Let the Games Begin! A Post About Upcoming Movies

Two months until the Hunger Games movie. Squee! They'd better not ruin it like Stefen Fangmeier and 20th Century Fox did with Eragon. Grrr. But it looks promising. I do like Josh Hutcherson (Peeta Mellark) and Donald Sutherland (President Snow), and Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss Everdeen) is supposed to be a good actress as well. I am also aware of the making of The Hobbit. I can't get the tune right for the dwarves' song in the trailer, yet neither can I stop attempting to sing it. Christopher Nolan is coming out with a new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, which I really want to see. Only there's one unforgivable fact:

I've never seen any Batman film or even read the comics. Shoot me. I am interested, I just never found the time - that and I can't sit still with rentals (Tim Burton's Batman with Michael Keaton), and when the last Nolan one came out (The Dark Knight), I was thirteen and my parents thought I was "too young" even thought it was rated PG-13. THIRTEEN. Gahh.... Anyway, I'll try and get to it eventually. My parents didn't let me see Lord of the Rings in theaters, or Mr. Burton's version of Sweeney Todd. They think I'm younger than I am, apparently. I think I might just do a post of censorship. I've not done that one yet, have I? I don't recall one.

Battleship. What can I say? It's not so much that they're making a movie BASED ON A FREAKING STRATEGY GAME, but that it's from the makers of Transformers. Oh, lovely! I bet it's another film primarily based around special effects, no sense of plot coherence, stupid characters, and the charming message that women are sex objects - the last one being presented to a target young audience of males and females who may grow to believe this is true. The Three Stooges? Alvin and the Chipmunks AGAIN? Neither looked very appealing; Stooges just looked like a recycled excuse to remake something already existent, which looked unfunny enough (eye-pokes get old, and that looked like the whole joke of the entire movie). Alvin has been stretched so thin I won't see it (double meaning intended). Tintin looks excellent and I cannot wait to see it. I just saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows yesterday with a friend, and it was superb. And I hear Janet Evanovich's novel One for the Money is being adapted! Haven't read that one, but I did read her nonfiction book How I Write, which contained samples from her fiction. She's rather funny. Then there are the clueless-but-confident directors who can't stop making the same mistakes, particularly Roland Emmerich and Tyler Perry. I don't know or care what's next for them, but they can't seem to stop making film after painfully terrible film. Michael Bay...don't get me started. But Tim Burton and one of the other producers of Shane Acker's gem 9 are producing a movie based on a novel I have yet to read with a very odd title: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Yeah.... But I trust them. It sounds goofy, and might be, but I'm rooting for them to make it count. Two movies about Snow White are being made: Mirror, Mirror - which looks funny - and Snow White and the Huntsman, which looks more serious and deliciously dark. I want to see both. And there's a remake of Jack the Giant Killer, which looks cool, but I haven't actually seen the old one. The last few mentioned titles remind me of this really awesome miniseries I saw when I was nine or so called The Tenth Kingdom. I need to re-see it, but it was amazing, as I recall. That's enough for now.

Au revoir!

- Lewis

Critical Enjoyment

"A film is--or should be--more like music than fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later." - Stanley Kubrick

"I don't take movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache." - Bette Davis

"You're only as good as your last picture." - Marie Dressler

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I think there's a difference between types of good and bad movies. One is whether it is well-written, acted, directed, etc., and the other is enjoyment. Sure, they're contributory to one another, but one doesn't entirely change the other. For example, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides had a few plot holes (and I'd  have to give it a C rather than my earlier B), yet it still was funny and exciting. Same with the newer Star Wars films, Eragon (the movie), Van Helsing, and the Inheritance books as well (which include Eragon and don't have bad plots, just somewhat unoriginal ones). There is a book I had to read for school called Anthem (by Ayn Rand) that was terribly lazy in its plot, had ridiculously blown-out ideas, and took itself way too seriously. Not something I'd read for pleasure, yet it somehow stood the test of time and is for some reason hailed as a "philosophical" classic.

Sometimes what we watch for fun isn't award material, but still fun. Also I wanted to mention that a movie based on a book can be unfaithful and still good, if done well in its own right (such as several Dracula films, Stardust, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory [the old one], Frankenstein [1931], etc.) I haven't read The Lovely Bones, but I enjoyed the adaptation. Stanley Kubrick's version of Stephen King's contemporary horror classic The Shining is disliked by many who have read the novel, yet I and many others love it (funnily enough, despite my being a King fan, I haven't read the book). I've heard similar things about Secret Window, another Stephen-King-based movie derived from "Secret Window, Secret Garden" - a novella featured in his collection Four Past Midnight. But Johnny Depp is in it and he's great. Plus I recall the writing and directing being interesting. But who knows? It has been a while.

James Cameron's Avatar is often accused of relying on special effects to tell a story. I disagree. While the story may not have been the most spectacular tale ever spun, there was not much wrong with it. I would say that there are two directors who do use effects to tell a story: Michael Bay (Transformers 1, 2, and 3 - please don't make a 4) and Roland Emmerich (2012, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow). At least Mr. Emmerich does not include as much sexism and racism as Mr. Bay. I think. I don't actually recall, but I won't willingly watch them again, although the effects in 2012 were at least entertaining.

But some movies are just torture to watch, like reading a phone book or tax records in place of a novel. These include Michael Bay films, any parody along the lines of Epic Movie (though I saw part of one Scary Movie installment, and it seemed OK), Son of Godzilla, Land of the Lost (Will Ferrell one), and anything by Tyler Perry. The reason I dislike Perry's movies is that they seem to all resolve in luck, meaning something JUST HAPPENS to go perfectly out of the protagonist's control, like a rich relative he or she didn't know about dying (Meet the Browns, which I was forced to watch once). And the humor is repetitive.

But don't worry, I do like plenty of movies. Just pointing out the not-enjoyable ones for me. I also have to wonder at people who base their opinions off of those of critics, such as my maternal grandmother. Many people I know didn't like the new Clash of the Titans, whereas I thought it was better than the original - a rare case with me. Maybe I missed something.

The point is, people should be free-thinking on media, not love everything but not hate everything either (like someone I know does [the latter]), and take in multiple factors. Don't ruin a movie for yourself because of a couple plot holes. And at the same time, look out for them! And don't love a movie because it's critically good but not enjoyable.

To quote a movie I don't remember the goodness of, but remember loving the book it was based on:

"Yes! That is all!" (Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellen [also Gandalf], The Golden Compass, 2007 - based on the novel by Philip Pullman)

----Lewis

Movie Review: Transformers (2007)

My gods, did I loathe this film. It's gone foggy now - I saw it when I was twelve - but let me say this to Michael Bay: There is a difference between plot and special effects! Same to Roland Emmerich. Now, I hear Mr. Bay is a great person in life: my sister tells me that he found an online video of a lady throwing puppies into a river and offered ten thousand dollars to whoever found out who the lady was. All the same, he sucks as a director. Good person, bad artist. The opposite goes for Roman Polanski, I hear. He makes some pretty good films sometimes (The Ghost Writer; Rosemary's Baby), but in life he raped a sixteen-year-old girl.

I digress. I save my "F" rating for true bombs, such as Epic Movie (2007), but this movie did nothing for me. I may be young, but I know an awful movie when I see one.

Final grade: D