Super 8 will probably end up being the kids banded together against a common enemy movie of this generation. And that’s cool. It was pretty good. Not great, but nothing as particularly bad either. The movie starts pretty much with a funeral for a young boy’s mother. It is the summer of 1979. We then follow the young boy and his 4 other friends as they attempt to film a zombie movie. They also manage to convince a young girl to join the cast. As they film at a train station, an air force train speeds by, but is derailed by a man who drives onto the track and collides with it. In the confusion of the crash, the young boy sees something escape the wreckage. That’s when things start getting weird. All the dogs in the town run off into the surround counties, electrical items go missing, and some people start going missing. The kids find themselves wrapped up in the center of the strange supernatural thriller.
The movie was entertaining. In typical J.J. Abhrams fashion, we don’t see the monster until much later in the film, with only flashes and blurry reflections to give us any idea of what the kids are dealing with. There is a good sense of tension because of this. And while there are some cheesy moments between the ever distant father and the young boy, there was fairly decent acting all around.
In the end, there really isn’t anything to rave about from the movie. It was good all around. My favorite part was probably the movies ability to make you really feel like it was 1979. At the same time, it’s hard to write a review about a movie that was just pretty good. There isn’t anything to rip apart yet at the same time, I can’t really go on at length about anything, either.
I give the movie a solid 4 exploding trains out of 5.
X-men: First Class was awesome. And while it may offend the distinct tastes of some super geeks, it did a fairly decent job of introduce Prof. X, Mystique, Magneto, Beast, and various others. Set in and around the Cuban Missile Crisis, the movie dealt primarily with what the X-men comics deal with on a daily basis, human acceptance, self acceptance, and how to deal with change. And also explosions. A lot of explosions. The movie begins with some footage from the first X-men movie, of a child, Eric Lehnsherr, being separated from his family in a concentration camp in 1942 Nazi Germany. As he is pulled away, he freaks out and starts bending metal until he’s knocked cold. Then the new movie begins by showing this event catching the eye of a very creepy German Kevin Bacon, who, I have to say, was very good in this movie. Meanwhile, in America, we see a young and walking Charles Xavier meet a young, and very blue Mystique. Fast forward, and through a series of events surrounding Kevin Bacon’s character, Sebastien Shaw, eventually Charles and Eric must team up with a group of teens with unrefined powers to stop him. The movie is genuinely good…not great, but probably good enough to breath some life into the series after the very unfortunate X-men: Last Stand. Everyone does a good job as the characters that everyone has been reading about since the mid 60’s, and really, the only one I couldn’t enjoy was January Jones as Emma Frost, but it wasn’t enough to seriously harm any part of the movie. In the end, I hope they make another X-men movie. I know the material exists to make about a dozen more so they should just keep cranking them out. 3.5 floating submarines out of 5. Also…a couple of pleasant cameos.
Hangover 2 flows exactly like Hangover 1…like, exactly. And while the series wasn’t exactly inventive in its plot points, it still remained consistently funny. I was laughing throughout. It takes place in Bangkok, and for a comedy, it had some surprisingly pretty shots of Thailand. The movie starts with Stu getting married to a girl from Thailand and after flying the original group out to just outside Bangkok, along with his fiancee’s younger brother, we discover that his bride to be’s father does not like Stu. Two nights before the wedding, the wolf pack convinces Stu to go to the beach to have a single drink in front of a bonfire and thats when the mayhem breaks loose. What follows includes a drug dealing monkey, Paul Giamatti, a severed finger, an uzi, and a the now infamous Tyson tattoo (which, by the way, the tattoo artist’s lawyers won out slightly, and while it can remain in the movie, it must be changed for all of the DVD’s.) The movie was genuinely funny, with enough surprises to keep you entertained, despite you knowing pretty much exactly what was going to happen in the end. It was, however, a far more dark and perverse journey than than its predecessor, though that seemed to have paid off. I give it 4 smoking monkeys out of 5. With a bit of innovation in the plot progression, this movie could have been as great as the first.
Resident Evil 4: After We Stopped Caring
Quick recap and then the review begins. There are zombies. Lots of them. They’ve taken over the world. There are very few humans left. And some of the humans that are still there are from the Umbrella Corporation. They’re bad guys.
That’s honestly all you need to know. Oh… and that there is a clone army of Milla Jovovich. And it’s the Matrix. Actually, the movie takes the worst parts of the second and third Matrix installments.
This is what bothers me. I genuinely enjoyed the first two, and could even find good things in the third. But this one. This one was kind of… crazy. While I do not hold a grudge against a clone army of Milla Jovovich, in fact, I might choose to celebrate this part of the movie the most, I found this movie moved too much like some of the crazier Japanese games. This is great if you like Japanese games, but the general movie-going audience would be confused by not only the strange shifts in reality but also the concepts of accepting weird things happening without explanation. A super huge, nearly unbeatable hammer man, gamers would know as The Exectuioner, is pretty much just thrown into the movie without explanation. In the video games, you don’t need logic to throw a boss in, but in a movie, they need to be fleshed out if nothing more than saying, this is this guy, he is here now, now he is dead.
In the first 45 minutes, they kill about 5 zombies. This is a zombie film. I came to see rotten flesh explode. The even more annoying thing is that this is the the fourth movie. They don’t have to set up that there are zombies. We know. They don’t have to establish the main character. We’ve already met her. We don’t need to find out why she’s an extreme badass with the use of a thousand of weapons. We’ve seen her slay thousands with a rusty pipe and a bazooka. GET TO THE KILLING!
Another very weird thing is the casting. Mostly alright save for really just one guy. One of the plot points is they are in a prison, and have to figure out how to get out of the prison. Guess who has the only way of doing that. Wentworth Miller. I’m sure not many people know who that is just by name but I’ll tell you show he stars in. Prison Break. The man who is going to get them out of a prison, made his fortune… getting people out of prisons. Typecast much?
But in reality, the worst and best part of this movie is the cinematography. The good news, it was filmed entirely in 3D from the start, so there is no half assed attempt to redo it in 3D rendering the whole thing a blurry mess. The 3D looked amazing. It worked out so well, things blowing up out of the screen and things flying out at the audience were exactly what 3D was meant to do. It was great. Sadly, while the whole movie was shot in 3D, it also felt like 80% of it was shot in slow-motion. For an hour and a half long movie, the movie felt like three hours, and not the good kind of three hours. There are only so many times I can see people dramatically flicking their hair to face an offscreen foe as they definitely lift their shotgun up and fire off a couple of rounds in a cool echoey kind of fashion. It’s honestly just a rehashing without many good things added to the series. Which is sad. I like zombies. I like hot women blowing up zombies. I like hot women blowing up zombies with huge guns that shoot quarters. I like all these things, but they could not save this movie. 2.5 crazy toothed inside out dogs out of 5
With all the new animated movies being turned out of the Hollywood factory like so many cadium painted Chinese toys, one, that is me, has begun to see a trend forming in both the style and structure of most of these films. Though Pixar occasionally mixes it up, the majority of kids movies are starting to feel all pretty much the same. But we can’t let Hollywood stand alone in cashing in on this current phenom. No, I feel like I must share my speculations with our QuinnQuips readers, of whom there are few. For those of you unfamiliar with my stylings, know that this will involve quite a bit of reading. We shall begin…at the beginning.
First, come up with a clever name for your movie. It’ll be your real first selling point, so think hard. It doesn’t really have to do much with the movie outside of sticking with a general theme. My example will be alligator themed, so I’m whipping out the title, “Smile of a different Color” Kind of long, but if you can see it in big white letters that suddenly get chomped up revealing the credits, the movie has practically already made itself.
Second, characters. Your main character should probably be a mean tempered but lovable out of place thing. Like I said, alligators, and while I prefer Wally, this is neither about a foppish amphibian nor a cute cognizant robot. No…we’ll keep is simple. Al…Al E. Gator. He’ll be a little chubby…big eyes, and then we’ll exaggerate something. Maybe he’ll have a really big set of teeth, maybe we’ll go t’other way with it and lop off a big part of his tail. Now even got a reason for him to be so angry and bitter.
Next we need a dopey sidekick. He or she may actually be better, and generally if you follow the rule of three (the rule that more than three characters have an infinite amount of ways to react and treat each other) you should probably stick to more than just one. They are more often your comic relief. They don’t really need to talk, but if you’re going to make them talk, make them idiots. So ours can be stupid lizards. Multiple shapes, sizes and colors tend to appeal to kids, so we’ll make a fat short red one, a big strong green one, and a thing tall yellow one.
Now we need a bad guy. While classic Disney villians were sinister and often times even scary, kids these days want a neutral villain or even a goofy one. A disembodied AI who just wants things to work they way they should, or a silly rival out for the same thing as our hero. For this, I think we’ll go with a decrepit old snapping turtle got a nasty bit and an even nastier attitude. We’ll throw a couple of dumb turtle henchmen in with him to fill out the evil roster.
Then comes the story. We have our players and now we need our heart-wrenching story that really grabs onto those tear ducts and goes on a near millipede like tickle attack. It doesn’t really need to be complicated, it’s only for kids, we’re not looking for something like Memento Jr. How about Al eats meat, but when his home is destroyed by a developing suburb, he’s forced to move to a new swamp, where the alligators are all vegetarians. People will like that, it’ll make them feel good that he’s only eating grass. None of the super violent stuff, except slapstick. You can burn a critter alive if its for the sake of shtick.
So now we got Al trying to learn to be a veggie in a swamp, and he’s struggling, and now we bring in our old beligerent snapping turtle, and he’s thinkin this is the most unnatural thing that he ever done saw, so he has it in for our now lovable scaly buddy. Have some sort of betrayal where it seems Al ate on of the of the lizards, have everybody turn on him only to see him save the day 5 minutes later, dooming his crotchety foe to some sort of prolonged torture as a child’s ride and there you have it. A movie. Nearly in it’s entirety, save for one thing.
CRAZY DANCE PARTY!!!!!!!!!! Yea…they’re necessary. The movie can’t end until our cold blooded friend strikes a hot pose on the dance floor with all his new pals.
And there you have it, a simple movie, I made up in literally 10 minutes teaching you the core tenants of an animated kids movie. Hell, you can even through in some sort of femi girl alligator with some suggestive, but not overly sexist curves. It’s that easy friends. A film with some heart, some hilarity, and even a curious look at how some stubborn old southern folks need to accept the change that the new century has brought. Truly, a movie for all.
Early Bird Special: Patrick Jean’s “Pixels” is an animated short about an average day in the life of NYC (i.e., the city is attacked and partially destroyed by old-school video game characters).
[gamefreaksnz.]
This is awesome and horrifying. Awesofying.
Leave it to some random guy in New York to screw up for all of us. This is why they have those special recycle places for TVs, dummy.
Video Game Health Care Bill: 1-Ups for all? That’s socialism! This video is diggable by clicking HERE.
Jeff and I wrote this in record time after that whole IRL health care thing happened last week, and I’m really happy with the way it came out. Big ups to Mike Parker for doing a great job putting it together.
Just finished this early this morning. Thanks to Jeff and Kevin for help with all the specific notes along the way.
Hilarity and Politicarity. I love the protesters.
Logicomix: An Epic Search for The Truth
By: Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou
Drawing: Alecos Papadatos
Color: Annie Di Donna
Logicomix is an intriguing combination of history and fictional narrative in comic book form. The main story follows famous logician, Bertrand Russell, is his life-long quest to build the foundation of mathematics and in his relentless search for truth. Russell’s tale is narrated by Russell himself through flashbacks in a speech that he is giving at a public lecture in an American college about the role of logic in human affairs. This central narrative transitions in and out where we witness the two writers of the book, and the artists, sitting in their studio or walking around modern day Greece discussing the themes of the book or occasionally explaining certain situations.
Logicomix begins with writer Apostolos Doxiadis introducing himself to the reader and explaining his thoughts and intentions upon beginning writing the book. Soon he discontinues his break of the “fourth-wall” and the story kicks off with the introduction of the artists and Christos Papadimitriou, a professor of computer science at Berkeley, who they have brought in to help with the more “logic-heavy” parts of the book. The narrative of the writers and artists progresses such that writer Doxiadis, and artists Papadatos and Di Donna have been working on this project for some time and have brought in Christos who needs to be “brought up to speed” (coincidentally bringing us, the reader, up to speed as well.)
The Bertram Russell narrative concentrates certainly on Russell’s mathematic endeavors but it also highlights many other themes in his life. The main other theme is the extreme search for logic and the connection it seems to have with madness. Russell has a many run-ins with madness starting in his childhood and continuing on into his later life, which leads him paranoid about the stability of his own mind. Themes like this that appear in the story lead the readers to begin to think of Russell not as a historical figure but instead as an actual character in a story. This creates for a book that straddles a fascinating line between what we commonly think of when we consider comic books and often what we think of when we contemplate historical fiction or even biographies.
The fictional bits of the story are things like when Russell meets certain famous logicians that he didn’t actually meet in his real life (such as Gottlob Frege, Henri Poincare, David Hilbert, etc…) or in the invention of certain causes of the thinking of Russell himself. However, though these logicians didn’t necessarily meet in real life, they were inspired by each other’s works in a time where mathematic and logical thinking were making extreme strides. For those who aren’t really familiar with the subjects discussed, you’ll find that the concepts that are mentioned are explained extremely clearly, and, you’ll walk away knowing a lot more about the time line of these discoveries. It is a very clear illustration of how one idea led to the next idea, which then led to the next idea. And all of this information is presented, as I said in a very clear way in tandem with very crisp artwork. The illustrations are clever and simple and work very well contrasted with the sometimes heavy subject matter. Though occasionally when the subject matter is less complicated the artwork tends to be too simple and not as appealing (if you’re interested in this “phenomena” I suggest reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud – he has a fascinating explanation for considering the pairing of complicated language with simple imagery or vice versa. It is also just a great book for those interested in making comics or just comic fans in general).
The transitions in and out of Russell’s flashbacks or from Russell’s story to the story of the writers and artists are always extremely and surprisingly fluid. Although it seems like often the transitions from Russell’s narration to the creator’s conversations are often just a preemptive strike to silence the potential critiques of the readers. One character will bring up an objection to something in the story that the reader might just be thinking of and another writer will “conveniently” explain it away. Or, often the story will break to explain an idea further, which certainly is helpful to those readers who don’t understand something or aren’t familiar with certain terms but somehow this seems too obvious a way of helping the reader along. The fact that the comic needs to appeal to the “common reader” makes certain things necessary (like stopping the story to “subtly” explain a concept) that interrupt the objective of it to be very much a fictional narrative and not a fact based or historical account.
All in all I think that this comic book brings up many interesting ideas, not just in reflection of the interesting life and ideas of Bertram Russell and those other famous thinkers mentioned, but about what comic books can do and how we can meld genres together to create something that displays subjects in a new light. Logicomix gives you an example of the good and the bad things that tend to arise from this endeavor.
I give it 5 genius philosophers turned into odd comic book characters out of 10.
-Sarah Q.
Over the Christmas movie seen, Hollywood released as slew of movies, as is their right…for they are Hollywood. But Hollywood’s got a new wing man…and his name is Tom Waits. And by new, I mean that he’s been around for a while, and been in several movies, but he came out in two different films.
The Book of Eli was a surprisingly decent film. And Tom Waits was in it….for like 7 minutes…as a engineer and shopkeeper. But still…APPEARANCE. Other than that, the movie was just a surprise. Great performances by Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, and Mila Kunis. The background to the story was nothing new. Mankind forges their way through another apocalypse. Big deal. We’ve done it like, how many times? We’re so totally prepared for complete annihilation. Ironically, we’re still not prepared for Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
I give it 3 and a half shaky cannibals out of 5.
The other movie Tom Waits was in was the breathtaking film the Imaginarum of Dr. Parnassus. Now I cannot stress how wonderful this movie was. Sure it was Heath Ledger’s last film, and yes he died in the middle of it, so the end seems, to most, if they build the movie solely of Ledger’s performance, to be cobbled together. I’m not gonna lie, Ledger did an amazing job, but this movie is so much more than him. The concept, the art, the oddity. It all came together to make a great Terry Gilliam film. And Tom Waits as a shady, tux wearing devil? He was literally born to play no other role. It was brilliant. He fit perfectly. Between the image, his voice, and the character he portrayed, I’m convinced the Tom Waits may actually be the devil to begin with. I could elaborate more, but I won’t. 5 throat flutes out of 5. Take that as you please.
-Dave Q.
Around the same time as the release of these movies Tom Waits came out with a live album called Glitter and Doom. This album is composed of tracks recorded on his 2008 tour in different venues and edited together to sound like one concert. Tracks come from concerts in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Tulsa, Knoxville, Milan, Jacksonville, etc., but come together amazingly well. The sound quality is consistently great throughout.
This is a must have for any Tom Waits fan. It is difficult to describe what happens to these songs when they are played live. Take for example one of my favorite Tom Waits songs, I’ll Shoot The Moon, the recording of which was taken from a concert in Paris. The original of this song is on his 1993 album The Black Rider and has a light musical background with that weird eerie circus motif that many Tom Waits listeners are familiar with. The beautiful part comes when this music is paired with the crooning quality of Waits’ voice as it almost stretches for certain notes and sings others perfectly. The live version takes everything interesting about this song and ramps it up to 11. The swaying quality of the music is more noticeable but more importantly Waits pushes his voice further. It seems now like he was holding back in the studio recording. The beautifully odd crooning quality that can found only in his voice is turned up and makes the song exceedingly delightful and whimsical. Highlighted by the fantastic section in the middle of the song where, in his gorgeously gravelly voice you hear, “Ooooh, baby. You know that I love you…So why don’t you caaaaaallllll me? You know the number! How many times have I given you my number?…” This does appear in the original but, once again, is about twenty times more enjoyable out of studio. Other highlights include a really great track where Waits has combined his songs Lucinda and Ain’ Goin’ Down to the Well No Mo’. As well as a version of Fannin Street that, if you have two ears and a heart, can’t NOT make you want to cry. Also another bonus (if you purchase the Bonus Track edition) is that you get a whole 35 minute track of Tom Waits just telling stupid jokes and ridiculous stories called “Tom Tales”. Who hasn’t wanted to hear Tom Waits just talk for a while?
Basically, check out this album to marvel, once again, in the versatility and amazing-ness that is Tom Waits’ music. Don’t worry that all you’re doing is buying music that you own already except now it is all in worse sound quality and has bits of clapping in between tracks, which is often something that comes to my mind when I purchase live albums. The songs that you know and love are given a whole knew existence in this one, it is definitely not a waste of money.
I give it 10 drunken pianos out of 10.
-Sarah Q.
So…this may be the Gorillaz third “studio” album, but in reality, it’s about their 8th. And it shows. Plastic Beach is near perfect emalgimation of rap, techno, rock, and R&B. While most of the songs feature some sort of guest, including, but not limited to, Snoop Dogg, Mos Def, Lou Reeds, De La Soul, and Hypnotic Brass, every song on this CD is purely Gorillaz.
While Demon Days had it’s moment of dark and crazy, Plastic Beach tends to stick to mellow and strange. It’s like a Burton film put out in the sun, given a mojito, and a it’s choice of cigar and champange or a blunt and some pancakes.
When I heard this album was dropping, I immediately pre-ordered it on iTunes. And low and behold, Monday at 11:59:59, I get an email from iTunes saying the I can now go download the album. Along with all the songs though, I got the music video for “Stylo” and a link to the new website, which insane and deserves a check out. The video for “Stylo” was interesting. It was basically a car chase on route 66 with the Gorillaz, a cop car, and Bruce Willis. Seriously. Die Hard star Bruce Willis.
All in all. I love the album. I’ve barely not been listening to it all week. Personal favorites include “Rhinestone Eyes” and “Some Kind of Nature.” Seriously. Pick this thing up and enjoy. You deserve it. 5 Crunchy Jellyfish out of 5
