Category: Cinema

Ben and I went to see The Hunger Games today.

Disclaimer: I have never read the book(s).

Overall I thought it was a good film, but the underlying story was terribly depressing. It was one of the most dystopian futures I've encountered in fiction, and I have no desire whatsoever to ever live in a world like that. I mean, what kind of society sacrifices its children…for entertainment?

The disparity between the haves and the have-nots seemed to spring directly from a Republican wet dream.

Josh Hutcherson does not look good as a blonde.

Thankfully it wasn't as graphically violent as it could've been. Guess they need to keep that rating so they can actually get their target audience into the theater.

A film based on the second book of the trilogy is due for release in November of next year.

 

But I still want to see it.

Meh.

Saw it yesterday. It was entertaining. Neither Ben or I felt cheated for spending $5.00 on a matinee showing. We might have felt different had we paid full price.

Dark and brooding, based on the interesting—if somewhat unbelievable premise that's been floating around the dark conspiracy-ridden corners of the interwebs for years (just Google Apollo 18, 19, or 20)—that the reason we've never been back to the moon is that we encountered something so awful there that it could never be publicly revealed.

It's presented as "real" in the same manner as The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield—in this case the film having been "pieced together from footage anonymously uploaded" to a website.

But the overall believability was immediately diminished for me when I recognized two of the "astronauts" as being actors (Lloyd Owen and Warren Christie) I've seen numerous times before; Christie actually plays a regular character on SyFy's current series Alphas…

Of course, after you see how the movie ends, you immediately find yourself wondering how any of this "real" footage—a lot of it supposedly transferred from 16mm film—ever made it back to earth to begin with. When I looked at Ben and asked that, he just turned to me and raising a finger to his lips said, "Shhh!"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=i5FWusjctuc

I've thought about growing mine back out, but I fear it would be more ironic than iconic…

The Matrix Reloaded

I stumbled upon this mess today on TNT. I saw Reloaded originally on the big screen back in 2003, but I was so disappointed after seeing the original that I almost walked out of the theater on more than one occasion and haven't seen it since. But like a bloody wreck on the side of the freeway, when I happened upon it today I had to stop and look.

Like so many others, after I saw The Matrix I was thrilled to hear there would be two more films in the series. And I had such high hopes for those flicks. The original Matrix was of course outstanding, blowing everyone away by raising the bar on special effects and addressing several heretofore (at least personally) unexamined questions about the nature of what we call reality. The impression I got from Matrix II was that the writers and director only needed a bridge to get to the third act, and the easiest way to do that was to take all the good points of the original and just turn them up to mind-numbing volume, throwing all restraint and subtlety to the wind. I found it pretentious and just plain bad on so many levels: over-long fight sequences (especially the hundred Smiths in the ghetto school yard – hey, if fighting one Smith is good, fighting dozens has to be great, right?), the albino dreadlock twins, the existential mumbo jumbo ramped up to the n-th degree, and the completely unbelievable (even keeping in mind the characters by then knew how to "play" the matrix to its full effect) 101 freeway chase sequence that I didn't think would ever end.

It almost made me wish I was watching it on disk instead of on-air so I could fast forward though those parts.

In all honesty, I did end up flipping between Reloaded and episodes of Movin' Up on TLC (I think the host, Doug Wilson, is kinda cute and I love the way flirts with the gay couples that occasionally appear on the show), and finally abandoned it altogether during the last ten minutes to watch a bit of Breakfast at Tiffany's. Damn, George Peppard was hot back in the day. Sizzlin'. I had a thing for him even when I was a kid. (And he grew old damned gracefully too. Woof. We miss ya, George.)

The only thing worse than The Matrix Reloaded would be the bastard that followed it, The Matrix Revolutions. Ugh. Don't even get me started.

But after Marc and I threw a couple Hamiltons away on Ghost Rider this afternoon, I can say without reservation that it definitely falls squarely in my personal Top 10 list of flicks that should never have seen the light of day. It wasn't so bad that it warranted asking for our money back (I only did that after seeing Nightfall many years ago) but from overhearing comments from fellow movie-goers as the theater emptied, we were definitely not alone in our less-than-favorable opinions.

And a personal note to Nick Cage: Lose. The. Rug. The color's wrong. The style's wrong. Either spend the bucks on a good piece or take a clue from Bruce Willis and just shave it all off, because what you've got going on right now just isn't working.

Maybe it's that whole flaming skull motif the designers were hoping to mirror, but Cage looked dreadful in this flick. Dreadful as in worn-out, washed-up and run over with a tractor.

In my opinion, they should've stayed with the actor who played the young Johnny, Matt Long, and reconfigured the story to reflect the actor's younger age. I mean c'mon…would you rather share a ride on a hog with this:

Or this:

Be honest.

I have to admit, I come with a pre-existing bias. Matt appeared in the short-lived series Jack and Bobby, which had been one of my major guilty pleasures until the WB axed it after only a single season.

I mean, even the bad guy, Blackheart, played by Wes Bentley (who sharp-eyed viewers will recognize as the video-obsessed teenage drug dealer from American Beauty) looks like he'd be more fun in bed on a bike than ol' Nick.

Okay, so my sideburn fetish is rearing its ugly head again. Shoot me.

With all this being said, it was still good to spend some time with Marc, so the afternoon wasn't a total waste…

Marc and I saw Bridge to Terabithia today. Not at all what I was expecting, but a very heartwarming story nonetheless. Despite the fact that children's television is a vast desolate wasteland, it's nice to see that there is some real intelligence and imagination going into children's film.

The flick also has a pretty strong (at least to us 'mos) growing-up-gay subtext that takes a few well-deserved swipes at Christianity along the way. (Marc commented afterward that he wondered why there hasn't been a huge, organized backlash.) Before I saw it, I worried it would be a CGI-heavy mess (à la Pan's Labyrinth), but it turned out that the CGI was used sparingly, and then only to augment the story, not be the story. (George Lucas, are you listening?)

And all I can say about the lead, 15-year old Josh Hutcherson—other than his demonstrated acting ability—is that he is going to be an absolute heart-breaker in about ten years. (Watch out Jake, there's a whole new generation coming up that'll be snapping at your heels in short order.)