Posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 9:04 pm in Action, Five Point Review, Sci-Fi by ryan
This is apparently the most expensive movie of all time, and it shows: James Cameron’s Avatar. Here are our five points.
1) If someone decides to give James Cameron another half-billion dollars or whatever to make a sequel, which I’m sure they will, he should spend at least 3-5% of his budget hiring an actual writer instead of giving us three hours of George Lucasian cardboard characters that feel like they were churned out of a strip mall stereotype factory.
2) I have never felt so sorry for an actor trying so hard to make witless dialogue come to life as I did watching Sigourney Weaver gag out her lines as though they were made of Clorox.
3) If you’re going to do a take on Big Bad Militaristic Imperialists vs. Naturalistic Tribal Natives, at least give me a reason to give a shit when the village gets blown up.
4) The end of the movie was painfully, groan-inducingly obvious after the scene in which Ripley—I mean Grace—is mercifully killed off.
5) I’m sure the fancy lights and glowy creatures and fancy color stuff are very impressive if you never played Halo back in 2001.
Posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 10:53 pm in Action, Five Point Review by ryan
Obviously there haven’t yet been enough Sherlock Holmes adaptations. The world desperately needed a new one, with Robert Downey Jr. as the star. Here are five points about this most recent effort.
1) For some inexplicable reason the writers have re-imagined Holmes as a filthy drunk instead of Doyle’s prim-and-proper but typically coked-out sleuth; the result is something like a bleary-eyed CSI operative with a phony British accent running around Victorian London.
2) Watson, rather than being a competent medical doctor and inferior detective, appears to have deductive reasoning skills that rival Holmes’s own, causing us to ask: to whom is Holmes going to explain that this is all elementary (we realize that quip is not actual Doyle, but it’s closer to canon than most of the other stuff in this film)? Or, worse, who needs Holmes if Watson is such a stud?
3) Three words: Michael Bay Explosions! No, seriously. Oh, and rapid-fire, ADD-inducing editing during fight scenes, which seem downright out of place. Truly, Guy Ritchie is to directing movies as Simon Ritchie was to playing bass.
4) The “evil symbol” in Lord Blackwood’s grimoire thing which Holmes later (sort of) draws on the floor during some weird ritual which is never really explained, looks suspiciously like the Sigil of Baphomet. The Sigil of Baphomet which was originally drawn up around 1968. Why is this important? It isn’t. It’s just stupid.
5) There’s a mystery here? Are you sure? Well…what is it? I know who the bad guy is, they gave that away in the first ten minutes. What do you mean he came back from the dead!? How’d he get out of the tomb? He pasted the door together with honey!? That’s just ridiculous, I don’t believe you. What do you mean he has a nefarious plot to take over the world? Shut up and pass the popcorn.
Posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 1:35 am in Action, Animation, Comedy, Five Point Review by ryan
George Clooney stars as a British fox in this 2009 film adaptation of a classic Roald Dahl children’s novel. Here are five points to consider.
1) Virtually all the inherent Britishness of Dahl’s work is inexplicably set aside or Americanized, with the main characters all very much from this side of the pond in slang and mannerisms, and the only remaining traces lying in the accents of the evil farmers.
2) In reality, this is less an adaptation of the widely beloved tale and more Wes Anderson jacking off all over the pages and then asking if you want to pay $10 to smell it—the inexplicable and inexcusable whole-cloth manufacturing of a martial arts enthusiast character speaks volumes, both about Anderson’s contempt for his source material and his pandering to an American audience that apparently feasts on that kind of crap.
3) Setting aside the wanton rape of one of Dahl’s best books, the animation is really rather good and the story flows along at a decent and entertaining clip.
4) As though rural British musicians channel Appalachia, Anderson treats us to a banjo-powered ditty outlining the exploits of Mr. Fox from the perspective of the farmers; the song, performed by English talent Jarvis Cocker, is entertaining in and of itself, but the idea that such a thing would spring naturally from the British countryside is highly suspect and, at best, incongruous.
5) Had Anderson merely ripped off the underlying concept and set this tale in Kentucky or Kansas, rather than pretending it is in any way related to Dahl’s book, this movie would be an order of magnitude easier to watch.
Posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 8:41 pm in Site Meta-News by ryan
After a three-year hiatus, the movie review site nobody ever read or had even heard of is making a comeback, with new and improved and innovative features like the Five Point Review, which probably isn’t any of those things I just said, but is an easy way to review a movie without doing a lot of tedious writing and thinking.
The idea here is to provide succinct yet descriptive reviews, so that a reader can quickly and easily decide whether he or she might be interested in seeing a particular film without having to trudge through some pretentious critic’s nauseating, self-aggrandizing horse shit, written more with an eye toward showing you how much they know about film than telling you whether the movie sucks.
