movies what i done seen recently

[chronovore]

I've been on a Guillermo Del Toro kick, so I rewatched Blade II and Hellboy. Blade was just about as good as I'd remembered, with plenty of very comic-book styled action and gorgeous visuals, from the ruined Eastern European industrial and rave settings to the indulgently slick artifact-like technology of the vampire strike team. I was surprised to see how much of Blade II GDT brought with him to his TV series, The Strain. It was also surprising to see Red Dwarf's "Cat" and Defiance's Datak Tarr in the vampire strike team, and Norman Reedus on Blade's support team. I had forgotten or perhaps never noticed how much CG is used during some of the fight scenes -- not the exploding bodies, of course, but the leaping about and vampire-kung-fu scenes have some particularly elegant-for-its-time transitions to-and-from live action actors. This turned out to be true for Hellboy as well.

Everly was a 99¢ special, so I took a chance on it. In general, I don't think Salma Hayek is often hired for her acting skills as much as her figure. She wasn't bad in this, which surprised me. On the other hand, the script was just frustratingly bad. It felt like someone wanted to write a more comic book version of Kill Bill, but include a nearly single stage, theatrical set in which to show it. Plus add a little grit and maybe some torture porn. I can't stand the latter. Just so much stuff didn't make internally consistent sense. I'm fine with suspension of belief to just about any degree, but I can't stand when the Reality Gauge needle is shoved around like a bullied victim in a school yard.

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation was great popcorn fun, and that's about it. M:I 3 and Ghost Protocol are both movies which made an impression. I could tell you about all kinds of scenes in this one, but the overall plot was less satisfying and coherent than JJ's previous outings.

Comments

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking lately about re-watching the whole Blade series...

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

I can only recommend the second movie. The first one left me feeling very ambivalent about the whole thing. It felt like a vampire movie aping The Matrix. The third one, I had high hopes for after GDT's sequel, but between Snipes phoning it in and the iPod product placement and the nonsensical story...

Oh, heck. Now I'm kind of feeling like re-watching it.

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

Ha! Sometimes it's fun to re-watch bad movies if you go in remembering it really wasn't that great.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

So, I rewatched it. This movie /is/ better than I remembered, but I will list the points which still drag it down:
- unfortunate-yet-groundbreaking use of ridonkulous CG and morphing for viscera
- the entire freaking vampire high council gets herded around like a kindergarten class by Dorff's lackeys; how did these wimps stay in power for centuries?
- Udo Kier is underused
- Udo Kier tells Stephen Dorff that the ancient languages vampire languages are untranslatable, even as Dorff's software is clearly showing coherent sentences being derived from the glyphs
- translation software is shown to derive coherent sentences; this is perhaps even less realistic than kung-fu vampires

Good points:
- fight scenes
- soundtrack
- no romantic subplot despite having a beautiful black female lead
- the writer wasn't allowed to direct

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

translation software is shown to derive coherent sentences; this is perhaps even less realistic than kung-fu vampires

Okay, I need to watch it just for that.

Let me know if Callum Keith Rennie makes Trinity worth it.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

That's just for the first movie. I am still considering whether or not to subject myself to Trinity again.