the house, and snatches the toddler right out of the crib.  Whatever it is, it slams through the far wall of the house, sparking a fire that reduces the house to ash, and leaves the grand-dad wandering the night screaming for his lost grandson...

The name of this flick gives it away, but it's a big boar, or what they call a Razorback.  Old grand-dad is actually tried for the crime of killing his own grand-son, but even what passed for law in small-town Australia back in 1984 couldn't convict a man with such an appalling lack of evidence.  Grand-dad devotes his life to getting vengeance on the big Razorback, but he doesn't get his chance until a newswoman from the States shows up to make a big stink about the killing of Kangaroos for pet food a few years later.  And that sets the stage for the real hero of the movie, Dicko Baker! Dicko Baker is a zany 'roo-hunter and opal miner and works at the Petpak meat-packing plant that turns roo-meat into dogfood for...  Wait, what?  Dicko's not the hero, he's the villain?  Shit!  I got this movie all wrong.  I guess the real hero is the news-lady's husband, but that's just crazy.  Who the hell comes all the way to Australia just to find his wife?  What a lunatic.

Razorback is an older movie, so don't expect any of the special effects to be all that CGI bullshit that fills all the monster movies nowadays.  All the wild kangaroos and piglets are absolutely real!  :-o  Though I am pretty sure the big Razorback is the Aussie equivalent of a mechanical Jaws.  The people are also real, and though the acting isn't particularly outstanding, it gets the job done.  Gregory Harrison is the news-lady's husband, supposedly the "real" hero of this movie, but he can't hold a candle to the likes of David Argue and Chris Heywood, who play Dicko and Benny Baker, the Roo-hunting, opal-mining Baker brothers.  The Baker brothers not only provide comedy relief for this movie, but provide that vital bit of scenery-chewing background that just moves the whole plot right along.

I caught this movie on Turner Classic Movies last week, but I have no idea where you guys might find it.  I've seen it before, but it's worth a second or third viewing.  The action isn't exactly crazy tense, but the pig scares the bejeesus out of you when it does show up.  The thing's farkin huge, and has tusks about yay-big (holds hands about a foot apart for emphasis, even though you can't see details over the internet).  Anywho, check out Razorback if you feel like it, and can find it.

In other news, not much else going on.  I started the year with the flu, and though I'm over it now, I'm just waiting for the next round of it to come after me.  Seems like everyone in the country is sick with flu right now, and the flu season doesn't really start to fade til March.  I hope I make it til Spring.  :-/

Catch you guys with a review the next time I see a good movie.  :-)

Happy Halloween!

And OHMRAT 2023 ends just as it began.  With a quiet whimper.  Sadly, I had no time this month.  Too busy trying to stay alive.  But, I did ...