Then we come to this evening, opening day for the Hunger Games movie. My wife and I were planning on going out after dinner to do some household shopping and wondering what we’d do afterward. I pulled up the theater’s movie listing, noticed that the Hunger Games was out ³ and the next showing was only 40 minutes away. Seeing as we still had some free movie passes lying around ⁴, we decided to see if we could get in to see it.

We went straight to the theater and the parking lot was looking full. We parked, started walking up to the entrance and noticed what looked like a crowd waiting in line for tickets. We started to mentally prepare ourselves for leaving the theater and finding something else to do with our evening. But as we got closer we released it was just a group of kids hanging out by the doors and there wasn’t really a line at all. We got right in.

My wife decided to get us some water and had me go ahead into the theater to get seats. While there were a fair number of people in the theater already ⁵, it definitely wasn’t packed. My wife came in a few minutes later; we watched the adverts and inane trivia crud the theater always shows and then the movie started.

We watched it all the way through ⁶; and frankly, we’re really glad we were there using our free passes instead of shelling out full ticket price. While I’ve not reread the books yet ⁷, I do remember enough of them to recognize that the story from the first book was heavily squished to fit into the movie’s 142 minutes. It didn’t feel like anything essential was left out; but everything prior to the arena is glossed over to the point that I doubt it made much sense to people who’ve not read the books.

And in the arena scenes are were we come to my biggest problem with the movie; the cinematography. Over the past few years, Hollywood’s gotten on something of a kick of relying heavily on hand-held/shaky camera work, small DoF and motion blur. Presumably their usage is intended to help the audience better engage with the film, either by focusing the audience’s attention on specific parts of the film or by making the audience really feel like they’re there in the film. In any case, if these effects are used well; they can have a profound impact on the film. Unfortunately the Hunger Games does not use them well and the end result is eyestrain, headaches and a lot of time spent looking away from the movie screen.

Overall, I’d say 2/5 stars. I would’ve given it 3, but the shaky camera work and motion blur really bothered me.

The Hunger Games © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

And things just went downhill from there.  True there were moments in the film which were enjoyable, but they were the exceptions not the rule.  I highly recommend staying away from this wretched, steaming pile of poo.

Review: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Like others in this thread, I didn’t care for the camera shake. It wasn’t bad enough to make me leave the theater but it definitely made me queasy. As for the storyline to the movie.… meh. While most of the characters had a good line or two; I didn’t them. Any of them. In fact, I would go so far as to say my main complaint with the movie is one of them might have survived. I would have preferred a clean sweep of character deaths.

In response to the Cloverfield thread on the Whateveresque forums.

Cloverfield © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

First movie had little to no shaky cam. Second movie had enough to annoy me and trigger my wife’s motion sickness. I guess I’ll be renting the third movie some day when the wife’s not around then. Thanks for the warning Les!

In response to SEB 30 Second Movie Reviews: “The Borne Ultimatum.” by Les.

Borne Ultimatum © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

So I am looking forward to seeing this and hopefully it won’t suck like the trailer.

¹ Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King and Silver on a Tree
² I’d give you a direct link to the trailer, but they built their site entirely in flash so there’s no way for me to do so. Apple now has the trailer for The Dark is Rising on their movie trailers page.
³ The main character of the book.

The Dark Is Rising © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Stranger Than Fiction, directed by: Marc Forster
Mark’s Rating: 5 out of 5

When I originally saw the ads and trailers for this movie, I knew I would want to rent it¹. I figured it would be a couple of hours of silliness and that would be it. I never expected that I’d want to add this movie to my collection; but by the time we finished watching it, both my wife² and I want to own it. Besides having a fair amount of silliness, the movie is also very clever. Visually clever in how the sfx crew generated all the overlay graphics to numerically describe Mr. Crick’s life at the beginning of the film. And cleverly written in well… the whole dang movie. Definitely worth watching!

The Prestige, directed by: Christopher Nolan
Mark’s Rating: 4 out of 5

It’s a shame that The Prestige came out at the same time as The Illusionist. If it had come out months/years prior or even after, the movie might have done so much better. As it is, The Prestige is always going to be known as “The other magician movie. You know, the one that came out when The Illusionist did”. The Prestige was an enjoyable, if rather dark, movie and had its own clever twists. But when compared to The Illusionist, it just falls short.

House of Flying Daggers, directed by: Yimou Zhang
Mark’s Rating: 3.75 out of 5

Stunningly beautiful as to be expected of Yimou Zhang, but the story just didn’t click with me. There were parts where it almost seemed like it would, but then the scene changed and those bits were crushed underfoot. Then again, I was pretty exhausted when trying to watch this one, so I’ll probably give it another chance at a later time.

¹ Seriously, who needs to go to the theater for a comedy? The only thing I really want to see on the big screen are action flicks.
² My wife’s expectations for the movie were initially much lower than my own.

Recent Movie Rentals © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Mark’s Rating: 3.75 out of 5
Johnny Blaze a motorcycle stunt rider with a carnival sells his soul to Mephistopheles in a bargain to cure his father’s cancer. The next day Blaze Sr. dies in motorcycle accident. Johnny blames Mephistopheles for his father’s death, but is still bound by his contract. Years later, Mephistopheles calls on Johnny Blaze to become the Ghost Rider and prevent Blackheart from stealing the contract of San Venganzas.

Fans of the original 70’s comic book may find themselves enjoying this movie, as will lovers of chessy flicks¹. Which is to say this movie is no great work of cinematography, but it is an enjoyable film. And one I have no hesitation in recommending for anybody to enjoy at a matinee or a cheap seats theater.

¹ E.g. Army of Darkness

Review: Ghost Rider © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Mark’s Rating: 4 out of 5

A dark, brutal and depressing movie that touches the heart. Pan’s Labyrinth was imported form Spanish (original title: El laberinto del fauno) and is a modern fairy tale. Don’t let that fairy tale description fool you, this is no film for young children. The setting is somewhere in the countryside of Spain, 1944. Ofelia is a young child who dreams of fairies as she goes with her pregnant mother to meet her new stepfather. Her stepfather is a ruthless captain in the Spanish army who works to put some a rebellion in the region.

Review: Pan’s Labrynth © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Casino Royale
My rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Bah. I was planning on writing this up as a proper review but now I’m feeling tired so you’re going to get the bullet point version.

• The latest installment in the James Bond film empire is Casino Royale. This also happens to be the first installment of the books. The film doesn’t quite cover Bond’s origins, but we do get a few minutes of Bond “working up the corporate ladder”. Kind of interesting but given how little time was spent in those scenes; I wonder if there weren’t other areas that the time could have been better spent on.
• Daniel Craig brings an interesting interpretation to the role of Bond. He has back the panache of Connery’s Bond but with a brutal violence that we’ve not seen before. I’m still not convinced this is the best path to go with but it’s certainly better than Brosnan’s somewhat stilted performances.
• Some people seem to really like the villain of this film, Le Chiffre. However I found him to be weak and ineffectual; though to be fair had a better plan than some we’ve seen¹.
• The chase scene at the beginning was incredible. Though I know there are other movies out there which also do this sort of thing. Fortunately, I’ve not actually seen many of those movies so this still looked new/fresh/interesting rather than old and derivative.
• It’s a pity they killed off Caterina Murino’s character so early in the movie. She was much more in the style of classic Bond women than Eva Green.²
• Product placement sucks. In this case, I’m referring to the fact Bond was driving a Ford towards the start of the film. On the other hand, winning the classic 1964 Aston Marton in a card game was pretty cool.

¹ Banker to world terrorists vs. Russian EMP satellites, no contest here.
² Smoking hot vs. vaguely attractive.

Review: Casino Royale © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

X-Men: The Last Stand
My rating: 2.75 out of 5.

Yesterday, the wife and I headed out to watch a matinee of X-Men: The Last Stand. I was planning on writing up a review of it for MovieComment¹. But when I got over to the site I found; I found he’d already written his own review. And not surprisingly², we have completely different opinions on both the current X-Men movie and the prior ones.

Brett Ratner was selected as the director for X-men: The Last Stand as Bryan Singer was busy working on Superman Returns. Unfortunately, this means the 3 part of the X-men series attempts to focus on the action/battle sequences rather than the character development which made the movies interesting. Mr. Ratner even went so far as to make the battles flow as much like a comic book battle as he could. This was a horrible mistake as the differences in the two mediums do not allow the flow of a comic book battle to work well on the screen. In a comic book, the audience accepts that the artist cannot draw every detail of a battle and they fill in all of the details they need/want with their imagination. With movies, we have a long history of war movies which show that the filmmaker can show significantly more detail. So when we have multiple scenes in the middle of battles where nothing is happening; it’s just boring (e.g. dozens of mutants supposedly leaping to the attack and all we get is them leaping over the rubble).

Additionally, I have to take issue with MovieComment’s claim that Storm looks especially good in the action sequences. Her *quote* flying *quote* scenes are without argument the worst special effects in the movie. I haven’t seen wire work that awful since John Cleese played Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and at least he was intended to look stupid swinging around on that rope. Then there’s the whole “wheee! I can spin!” crap they came up with for Storm. For crying out loud, this character is theoretically supposed to be the human mutant equivalent of Mother Nature and they’ve got her spinning around like a f’ing top! Still some of the other actions sequences weren’t too bad. Pretty much, any of them focusing on Wolverine were good. The bit with Kitty Pryde (aka Shadowcat) and the Juggernaut was really good (the end of that sequence was particularly funny).

The addition of other characters to the team in this film was both good and bad. Good in that they picked Shadowcat and Colossus³. Bad in that they did not really do anything with their characters and they failed to continue developing some of the other characters from the previous movies. Most notably, Rogue’s storyline was pretty much dropped and converted into a weird, teenage angsty thing which didn’t play well on the screen.

Speaking of bits which didn’t play well on the screen, the climax of the movie with Jean Grey/Phoenix and Wolverine blew serious chunks. To anybody who liked this scene, I apologize but Famke Janssen’s performance just did not pull off the seriousness of the moment. Maybe with a better director she could have done it, but I guess we’ll never know. Hmm, maybe they can do some sort of director’s cut but bring back Bryan Singer to do it so we could get a decent movie. That could be very interesting. Overall, I’m glad I went to see the film (for the new characters) but I’m extremely glad we went to maintee and used some coupons we had. If I had to pay the full, evening ticket price; I would have been seriously pissed off.

Oh yeah, if you’re reading this review prior to watching the movie; stay in your seat until after the credits. There’s one more scene after the credits are over which you don’t want to miss.

¹ A movie/dvd review site run by a friend of mine.
² He has consistently stated he believes Dumb and Dumber is not only a good movie, but one of the funniest he’s ever seen. While I find that movie to be an abhorrent piece of utter excrement.
³ My particular favorites.

Review: X-men, The Last Stand © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.