The Spirit!

As already demonstrated with Speed Racer i often disagree with critics on the quality of movies but with The Spirit is appears im not only disagreeing with critics but also the majority of viewers.  The Spirit, at the time of writing this, is scoring, on metacritic, a 31 out of 100, the same score as Max Payne(except the spirit ei a zero from one publication, a feat in the world of shit that not even max payne earned!).  I personally feel that this is one of the most under-rated films of the year.

To start of I realize this movie indeed has some major flaws.  For instance I wanted to kick every single actress in the mouth because each time their mouths opened, you knew you were in for a blizzard of shitty acting.  The Spirit also overly used the meeting with death idea;  The spirit meets with her(note: Its a her, yes! i wanted to kick her aswell!) like 3 or 4 times, the final resulting with the spirit being underwater, meeting with her, and deciding to go on living… which happened in Max Payne… they were almost the exact same scenes… didnt one person involved with the movie see max payne and think “boy! this movie is awful. waitaminute…FUCK! WE SHOT THAT LAST FRIDAY! I NEED TO WARN THE OTHERS!”?  The final qualm I had with this film is that…it felt like Miller 100%, while stylistically it was quite good, it just didnt feel like eisner at all.  But while these problems were quite annoying the film was still pretty damn enjoyable.

The Spirit’s main strength was Gabriel Macht(the spirit) and Samuel L Jackson(the octopus) when together and Louis Lombardi(the os henchmen) in general.  The fight scenes between the octopus and the spirit had really good action and tended to be hilarious and the henchmen… well they were just plain funny, especially their various names(my personal favorites were huevos and rancheros).  The quality of these 3 actors more than, in my opinion, the god-awful actresses.

The movie was also good in noir terms aswell.  For instance EVERYTHING the spirit says is SO GODDAMN HARD BOILED!  The spirit had the archetypal relationship with the chief, you know the “DAMNIT! GET IT IN ORDER OR ILL HAVE YOUR BADGE!”  which the movie was happily lampooning and praising at the same time.  The movie also had a collection of femme fatales… hot hot ANNOYING AS FUCK femme fatales  including the nazi Japanese  assistant and the gold-digger jewl theif.

I found the movie to be truely enjoyable and think that the only possible reason asto why its being slammed so hard is because people either misunderstand it or theyre being cockbags who review the movie because they saw other people hating the movie, cause golly who needs the truth when you can fit in!

I think this movie was misunderstood.  People saw Frank Miller and instantly 300 and Sin City popped into peoples mind, giving them thoughts like “ima see me some gore” or “ima see me some bare-chested men!” and what they got was a noir comedy… except they didnt realize it was a comedy…and the people who showed up probably didnt even know what noir was.  Now this may just seem like im saying “its bad on purpose” but trust me, i think every BAD about this movie is BAD and should not have been BAD and the director wasnt intending it to be BAD(dead lord I cant type BAD without capitalizing it!), what I am saying is that this movie is being looked at the wrong way.  people expecting an action flick got a comedy and if you think that doesnt matter than imagine how a person who was told hotel rwanda was a comedy would rate it after seeing it.

Some of the flaws people have been pointing out are just plain silly to bring up.  For instance a few people on IMDB got pissed off about how they couldnt tell what age it was because it had modern devices but an old car…except its only one car…and its own by extremely rich eva mendez… BECAUSE NO RICH PERSON OWNS A COLLECTOR CAR! thats like seeing a rich person drink an aged wine and saying “WAITAMINUTE! I THOUGHT WE WERE IN MODERN TIMES! WHATS ALL THIS TIME TRAVEL BUSINESS?!?!?!”.  People have liked to take pot shots at Miller calling him racist which is why he made samuel l jackson speak in ebonics, eat fried chicken, drink kool-aide, and have several children from several women!  These kinds of complaints shows that people really are just hating the movie for any reason they can think of.

In the end the movie was okay.  Im tired of all this bullshit from professional critics.  The Dark Knight gets overly praised cause its what “everyone” else liked  while movies like speed racer and the spirit get smashed cause “everyone” hates it.  sure the movie has some flaws but 31 on metacritic? thats just unacceptable! I get the feeling critics saw the first 10 or so minutes then copy-pasted other reviews.

Dark Knight: an update

im hopefully going to see this movie tomorrow and im pretty positive im going to hate it, mainly cause everyone has been going fuckin nuts about the new joker and based off of what ive seen from trailers, i hate his fuckin guts.

seriously its gotten out of hand. currently on IMDB the dark knight is rated at 9.7, thats number 1. its the highest ranked movie currently. higher than number 2, the godfather. higher than any movie youve ever seen in your life!

Hellboy II and the gigantic “MEH”

Every once in a while i will see a movie that i thought, from the very beginning, wasnt going to suck and it turned out great. It is a rare occurrence that happens, at best, once a year, this years movie sure as hell isnt hellboy.

This movie isnt bad, but it isnt good either…infact its like the movie barely exists at all, you never feel excited but at the same time you never really feel bored. The movie had some amazing visuals, possibly the greatest costume/make-up crew of all time, some pretty cool fights…but at the same time it had a very weak plot, just awful cinematography/editing, just painful dialogue, and a very boring romance. In the end the aspects of the movie really balanced out to make the movie just…there… not really memorable in anyway.

The movie’s best features and it’s worst comes from it’s origins, the comic Hellboy. The comic’s character designs are almost followed down to the very last detail, and the designs from the comic are brilliant on page and brilliant on the screen…and while im on about the movie’s costumes you can clearly see Guillermo del Toro’s signature look and feel on the minor characters…if anything go see this movie for the brilliant costumes. However the comic was never really strong in the dialogue department, “the part of my brain thats still working” must have been used at the very least 20 times in the first hellboy story arch while this conversation appeared in the movie: “your going to pay for what you did back there!” *hellboy taking out his gun*”do you take checks?”. I mean what the fuck? that doesnt even fucking mean sense, it doesnt seem macho or cool, it doesnt belong in the film.

The movie left alot of questions unanswered and did some things that just pissed me off. For one thing they got rid of Abe Sapien(a fish-like alien)’s breathing apparatus half way through the movie., they just completely forget about it and they never answer how the hell he survived for that long without being able to breath properly. There is a scene where hellboy is hit from both sided by locker doors…on both sides…if youve ever witnessed a locker room all the lockers in one row go the same direction, why the hell is BPRD doing things differently? is it really vital to paranormal research?. The elf prince kills the king potentially throwing the elf community into great turmoil but once the king is dead the other elves are never even mentioned again. Hellboy is made out to be a complete moron in the film(even though he could apparently run diagnostic tests on his brain in the first book). The murderous tooth fairys are described a going for the teeth first even though they completely tear off the skin of one guy before going for his teeth. Liz is pregnant which kept the thought of liz and hellboy doing it throughout the movie(i have seen things no one should have to face). When people first see hellboy out in public they comeup with hellboy right on the spot instead of the rational thing of saying “HOLY FUCKING SHIT A GODDAMN DEMON!”but nooope, they say “hey hellboy”…what are the odds theyd guess his fucking name on try 1. The elf prince hates humans but when confronting his father, who was speaking elfish, he spoke english, way to honor your own language you ass! The elf prince steals a piece of the special crown at an auction but they never said how the auction house got a hold of it in the first place.
In the end the only real reason to watch hellboy is for the costumes and effects…but most people only read hellboy for the art anyways

On another note WTF is up with death race? that has to be the worst movie idea in all of history. Seriously the makers of that film should feel ashamed

Least Wanted review of all time

I walked into…well drove up to the movie theater prepared to hate Wanted”s guts. I read the comic the movie was based on and when i saw the trailer i figured the movie would not do it justice…quite the achievement as I wasnt too fond of the comic (admittedly it had its good moments). My feelings for the film after watching it are mixed; as a movie it was better than i thought itd be and yet as a movie based off of a comic it was worse than i thought itd be.

The movie’s overall premise is there is a group of assassins called the fraternity who believe that “killing one could save maybe thousands”. The protagonist is Wesley Gibson who led a terrible life with a terrible job while his best friend fucked his girlfriend behind his back. It turns out his father was one of the greatest assassins of all time and now his son must train to avenge his father’s death. He grows into a man, leaves his girlfriend and friend behind and embraces the life of an assassin. The Comic’s premise, on the otherhand, was that there was a group of supervillains who took over the world called the fraternity who believed in doing whatever the fuck they want, whether it be murder, rape, of theft. The protagonist is Wesley Gibson who lives a shit existence in a shitty job while his chubby gothic girlfriend fucked his best friend behind his back. He embraces the life of a super-villain, kills his asshole friend(and many random people) and embraces the life of doing whatever the fuck he wanted). In general they sound kinda similar but they really were not.

In the comic the main event was that within the fraternity someone tries to usurp power and a civil war sorta erupts within the fraternity. The plot twist was that His father never died he staged his death so he could wait for his son to become the best and then his son would kill him. The main event of the movie occurred after the twist which was: Cross(the person he though was hunting him down) was actually his father(it was so predictable i was able to say “No Wesley Gibson, I AM your father” before it was revealed and that The leader of the Fraternity was choosing targets for his own personal reasons. The main event is Wesley kills just about everyone in the fraternity(In the comic Wesley kills all those who betrayed his sect of the Fraternity). The plots were just so different that they really should not have even called it wanted as it was so different from the comic.

The movie started out…well just awful. In a similar fashion to the comic it opened up w/ a character who is killed by a sniper show from about 2 miles away thought the movie replaced the gay near-sex scene with a business transaction-type deal. What made this part awful was the fact that the agent, who has to jump between 2 buildings to kill his assailants, engages in a super run(he moves so fast things from the wall fall off behind him) to get to the other side. He uses a goddamn super-power and they never explain how he did it or why other assassins were not able to pull it off. Terrific story-telling, just terrific.

The movie went along pretty well, no real complaints until the secret of the Fraternity was revealed. They take the names of the people they need to kill off of a loom. That is the worst idea ive ever heard of and I had to stop myself from leaving the theater at that point. Not only was it justbad, but it constantly re-occurred over and over in the story.

Fox, who had been like a mentor to wesley, was assigned to kill him(the name was one of the ones faked by the leader) right as Wesley was closing in on fox. Wesley learns the secret from his father(who he accidentally killed) then fox tries to kill Wesley and he gets away. Wesley returns to the Fraternity to attack it head on for, ill admit it, a kickass few scenes. Then its just Wesley and the Fraternity’s elite left, them in a circle surrounding him. Wesley tells them the Fraternity’s secret and the leader lets them know that all of the elite’s names came up(though he could have very well been making that up aswell) and he said that if they were to kill him they had to kill themselves aswell, fox then shoots a curving bullet that kills every elite(excluding the leader but including herself).

The end was pretty awesome but the final line was not quite so. In the movie Wesley turns to the camera and says “what the fuck have you done lately” which was pretty badass. On the otherhand in the comic the final thing is Wesley with and angry expression with the caption “This is my face while im fucking you in the ass”.

The movie implemented one very important thing from the comic; Wesley’s narrative monologue. In the comic however the monologue involved alot of hatred twords the human race, insulting the readers, and general douche-ness which is essentially what the person had become. In the movie the only thing in the monologue even close to the comic’s is the “what the fuck have you done lately” making his dialogue seem like a weak version of Fight Club’s.

In the end the movie was okay for a shoot-em up but it was unacceptable for a comic based movie. The gun scenes were well planned, Fox was hot as hell,they made a decent choice in casting Wesley. Had they stuck more with the plot of the comic I Think the movie would have been so much better…especially if they included the character Shithead, a being created solely out of fecal matter.

Grid: a review

The Racing Game Grid(or, if your a intolerable cunt who goes solely by “proper names” : Race Driver: Grid) is like crack for me…though unlike crack-heads i absolutely hate my addiction; i receive no jittery moments of bliss, completely ignorant of the fact that you just sold your car for money and you had to suck your dealers dirty dirty wang.

Grid starts out as unrealistic as possible, you are a driver who has yet to receive their rookie license and yet, somehow, you start the first race off in a Dodge Viper…with your own guardian angel…and a business manager. You climb up the ladder of racing fame, progressing from simple muscle cars and touring cars up to GT cars and above. Pretty standard for a racing career game.

Once you achieve enough fame in one racing area(by which i mean area of land) you can eventually hire a partner…who magically comes with the same cars as you and you magically get 2 for 1 deals from then on out. Ofcourse your first partner is about as useful as having an 80 year old man as your team mate. The only positive about these partners is no matter what nationality they are from, they come with that stereotypical accent. An Italian partner of mine constantly said things like “passion” and “we finish this as brothers” all in a mencia like italian accent; a french partner said in a snooty voice “Now you are almost as good as me” while i was generally beating him by about 11 spots(me in first, him in last). The best time-waster with these chimps is to crash into them in which they say “sorry, my bad” its Hilarius, i spend hours crushing my team-mates car into a mechanical cluster-fuck and apparently it is all his fault.

In game advertising in this game has been taken to a whole new level which is amazing because its a racing game and logos are about everywhere you look. Instead of having to buy cars new you can buy them off of ebay motors which is the worst idea ive ever heard. Other Pro racers are selling their 5 million dollar vehicles for slightly reduced prices on ebay motors cause if your gonna spend 4.8 million, you might aswell spend it on ebay. The worst part was prototype races. Its where you race prototypes(which the company DOESN’T give to you, you have to buy it) against other racers in the same prototype cars(which makes me believe these arnt prototypes at all). The best part? THESE GODDAMN PROTOTYPES CAN BE BOUGHT OFF OF EBAY. the stupidity in that is just remarkable.

The game contains a very limited selection of cars, only in the 70s or something, the focus is heavily on supercars and there arnt any long races(24 hours de le mans is only 24 minutes long), so that makes this an arcade racer right? apparently not because this game incorporates realistic damage to your cars(and gives you 5 backups because your car can break easily). So what this game has tried to do is combine the best of racing sim games and the best of arcade games…and it fails…horribly. It adds the limited selection of cars of the arcade games with the realism of car damage of a racing sim…but without any goddamn pit stops! if your car gets damaged and you cant instant replay your way out of the damage then you are fucked!

In the end this game could have been pretty good, but unfortunately it just fails. More importantly though for some reason I cannot quit this goddamn game!

Why Manga is fucking up everything

As exaggerated as the title may sound, I honestly believe that manga/anime will fuck up the world in every possible way.  Now I assume there was a period when anime/manga was good; a period when it was, most likely, all mecha-related;  but something terrible happened: It spread like a goddamned virus.

The problem with Manga/Anime(now just referred to as manga to save time) becoming popular is it began to prosper, and like a shark with it’s first taste of blood, manga began to such up as much blood as possible by any means necessary.  To appeal to a larger market the average idea of an anime became more and more stupid:  Teenage Ninjas(NOT mutant turtle ones) wearing flamboyant clothing or being emo? can you say MILLIONS!?!  Two vampire twins hell-bent on destroying each other while their victims are turned into loyal  servants and one of them is an opera singer ? they are clearly on to something there.
Even when mangas have good stories they usually end up fucking it up.  Death Note, for instance, was new and original, it was entertaining and clever, and fucked it all up by the end.  A mastermind killer’s masterpiece plan was subpar for a fifth grader and he was reduced to begging a death god to help him like a crack addict reduced to sucking his dealer’s cock.  Not only that but they managed to fuck up the mech genre aswell, specifically in Eureka 7.  The story is about a boy and girl in love, girl is actually an alien type thing and has adopted the most annoying children in the planet. Oh and there are robots that sky surf.  Yes you heard that correct, WIND SURFING ROBOTS.  The dialogue is just plain terrible and the coming of age stories featured in just about every episode was terrible.

While some instances of manga are good like shin-chan(on occasion), Akira, and FLCL, The entire medium is in general just awful.
Though The comic industry is doing fine, its no secret that manga is far more prevalent read for (pre)teens.  They(by which I mean goddamned weeaboos!) have also started to invade on Comic territory which is just angering for your average /co/mrade.  In Comic-Con there are booths for such weeaboo distributors a Tokyo-Pop which may seem logical but I assure you it isnt.  Comic-Con is a convention for comics, things like Anime Expo is for things like anime/manga.  Having the tokyo pop booth at comic-con would be like a mac booth at a pc convention.   I saw more goddamn Naruto Fags at Comic-con then I did any comic star which is angering because A: Naruto is one of the shittiest mangas around and B: like I said its not their goddamn CON.

Hughes Net

The ISP Hughes Net is possibly the most soulless and evil company in a evil and soulless business.  Their only claim to excellence is that they are available everywhere and for those of us in the middle of fucking no-where, its either them or Dial-Up, so Hughes Net is basically our only internet option.  I live in an area where the phone polls are underground and the internet suffers because so; guess which ISP i have.  The internet is terrible ofcourse, Playing online games or downloading anything larger than songs are nearly impossible.  The internet gets slightly better after 9PM, meaning I can actually watch videos off of youtube WOW TECHNOLOGY HAS ADVANCED SO FAR!  The worst part of it is is the plan I have costs, If i remember correctly, 100 bucks a month! my god that costs more than ACTUAL high-speed internet.  The plan, off of their website, boasts 1 MBPS download speed while ive never reached higher than 100kbps; on average it is below 15 kbps!  There is even a download limit, a paltry 375 megs!!!!

They also blatently hide the truth in their commercials ” HELOOOOOOOOO HIGHSPEED” “Im never going back to dial-up” there are numerous more comparisons to it and highspeed, why? BECAUSE ITS A SHITLOAD SLOWER THEN HIGH-SPEED INTERNET

FUCK CRITICS

I probably have no right to say that most critics are retarded, but damn it, its probably true!  I shall list 2 recent examples, GTA IV, and speedracer.  One dreadfully over-rated, one woefully under-rated.

Speedracer: The average reviewer of this film apparently has no clue what the fuck the anime Speed racer was like, which might be valuable information to know BEFORE your review the live-action version!.  I entered the theater to watch Speed racer opening night, surprised to see about 15-20 people in the theater.  The cause of this was probably because of the scathing reviews it has recieved. Take, for example, this review from The New Yorker “of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.” “by the name of Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch). Does that not suggest a preëmptive strike by his parents,” “The film revolves around cars, yet there are practically no cars. Almost all the vehicles you see are digital creations, as is the track itself, and they cannon and collide with the harmless mayhem that anyone versed in Hot Wheels will recall with pride. The entire movie, indeed, is what Tom Wolfe would call a Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, complete with achingly blue skies, customized deserts, fantastical mountains, and everything from Goodman’s shirt to Ricci’s fingernails daubed in lollipop hues; it makes the world of Pee-wee Herman look like Anselm Kiefer.” “they want everything both ways, stuffing the cast with multinational actors (“Speed Racer” is based on a Japanese comic book and TV show from the nineteen-sixties) yet still supplying the hero with a pancake-flipping mother, a father who builds a winning car in his own garage, and a glass of cold milk on the victor’s podium.”

WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!?  The world was created FROM the anime, the odd environments, odd clothing, the “harmless mayhem” if this twat actually bothered to do any research then this person might have made a valid review, but no, this douche cant be bothered with that.  Not only that but I add :”Though the film is not as criminally poor as “V for Vendetta,””  clearly this person has no right to be reviewing for something as prestigious as The New Yorker.

The Movie’s cheesy dialogue, cuts, effects, environments, costumes, ect ect, is based/taken from the goddamn anime, but while paying tribute to the “quality” of the series, the movie also pokes fun at old anime. The Wachowskis also made it very enjoyable, a task nearly impossible when stuck with content like speed racer.

GTA IV

On the other end of the spectrum GTA IV has been getting more praise then a fatty scarfing down a salad.  The lowest score from a critic on metacritic is a 91! I have played the game and I give it a 70, 75 tops, this creats a 16 point gap between me and the harshest reviewer, which is, frankely, absurd.  The game is fun, entertaining, violent, and basically like every other GTA, just with the Euphoria Engine.  The driving system is sort of annoying, the combat system is extremely unhelpful, and the voice actors are very annoying.  That said it does have the un-deniable fun factor included with the GTA series.  Long story short, the game is good, certainly an improvement since the previous entries in the series, but far from perfect.

What does this show you? Critics in todays society go, for the most part, with the flow.  Whether its the universal jerk off of GTA IV or the screwing over Speed Racer is facing, Critics are affected by other critics.