Posts Tagged ‘subliminal’
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Dec28
I know I said last week that I was taking this week off. But, truthfully, with SO many good movies in theater right now, I couldn’t resist tossing this one into the mix.
Uh, yeah. Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem. Great movie.
Okay, it’s no Bridge Over the River Kwai, but it was a film I had been eager to see despite me deep-seeded loathing of the first Aliens Vs. Predator. Don’t ask me why. I’m a glutton for punishment.
I went and saw the film Wednesday night after everyone went to bed at my house. Cami had no interest in seeing it for obvious reasons, so it made it easy for me to get out of the house for a while. Believe me, after the holidays, I needed the time alone.
As far as my reactions to the movie are concerned, let me give it a left-handed compliment:
“It’s better than the first one.”
I had high hopes for AVP:R and a lot of that had to do with the ultra-violent red band trailer released in August. Watching that, I thought for sure that the movie was going to correct the mistakes of its misbegotten PG-13 predecessor. Well, it does that and then some. And then it rapes what’s left. Right before it pees on it.
This movie doesn’t know where the line is and that’s either a good thing or a bad thing depending on where your moral compass is pointing. NO ONE gets off light in this film. An 8 year-old gets tagged with a face hugger in the first five minutes. Once the aliens start multiplying, people are dying left and right. Stoners you meet in a pawn shop get their heads blown off by a Predator five minutes after you meet them. The alien queen stumbles into a hospital maternity ward and impregnates already pregnant women with eggs. Drooling over a nursery over crying babies, you know there is some twisted thinking at work here.
I’m not going to bother getting into the plot. There isn’t one. The human characters in the film are cardboard cutouts. The ex-con, the troubled teen, the military chick, the well-meaning sheriff. So what? They all become cannon fodder.
The movie is dark – not just in terms of content but in it’s lighting as well. don’t mind if you’re going to turn out the lights to make things scary, but at least sit the camera down for more than five seconds so I can focus on what I’m supposed to be looking at. In the film’s third act, it’s starts raining like cats and dogs (of course) and by that point, it’s nearly impossible to see anything.
AVP:R is a film that seems almost designed around cutting a good trailer. There are a ton of little moments that make the film interesting, but nothing that ties everything together. At this point, the franchise would be better served by taking the action off Earth and maybe setting it in the future again.
The other thing the franchise needs is a throw down between its monsters that lasts more than 5 minutes. In the middle of AVP:R, there’s a sequence in a storm drain that shows promise as the Predator is surrounded and fights off a small gang of aliens. But it’s over before it even starts. It leave you thinking, “The last battle must be a real knockout!” and then it comes and it’s basically a slap fest.
Think about great kung-fu movies where two guys would fight for 20 minutes. We need something like that. If your movie uses the word “VERSUS” in it’s title, we demand it.
Complaints aside, am I glad I went? Sure. My curiosity would have gotten the better of me at some point anyway. This is the kind of nerd stuff I *have* to see. But if you’re not a fan of the characters, you’re not going to find anything redemptive about the film at all.
That’s all for now. I hope everyone had a good holiday and I’ll see you back here on Monday!
Have a great weekend!
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Ah, it feels good to get back in the swing of things.
Real quick, thanks to Wes Molebash, Brandon J. Carr and Clay & Hampton Yount covering for me last week while I was away helping to see my Dad through his open heart surgery. I took off Monday as well and filled in with a review of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull. We were having some site isues on Monday, so it was posted late.
For those of you who are wondering, we brought Dad home on Sunday, less than a week after his operation. Everything went better than expected. They were able to repair my Dad’s mitral valve and he was out of the ICU in less than 24 hours. I was amazed that they had him up on his feet and walking so soon after surgery.
Right now Dad is at home, building his strength back up. Even the little things wipe him out completely. But, fortunately, we found that he doesn’t have to do physical therapy and only needs to walk on a daily basis to help build him back up again. After 6 weeks, he’ll be clear to go back to work part time.
Everything leading up to the surgery was pretty scary. There was a lot of invariables. Turns out the surgery was the easy part. It’ll be a long road to recovery, but my Dad’s young age plays to his advantage and I know he’ll be up and around in no time.< I wanted to reiterate my thanks to everyone who sent positive messages of support. I really appreciated them. I wish I could respond to everyone individually. But, at this point, I'm just trying to get caught up. Thanks again. It means a great deal to me. ... Back to movies, I was able to catch Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull Friday night before Cami and I left for Rochester to visit my Dad. We left Henry with my in-laws for the weekend and it was a nice break for the two of us. As I mentioned in the review, I liked the film. I left feeling entertained and that the film - at least partially - lived up to the hype. HOWEVER, I'm not turning a blind eye to some of the more ostentatious "WTF" moments. Most notably during the jungle chase when Shia LaBeouf character gets knocked off a moving vehicle and gets tangled up in some hanging vines. In true, implausible fashion, it’s not long before he extracts himself from the situation by mimicking the CGI monkeys that have surrounded him by swinging vine to vine, Tarzan style. I turned to Cami during that scene and say “Boy, you can really see George Lucas’s Ewok-lovin’ mitts all over this one!”
There’s been a lot of hullaballoo on the internet about these credibility straining moments in KotCS and some of them I’m willing to give a pass on. But I haven’t talked to ANYONE who thought that vine-swinging sequence with the monkeys was kosher.
It’s symptomatic with the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach Spielberg took to the film. Truthfully, that whole jungle chase sequence is a perfect example. It’s not enough to have a chase sequence. You have to have a chase sequence where people are constantly falling off the roof of the car, rear-ending each other, throwing passengers from one car to the other, firing hood-mounted machine guns at each other, engaging in a 50 MPH sword fight with each other, nearly ramming each other off steep cliffs before finally ending up in a river and plunging down three impossibly large waterfalls.
Oh, yeah – and monkeys who know the difference between the greaser good guy and the Soviet dominatrix bad guy and will help in a fight.
Truthfully, if you want to talk overblown, don’t forget the CG gophers in the opening sequence of the movie. I don’t know why real gophers couldn’t have been used. CG gophers strip credibility from the film when their inclusion offers nothing of value. Do we REALLY need a CG gopher to give Harrison Ford a quizzical look after a harrowing escape? REALLY? Because guess what? That shot just cost $50,000.
It’s bloated and wasteful and indicative of filmmakers over reliance on this technology. Especially when the director vows up and down to use practical effects whenever possible in a year’s worth of interviews. If you’re going to use CG, at least make it so I can’t TELL if it’s CG!
I’m kind of beating up on the film a little bit. Actually, a lot – especially for a movie I professed to enjoy. I started to fall into the same trap during last night’s recording of The Triple Feature. If you missed that show, you can download it here. I encourage you to do so. We had a very lively exchange. I had a lot of fun.
Beyond that, I’ll leave you with an illustration I found over at the Digital Pimp Online forum. It comes from illustrator Jolly Jack and I think it sums things up nicely…
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