gwax's rumblings

So I was watch­ing Transformers: The Movie again (yeah, I do this a lot) and I noticed a funny thing. The movie begins with the won­der­ful phrase, “The year is 2005…” So I say to myself, that’s now! This is the year of the Transformers.

I just watched a very odd movie that goes by the name Naked Lunch with some folks in 433. It was a rather Fear and Loathingesque movie. It was fucked up, awe­some and I would be inclined to give it a rather emphatic +.

I just saw I ♥ Huckabees and it was a very strange trip through exis­ten­tial odd­ity. It was humor­ous at times, odd at oth­ers and made you really think about some things at other moments. This movie struck an inter­est­ing chord with me; I’m not sure what or where that chord is, but I can sure feel it vibrat­ing around in me some­where. I’ll have to watch this movie again and I highly rec­om­mend that other peo­ple go see it for the first time.

Also, I would love to be an exis­ten­tial detec­tive, though I’m not sure that I under­stand things enough just yet.

	Story: 3/5
	Quality: 5/5
	Oddity: 3/5
	Characters: 4/5
	Acting: 5/5
	Philosophy: 4/5
	Comedy: 3/5

	Overall: 4.5/5

Last night I went and saw Anchorman with some friends and it was absolutely spec­tac­u­lar. One of the best come­dies that I have seen in a while. The humor skirted the line of over-the-top a great deal but, in my opin­ion, didn’t spend too much time beyond it.

This is one of the best come­dies that I have seen in a while, and I highly rec­om­mend it.

	Story: 3/5
	Quality: 3/5
	Humor: 6/5
	Characters: 4/5

	Overall: 4/5

I saw Spider-man 2 today and I have two adjec­tives that I would like to use in describ­ing it: fun, crappy.

One thing that I kept think­ing about was how totally awe­some it would be too have 4 gigan­tic robotic arms that half have a mind of their own. The movie was pretty much worth see­ing entirely for Doc Ock. I really ought to go about invent­ing cybertech­nol­ogy (/me is a Shadowrun dork).

Also, there was a whole lot of emo­tional, chick flick stuff in the movie. As much of a shame I will be to my gen­der, I’m going to say that I don’t usu­ally mind that emo­tional, chick flick stuff too much, but in the case of Spider-man 2, it was not only over­done, but rather poorly done as well.

	Story: 2/5
	Quality: 1/5
	Characters: 3/5
	Action: 5/5
	FX: 5/5
	Badassness: 4/5
	Acting: 3/5

	Overall: 2/5

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 last night, if you haven’t heard of it, crawl out of that cave you’ve been liv­ing in. It sure is some­thing. I don’t par­tic­u­larly want to review the movie or give my opin­ion on the top­ics it addresses because I won’t do jus­tice to my own beliefs, but I rec­om­mend that peo­ple go see it and form their own opinions.

I saw Troy last night and I was both amused and very dis­ap­pointed. I came into the thing expect­ing them to cut out a great deal of stuff, but I wasn’t expect­ing them to go about com­pletely rewrit­ing the major­ity of it and chang­ing the char­ac­ters them­selves. Worst of all, though, is that they decided to pretty much write out the vast major­ity of the hero con­tin­gent of the Trojan War. Basically, the movie was loosely based on the con­cept of the Trojan War and has rel­a­tively lit­tle to do with The Illiad. Besides my dis­gust, I thought that it was rather well done and if they had cho­sen to title the movie Achilles: The Movie, I would have been totally cool with the whole thing (the The Movie part is rather key).

	Story: 2/5
	Quality: 2/5
	Characters: 2/5
	Action: 5/5
	FX: 5/5
	Accuracy: 1/5
	Pacing: 2/5

	Overall: 3/5

Saw Kill Bill v2 (v2 is in this case my pre­ferred way of writ­ing vol­ume 2) tonight and I can say that I liked it. I don’t know about the end­ing though, just don’t know (won’t say more; don’t want to spoil it). They tossed in some inter­est­ing twists, more than you might expect. I would say that it’s worth the $10 you have to pay to see it, but I’m not so sure if it’s all worth the $20 it takes to see both halves (but maybe that’s just me get­ting irri­tated at movie the­aters for goug­ing the con­sumer). As an aside, I really think that some­one ought to take up an antitrust thing against all of these damned movie the­aters and the MPAA thing; $10 for a movie and then another $10 for pop­corn and a soda: out­ra­geous! (I didn’t get pop­corn and a soda tonight because it’s too expensive)

And just to toss another opin­ion in, Budd and Pai Mei are both great char­ac­ters. I espe­cially liked Pai Mei’s beard.

Having recently watched the amaz­ingly good Bubba Ho-tep, I feel that I ought to give it a lit­tle plug. After all, it’s out on DVD and VHS and more than worth rent­ing. It’s one of those humor/horror movies that isn’t scary but is really amus­ing. Also it has Bruce Campbell, of Army of Darkness fame, as Elvis.

In case you won’t just take my word for the qual­ity of this movie, I’ll give you some more details to help con­vince you. Bubba Ho-tep is set at an old folks home in Texas some­where near the present. The main char­ac­ters are Elvis and JFK (who is, inci­den­tally, black) as geri­atrics. Now, throw a soul-eatting mummy into the mix and you have one of the worst ideas for a movie ever. In an odd twist, a really bad movie idea becomes a really amus­ing movie; which might make sense if you con­sider how many really great movie ideas make for really poor movies. In short, Bubba Ho-tep is a movie that tried to com­bine the amuse­ment value of mum­mies, Elvis, JFK, old peo­ple and the South and man­aged to pull it off.

I just watched Punch Drunk Love (yeah I know that it’s been out for a while) and I really liked it. I tried watch­ing it once before and didn’t make it very far (this was a while ago) but this time I set out to watch it clear through and it turns out that it starts to get really inter­est­ing just after I gave up last time. Interesting char­ac­ter that Barry, a lit­tle on the psy­chotic side but I like him.

Good movie.

I’ve been on a real movie watch­ing binge this evening. I started with Transformers: The Movie, moved on to Roujin Z, then Ghost in the Shell, Metropolis and finally The Magnificent Seven. Whole lot of movie watch­ing, some of them are pretty good movies though.

Anyway, The Magnificent Seven is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s mas­ter­work Seven Samurai as a west­ern. They do a very good job of tak­ing the story and a lot of things from the orig­i­nal and bring­ing them to the new style; it’s very notice­ably the same story. There are, how­ever, a num­ber of changes that have been made, prob­a­bly for the slightly dif­fer­ent set­ting and audi­ence. The last time that I watched The Magnificent Seven I had not recently seen the orig­i­nal and didn’t see the sig­nif­i­cance of the changes. Having seen the orig­i­nal in the past few months and watch­ing the remake now shows me that the dif­fer­ences are really very sig­nif­i­cant and as such I can only say that The Magnificent Seven is pretty good com­pared. Please remem­ber that I con­sider Seven Samurai to be one of the great­est movies ever made.

I’m sit­ting here watch­ing the Transformers movie and remem­ber­ing how great a movie it really is. I would rank it up there as one of my favorite movies, right up with Seven Samurai and Forrest Gump. I don’t care if it’s a kids car­toon; the themes and emo­tions por­trayed are incred­i­ble. I sus­pect that I, or some­one else, could write a truly incred­i­ble paper about the var­i­ous ele­ments of this movie, but for now, I’m going to pro­vide a run­ning commentary.

The inter­per­sonal (inter­ro­bot?) inter­ac­tions are quite impres­sive. The rela­tion­ship between Megatron and Optimus Prime is one of mutual respect and almost seems to have ele­ments of friend­ship. The bat­tle between the two of them por­trays an inter­est­ing dynamic, Megatron’s unwill­ing­ness to use a weapon at the out­set and Primes unwill­ing­ness to fin­ish off Megatron. It takes the intru­sion of Hot Rod to snap them both back to real­ity and bring a con­clu­sion of the conflict.

Unicron is an inter­est­ing fig­ure, some sort of God fig­ure or Devil fig­ure. I am not sure what to make of him, but he sure is some­thing, world eat­ing power giver that he is. The bit about Megatron becom­ing Galvatron at Unicron’s hands is a very Faustian soul sell­ing kind of thing.

Megatron/Galvatron exem­pli­fies self-centered greed and a lust for power. Also, Galvatron 0wnzes. Starscream on the other hand is just a dick.

They do a pretty darned good job of mak­ing the Autobots into stereo­typ­i­cal good and the Decepticons into stereo­typ­i­cal evil. This is all done with­out going over the top or seem­ing cliche.

I’m not sure what role the two humans play in the whole thing. Daniel and his father may only be there to add a human ele­ment to the movie, or they may serve some other role; it’ll take some thinking.

The trans­for­ma­tion of Hot Rod over the course of the movie is a com­ing of age thing. In fact, as I think about it, this movie really has every impor­tant story ele­ment, except for romance. I blame the lack of romance on the plu­ral­ity of cen­tral char­ac­ters and that the trans­form­ers are androg­y­nous. Actually, I take it back, there are ele­ments of romance between RC and Hot Rod, but just barely.

I should stop now, or this post will turn into an essay. Also, I want to sit back and enjoy the movie. Suffice it to say that Transformers: The Movie is great and it’s one of very few movies that I can watch over and over again.

So, we just watched Encino Man in Happiness (433) and I’m not really sure how to put it. Most peo­ple would prob­a­bly call it a bad movie, maybe a very bad movie, but me, I was amused. Let’s see if the cast gives you any idea of the qual­ity of the film: Pauly Shore, Brendan Frasier and that guy that plays Sam in the Lord of the Rings.

Synopsis: (spoiler warn­ing) Guy likes girl. Girl doesn’t like guy. Guy digs up cave­man. Hilarity ensues. Guy gets girl.

Hey, if it’s got Pauly Shore, then it’s got to be good right? I mean, look at such unfor­get­table clas­sics as Bio-Dome, Jury Duty or In the Army Now.