Tag: movies

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The Conjuring: Don't watch the trailers!

The Conjuring is one of those movies where you’re probably better off not watching any of the trailers beforehand in order to get the maximum scare value for your money.

That being said, the Conjuring manages to be scary using lighting, sounds and background music to create the creepy atmosphere without using a lot of gore. 

It’s “based on a true story” which is at least loosely accurate. The Warrens really did exist and they were a well known husband and wife team of paranormal investigators. They are best known for another haunting investigation that you probably have heard of in Amityville (as in The Amityville Horror).

The Conjuring is based on another case where the Warrens help the Perron family who are experiencing increasingly disturbing events in their home in Rhode Island in 1971. Ed played his original interview of Carolyn Perron to producer Tony DeRosa-Grund. Loraine also helped consult on the film once it started production.

Outside of that, you’ll have to make up your own mind about what happened to the Perron family. 

The film takes great pains in recreating the 1971 environment, which helps hearken back to the other classic horror films from the 70s, like the Amityville Horror.

it delivers on the classic horror film with a couple of interesting twists. The movie title itself is a bit misleading which you’ll understand by the end of the film. I think the biggest danger about this movie is watching the trailers. Some of the scares are in the trailers, so you know they’re coming. 

Still, without those, there are still plenty of scares that you won’t necessarily see coming. I can think of a couple that caught most of the audience off guard. I was also kind of pulled out of the movie because I recognized the actors playing Roger and Carolyn Perron. 

It’s directed by James Wan who directed Insidious, but I think this is a much better movie. I lost interest in Insidious near the last third of the film. The Conjuring is a bit of a slow burn, but is overall worth watching.

 

 

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Pacific Rim Thoughts

Who doesn’t like giant robots?

If you ever watched the old Japanese movies/shows featuring Gozilla or Ultraman or other monsters fighting or generally wreaking havoc on the cities underneath them, then Pacific Rim is the movie for you.

As a kid, I thought the giant robots were the coolest thing ever. At least, until Star Wars came out.

I even owned one of these giant Shogun Warriors that came out in the late 70s (yes, I know, I’m old). While I had Raydeen, a neighborhood friend had Mazinga, and both were pretty cool. I mean, these were toys that were almost two feet tall! And, they shot rockets! (This was before the industry took shooting plastic projectiles out of toys because some kids were shooting the projectiles at each other.)

Pacific Rim, to me, is an homage to those old monster/robot fighting movies. It’s a summer popcorn movie that’s big on action and visual effects and, of course, giant monsters fighting with giant robots.

On that score, for the most part, Pacific Rim delivers big time. The monsters are massive, and there’s a bit of variety to them (although it’s never explained how, once detected, they have nicknames). The machines are equally massive. The destruction scenes are nothing short of spectacular. IMAX, natch, takes things to an even bigger scale.

The story is pretty basic. Monsters, named Kaiju, start rising from the sea and attacking coastal cities around the Pacific Ocean, causing massive amounts of damage and costing millions of lives. To combat the Kaiju, humanity combines their resources to build “monsters” of their own: Massive robots, called Jaegers. Jaegers are piloted simultaneously by two pilots who are neurally linked. The war begins, and for awhile, the Jaegers prove extremely successful.

Eventually, though, something changes. The Kaiju begin to adapt, and they begin taking out the Jaegers. Humanity’s leaders opt to look for other options and leave the Jaeger program to fend for themselves. There are no real surprises to the story; you won’t find any Oscar caliber material here. This is a movie about giant robots and monsters, remember?

One of the only downsides to the film I found is that, like Transformers, the fights occasionally zoom in so close that it’s fuzzy about what part of the monster is hitting the robot. Part of that is that most of the fights happen at night in the rain and near the shore, so both monsters and robots are at least partially submerged in water.

I’m sure part of the decision to bring things in close is to make the audience feel like part of the action. It’s a little disappointing though to not see a few wider shots though, to get a bigger perspective that the robot and monster are tearing up a city while they’re fighting. It also seems strange that the Kaiju have ranged attacks but the Jaegers do not (or at least, don’t seem to use them).

There were a couple of minor things that bothered me, but they start getting into taking apart the plot. Pacific Rim is one of those movies where you shouldn’t get lost in the details of the plot because they will hurt your head.

Pacific Rim is a great summer action popcorn movie. It’s long on action and visual effects and short on plot, which, when it comes to giant monsters fighting giant robots, is just the way we like it.

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Star Trek: Into Darkness Review

The challenge with saying anything about Star Trek Into Darkness is to say anything about it without giving away any spoilers. 

Overall, I think if you look at the movie with the re-boot of the series in 2009, Into Darkness is a great summer action movie. The movies capture the spirit of the characters in the original series and re-creates the dynamics (and creates some new ones) between the main characters.

It was cool to see Uhura get something to do in the movie, but it would be nice to see a woman with more of a commanding role in one of these films. I think it would be fun to have Kirk have to deal with a female captain that’s almost a mirror reflection of himself. 

Benedict Cumberbatch was a great addition to the movie cast as well. I thought he was excellent in the BBC’s recent Sherlock series, and he’s a great presence in this movie. 

The story, though, is still part of the re-boot, and this one focuses on building the friendship between Kirk and Spock. It also calls to question whether Kirk is really ready for the responsibility of “the chair” – being captain of Starfleet’s flagship vessel. 

Although fascinating, seeing the “origin” part of that story between Kirk and Spock is a bit hard to imagine. If you’ve been any fan of the Star Trek series at all, these characters and their relationships have long been established in our heads. 

Yes, the movie has a few glitches (technical and story-wise) and one scene you may either really enjoy or find super cringeworthy (I fell into the latter group). For the most part, they aren’t a major distraction to the overall story.

Die-hard Trek fans may pick apart aspects of the story and the technology with regards to how things don’t fit in with the original canon. I can easily understand how that can be disturbing to fans. I used to watch Smallville and had to spend a lot of time just shaking my head as the show’s producers played drastically fast and loose with Superman’s canon. 

If there’s one nagging thing that still bugs me in these new Trek films is all the freakin’ lens flare. To heck with 3D or IMAX or whatever, let me pay for a version of the movie with 70% less flare. 

But, here’s the interesting perspective that I read about – and it may or may not help you going into the movie.

Remember – this is a continuation of the 2009 re-boot of the Star Trek movie universe. That movie involved a time-travel plot, and because of the actions in the first movie, the timeline for this version of Star Trek has and will continue to change as repercussions from elements of history changing in the previous movie.

Basically – This ain’t your father’s Star Trek. It’s hard, but try to set aside the history  from the original TV series and original movies before you see Into Darkness.

I didn’t do that, and it kind of affected my perspective on the movie.

I’ll have to go see it again with that in mind now to see if I enjoy the movie more with that in mind.

Bottom line. Give Into Darkness a chance. It’s a very entertaining movie.

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The Hunger Games – Pretty Good

The Hunger Games is a faithful adaptation of the book, and despite the comparisons to the Twilight series, the main characters are teenagers, and there’s are hints of teen romance, this movie has plenty of action (and thankfully, no sparking vampires) to keep audiences enthralled for the almost-too-quick two hour length of the film.

If you haven’t read the books, the story is pretty straightforward. In the “future,” the country Panem (a country where the current countries of North America once existed), is divided into twelve districts. After a rebellion was crushed by the Capitol, the Capitol, now in complete control of the districts, declared that each year, all districts would select one boy and one girl aged 12-18 to participate in a competition. The competition would be a televised fight to the death, and the winner would return to his or her district showered with riches and crowed winner of the Hunger Games.

The main character, Katniss Everdeen, volunteers to participate in the games when her younger sister is selected. From there, she is rushed into a completely different world. We see in the opening moments that the citizens of District 12 live in poverty, and it’s not until we see Katniss board the train to the Capitol that we see there’s a drastic contrast between her livelihood and the absolute rich decadence that residents of the Capitol enjoy.

The movie stays pretty close to the book here, sending the tributes to the Capitol where they are primped and put on display for the entire country. They are provided some training, and then they are placed into the arena for the games. You might be reminded of the movie The Running Man, and you wouldn’t be wrong. There are a some similarities between the two movies when it comes to the game.

It seems that the movie is in almost too much of a rush to get to the games. The characters are quickly gathered, allowed to say goodbyes, get to the Capitol, rush through training to get into the arena. It seems like because this section is rushed that some of the nuances of strategy of playing the games are lost.

The action in the game itself flows very quickly. The movie does a great job of conveying the extraordinary aspects of the arena, how much control the “game master” has over it, and how much detail is captured and televised to audiences. One of the more heart-wrenching scenes in the book is done incredibly well.

There is a decent amount of action in the movie, and the pace seems to be pretty good. I thought they didn’t go too over-the-top with the gore factor. Remember, these are teenagers killing teenagers in a fight to the death, so the PG-13 rating is warranted.

We learn that part of the strategy for the the tributes from district 12, Katniss and Peeta, is to play the role of “star-crossed lovers.” The goal is to get audiences interested in the fates of the pair, so that “sponsors” can be found. Sponsors, we learn, can send help in the middle of the games when the players are in desperate need of aid to continue playing.

But, the movie skips over much of this development between the two characters. I think a lot of this was in part to avoid the “cheesiness” of the Twilight movies, but I think the director missed the point. The “romance” scenes here help develop the relationship between the two characters and the audience (both the actual audience and the “games” audience). Knowing that playing the “romance factor” up is a game strategy, the book leaves the readers wondering how much is Katniss “pretending” or how much does she really have feelings for Peeta. Because we don’t know who is sincere or who is just putting on a good show, the cheesiness of the romance in this story works.

Without that buildup, though, the later scenes in the movie feel awkward and forced. In fact, once the Hunger Games are over, the movie quickly wraps things up, ignoring some of the fallout of the ending. It still leaves the movie open for sequels, which, considering the Hunger Games is a trilogy of books and considering Hollywood’s general lack of originality, will almost certainly be made.

I suspect that many will not approve of Jennifer Lawrence’s performance as Katniss, but I think she did an excellent job staying true to the character. Lawrence is tough when she needs to be, but she can be gentile and nurturing as well. The male leads are mostly forgettable, but Woody Harrelson does a great job of playing their drunken mentor, Haymitch. In fact, I think he’s given a couple of extra scenes that were not in the book, which helps expand on the overall barbaric absurdity of the games. Also, you may not recognize him without his trademark shades, but rocker Lenny Kravitz has a small role in the film as Katniss’ lead stylist, Cinna.

Even without the lack of romance, the movie is a very good adaption of the novel. Unfortunately, as much as the director stayed true to the story, some of the more subtle tones of the book were lost. It seems like there was a concern to distance this movie from the Twilight franchise, and there wasn’t enough faith in the material in the book to accomplish that. However, I think they could have spent a little more time, especially at the end to expand on what happened after the conclusion of the games, and to build up the relationship between Katniss and Peeta. Without these, the movie still succeeds as an action/drama of a bit of a different nature, and I have no doubt we’ll be seeing more of Katniss Everdeen in the inevitable sequels.