So I finally got a chance to watch Antman this past week. I’ve been meaning to see it for awhile now, but never got to it. Paul Rudd, as usual when I watch his movies, is great. The movie in general isn’t bad, and the casting seems excellant. I remember there being some concern from comic fans about elements of the story (mainly Hope’s mother) but as someone whose never read an Ant-man comic, I am unaware of what those concerns are and if they materialised in the film.
While there is nothing really about the movie that sticks out to me as the-best-thing-ever (apart from some hilarious one-liners by supporting cast and a Thomas the Tank-engine cameo), nothing really stands out as particularly bad either. I look forward to the next movie, which might contain a little less explaining of what is going on.
Title: X-Men: Apocalypse (Third in the First Class series).
Rating: PG-13
My grade: B-
I enjoyed the movie, though I don’t think it quite lived up to the hype they tried to build for it. Apcoalypse himself came off really as that creeper who won’t say no for an answer combinded with a televangelist. Alex Summers appears, but I thought he was dead, so clearly a rewatch of the first movie is in need.
I did enjoy the cast, who I think did a great job with what they were given.
I’m going to put the rest under a read more because it will contain spoilers.
Today is the 39th aniversery of Star Wars’ first theaterical debut in 1977. Since I wrote a post about Stargate a few posts ago, I figured I’d spare a post for another favorite franchise of mine, Star Wars.
I was a late-in-life Star Wars fan. (My father holds true to the idea that Star Wars is Lame, one should only watch the Original series of Star Trek). In sixth grade I started watching Return of the Jedi, and was mostly confused. Which can happen when one watches the last 30 minutes of the third movie in a triology.
Anyway, I decided at that point to go to the video store (because they were still around), and rent the four Star Wars movies that were out at that point. I watched them in chronological order of story, not release, so the first SW movie I watched in full was The Phantom Menance. I think this altered how I veiewed Star Wars movies.
Many of my friends are of the opinon that the prequels suck, and only the originals are any good (although they have favorable feelings about 7, but I haven’t seen that so no opinon there). Unlike them, I’m more neutral to favorable on the prequels. Most of the issues I saw was George Lucas tried to retconn things he had wanted to change from the original trilogy. Even as a fan of the prequels there were some moments where I wanted to ask him what he was doing. (Namely the Owen Lars situation. My friends have heard me rant about this.)
Still, the prequels weren’t as bad as I think popular culture likes to protray them as. They still continued to break box office amounts, and people still watch them.
Now I just have to watch Episode 7, so I can call my watching complete. Well, until Episode 8 comes out.
So I got netflix in the mail (Yes, I still use the DVD service) and it happened to be a movie with Helena Bonham Carter and Cary Elwes in it. Always a good reason to watch a movie. As I watched I also recognised a few actors I liked, although some I still refer to as their character from whatever I saw them in before. Patrick Stewart was a surprise, playing Lord Grey, Jane’s father.
From what I read on Wiki (doing a quick check of facts, nothing too indepth) the movie is an overly romanticsed story. Jane may be the closest to her actual person, but Guilford is changed to be more the sweeping romantic hero.
As you can guess from a cast that has the three actors I mentioned, the acting was good. The settings were also good, and so were most of the costumes (although some of Jane’s early costumes were not appealing on her, but alas that happens to us all). Its just that the actual script is not so good.
For example, their idea of a intro conversation to a love scene is to talk about the differences in Prostantism and Catholicism. Kind of a weird topic to inspire kissing.
And there is this scene where these two are going around making wishes, about how they want things to be better for the poor and the hungry and breaking their dishes to confirm the wish was sent. I spent most of the time going “Don’t do that, someone’s going to end up bleeding and your servants are going to have to clean all that up and then what will you have to drink out of?”
While the two leads try to make it work and do seem to have some chemistry the awkwardness of the script and the real life storyline seem to fight them the entire way and it just seems…awkward.
So my final grade is a B-. I managed to sit through it without pausing it it too much, and I didn’t even start to skip scenes till nearly the end. It just had too many awkward scenes. Also I have found I can do without the word popary.
So last night I went with my friends to see Captian America. Which, I will admit, was good. But I’m still going to give it a B. Unlike some other films in the Marvel line, it didn’t have me leaving with “That was AWESOME” type of feeling, and I was expecting that.
The problem I think is that there was too many characters with hinted at side plots that didn’t really end up anywhere. It was a film of cameos. Most of which you see in the trailer. There were some elements of Cap’s story arc I kind of felt like I missed an episode, and maybe I did since I don’t watch Agents of Shield (though I want to) or Agent Carter (again, want to).
This felt more like an avengers type movie with a bad guy you don’t really understand. Which on one hand is interesting. You know he’s the bad guy, bur you don’t really understand why till the end. Its more soft then the previous Villians tended to be.
This movie also made me want to go and write an essay on how Phase Two of the MCU is basically Tony’s downspiral into PTSD and depression.
So while it was good, and I enjoyed it, I felt the story was a little awkward in places and some characters could have had their side plots taken out with no detraction from the main story. It gave us a look into Winter Soldier’s past, but I’m not sure how well it fits in with what was previously shown (particularly about how the activate/deactivate Bucky).
Deadpool was rated R. It is rightfully so rated. It earns its rating with aplomb and is happy about it. However parents across the nation seemed baffled about a Superhero movie being R, choose to ignore it and then took their young children (and by young I mean under the age of 13) to see a movie clearly not meant for them.
The odd part of this is how much Deadpool marketing, as well as fans familiar with the comics went out of their way to try and inform parents that this movie was marketed towards adults, has always been for adults, and that it might not be something you want to bring your child to see.
I didn’t think I’d be writing two memorial posts in a single week. Or that I would loose two parts of my childhood at the same age, from the same thing. Alan Rickman passed away this morning at the age of 69 from cancer.
As with David Bowie, I grew up with Alan Rickman in films. I remember my sister’s favorite film for awhile was Robin Hood: Price of Thieves where Rickman played Nottingham and threatened to use a spoon on a Robin because it was dull and thus would hurt more
One of my favorite adaptations of Jane Austen had him as Colonel Brandon, an older man who falls in love with Marianne.
Coming out of High School there was Dr. Lazarus, from Galaxy Quest, Harry from Love Actually, and Marvin the depressed Robot from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
For many of my friends who liked Kevin Smith Films, he was also Megatron, the voice of God from Dogma.
However, I think for a entire generation he will always be Professor Snape. While over the years my love of Snape had decreased due to realising how much of creep he really was, Alan Rickman had me loving the morally grey character.
Also apparently he was the bad guy in Die Hard, but I’ve never watched Die Hard so I can’t really say anything about it. But now I have a reason to watch it.
2016 is taking a lot of legends in their field. Rest in Peace, Mr. Rickman. Thank you for your decades of Entertainment. You will be missed.
I woke up to the news today that David Bowie died last night after a long battle with cancer. I wasn’t aware that he had been sick. It was only a few days ago a friend and I were discussing him because it was his birthday.
David Bowie was one of those artists where I enjoyed them but was never OOOOH MUST HAVE about when a new album came out. He was always in the background. He was an artist you had to respect even if you didn’t like his music.
I grew up with David Bowie music. His career spanned decades and ranged in style. He showed up on soundtracks often, and a few movies as well. I think part of me thought he’d be putting out new music for a few more decades. So today with his passing, it seems like there is a hole in the fabric of music.
One of my favorite childhood movies was Labyrinth where he starred as Jareth, the king of the Goblins. The soundtrack is also one of my favorites and he wrote most of the songs on the album if I remember correctly
Here are a pair of my favorite songs from the movie:
Wiki-thrall is a term my sister and I came up with for those times when you go on wikipedia to look for one thing, and then an hour later you are still there, sometimes not even on a subject anywhere related to your original topic. Once such case, I was researching the bird “Wren” because I decided to call the species that were to be the big bads in my Stargate Atlantis fanfic that and wanted to see if there was anything of the actual animal that might be good to use. At least I started there. Somehow by the end of the day I landed on the history of Pepsi. Still not sure how I got there.
Sometimes its just by clicking links on the page. This happens alot when I’m looking up people. You see a highlighted association, so you check that person out. And suddenly you are reading about a Rock star who once wrote a song about a cousin of a friend of a cousin of the original person you were researching.
I love learning, so its not necessarily a bad thing. However I do think sometimes it hinders when you are actually doing research with a purpose, like when I was doing research for a paper on German artist Anselm Kiefer. I was doing topic research on Norse mythology, for which his painting was based, and ended up learning about Norse deities that were not even involved with the story at hand. Of course it probably didn’t help that Thor had just come out on DVD at the time so I was intrigued by the differences between the comics and the actual mythology.
Today I was trying to show my father an article on the actor Armie Hammer, who is in a movie I liked and made my father watch last night, The Man From Uncle. However I ended up on the page of his Great-Grandfather which lead to learning some interesting history.
Its not a good example of Wikithrall, but it reminded me of that, and I started wondering if other people had names for it, or what interesting paths led them to new information.
Well, I missed one day out of the year already, but I’m going to just shrug that one up. Its the holiday weekend, I can give myself a break. Besides of all the things to worry about, posting on this blog is not going to be one of them. But enough about that, lets go on to today’s actual post subject.
For this post, I decided I wanted to talk about one of my favorite classic films. Balalaika is a 1939 musical based on stage musical produced a few years earlier. It stars Nelson Eddy and Ilona Massey. It also has some notable character actors in the background including Charles Ruggles (The Grandfather in Parent Trap) and Frank Morgan (better known as the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz).
The plot of the movie is an interesting alternative history of Russia. Instead of the Romanovs, the royal family of Russia is the Karagins, but that doesn’t mean the people of Russia are any less likely to try and rebel. Eddy plays the Prince, Peter Karagin who falls in love with a singer he hears at the Balalaika, a club in St. Petersburg. He disguises himself as a student to romance Lydia Marakova, who is secretly a revolutionary along with her father (a music professor) and brother (a pianist). They do the local work of the Party from their home where Professor Marakov also teaches music.
Peter manages to fool Lydia and her family into believing he’s just a music student by singing a great rendition of The Volga Boatman, a Russian folksong.
Suitably impressed, Lydia decides to give Peter “Teranda” a chance. He in turn decides to use his princely influence to get her a interview with the head of the Russian Opera. The two fall in love but things of course don’t go as planned.
Lydia’s brother turns out to be a hothead who is not willing to just wait for the right moment, and goes to hold a revolt in town. Unfortunately he is killed when the Cossack (led by Peter) come to break up the crowd. This leads her father to agree to be part of an assassination plot of General Kargin, Peter’s father. I’m guessing Peter is probably a son of a younger son, thus not actually high on the line of succession as they both make it out of this movie alive, and we all know what happened to the Romanovs
While Paval Marakov can’t do it in the end, a family friend does shoot the General. This of course ends Lydia & Peter’s relationship. For one, Lydia is arrested at her debut at the Opera for participation in the General’s not-so-fatal shooting. Also, Peter is off to war.
Things don’t go so well for our pair as the movie continues. There is a revoltion in Russia which makes Peter and many of his aristocratic friends (and fellow Cossacks) flee to Paris where they now live much less effluent lives. Lydia, freed from prison by Peter as one of his last acts before going off to war, finds herself struggling to keep a job.
The movie ends with them all joining together for a New Years day party years after the war. Peter’s former valet Nicki and his wife Marsha (who was Lydia’s maid when she sang at the original club) have opened a Russian themed club called the Balalaika and have decided to serve the Aristocracy of Russia one more time as many of them have become their close friends.
They both watch sorrowfully as Peter continues to be heartbroken, and they worry about Lydia who has disappeared for awhile. However they both end up at the Club that night, and through some careful scheming, Marsha and Nicki get the two lovebirds together while singing a New Years wish to a mirror, and thus reuniting them for a happy New Year.
Its a good movie, in my opinion and one of my favorites of Nelson Eddy. Its full of great songs. I wish I could find a video of Nelson Eddy singing Silent Night in German with the German troops as the two sides hold a truce for Christmas.
The only regret I have is since this was never a book (to my knowledge) we don’t really get to see what happened with Peter & Lydia during the years they were apart. It also doesn’t really give you a good idea of the passing of time. Just that you get the feeling years have passed.
If you are in the mood for a classic musical or for operettas, I suggest watching this movie. It has wonderful singing and a good love story.
Sokorra Lewis 