Shmee.Me

July 11, 2013July 11, 2013

I Like 3D In Movies, But It Still Needs To Go!

I like 3D in movies. One of my favorite movies from last year Dredd 3D was obviously in 3D, and it was fantastic, but it is time for the technology to move on. It used to be fun and only on certain movies, but they recently tried to convince us that we needed to see The Great Gatsby in 3D. It was a story about the 20’s for crying out loud.

Movies like Dredd and Avatar were meant to be seen in 3D because the directors thought about that process, and made them with 3D in mind, but most movies are not that way. They take a 2D movie and post-process it to add the effect, and for the most part you can’t even tell except that the movie is fuzzy if you try and take your glasses off. The only reason they do this is to jack the ticket price up, and since movies already cost north of $12 a ticket it is a little ridiculous.

If they only used 3D every now and then it would great and I would still be happy with the technology, but it has gone too far, and it is time for studios to do the right thing and reduce the amount of 3D movies they release. It is too expensive and they are destroying their customer’s good will.

July 6, 2013July 6, 2013

Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina is a film by Joe Wright released in 2012, and it was nominated for four Oscars and it won one for Best Costume Design. The film is based of the Leo Tolstoy book of the same name, and from what I hear they cut a lot of the book out, but in this movie’s case that may have been for the best.

The movie starts with the titular Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley) traveling to Moscow to try and get her brother’s wife (Kelly Macdonald) to forgive him (Matthew Macfadyen) for his unfaithfulness. Her unaffectionate husband (Jude Law) warns her against it because people were meant pay for their sins. She is successful but her brother doesn’t change his ways. While in Moscow she meets Count Alexei Vronsky (Aaron Johnson) who becomes infatuated with her. He chases her and after awhile is successful and they have an affair. Victorian era drama ensues.

This film gorgeous to look at. It is filmed as if the whole thing is a large stage play, and the actors move around the stage as if it is a city with the upper gangways taking the place of city streets. It is fantastic, you keep waiting for them to break in to song. Sadly they never do. The actors are wonderful and Keira Knightley has once again proven why she is the go to lead for Victorian costume drama’s, but whoever wrote the script forgot to make it engaging.

It is like taking a long walk with beautiful people in a beautiful place, but they keep droning on and on about something horrifyingly boring like the tax code or something. It feels like it is at least an hour longer than its two hour and ten minute run time. I am not sure Tolstoy would have been happy with the way it was adapted. The film still had some interesting things to say about gender inequality, but it said it over and over, and Anna really did choose her own horrible fate.

I wanted to like this film since it was so darn nice to look at, but it dragged on and on. I, believe it or not, am usually a fan of this genre because of all the witty banter, and the social engineering the characters do, but in this case they took all that out and you are left with a long hard slog of a film.

July 2, 2013

Shmee Survives World War Z!

World War Z is a big budget zombie movie produced and stared in by Brad Pitt. Before its release it was known for its exploding costs and script rewrites, and then the ending tested so poorly that they had to totally scrap it and film a new one at the last minute, but it seemed to turn out okay provided that you didn’t want a movie that resembled the book.

The story follows a former UN investigator Garry Lane (Brad Pitt) as he travels the globe looking for the cure to the zombie plague ravaging the world, so that the UN boat that is looking after his family doesn’t kick them off.

The plot is simple, but since it is a zombie movie that is to be expected. The zombies in this movie are a mix between 28 Days Later and its PG13 sensibilities, so fast and scary looking but without being gruesome, unlike most of the creatures from their genre. The special effects are good with the zombies looking the part, and the huge zombie waves attacking human strongholds are well done.

It is interesting that parts of this movie that work the best are not the large epic fights, but the close quarters with zombies hiding in the dark scenes, and while the large set pieces do add scope, they loose a lot of the tension. There is nothing better than a person with their back against the wall trying to survive against these relentless foes.

I like this movie, and it says a lot about how the public feels about zombies these days that the market can sustain such a large scale project, but at the end the day the reason it works are the old school zombie scares.

July 1, 2013July 1, 2013

Someone Made Troll 2!

Troll 2 is one of those amazingly bad movies that it is so impossible to believe it got made and released. It is defiantly one of the worst movies of all time, and one of those rare treats that is so bad that it is good, especially when watched with a good group of friends. It was released in 1990 and directed by Claudio Fragasso.

The story is about a family that decides to go to a farming town Nilbog (goblin backwards) for vacation, only to find that the place is full of goblins, and that the goblins are vegetarians so the people have to eat some green stuff to turn in to plants so the goblins can eat them. Oh yes, and the son Joshua is haunted by his grandfather, who for some reason knows everything about goblins, and thus can help his grandson out. Notice I did not type the word “Troll” at any point because there are none in this movie, and it has nothing to do with Troll 1.

The goblins are supposed to be scary, but it seems that in most situations they pose no threat to anyone because they are slow and only have spears that they can throw at people, but they only do that once, and I would remiss if I did not mention that there is a scene in which two people make out with a piece of corn between them and it turns in to popcorn, yes that happens.

The fact that a studio paid someone to make this movie boggles my mind, at least with Manos: The Hands of Fate it was just a bunch of people getting together to make a movie, and then realizing that was something they did not know how to do, but with this it was supposedly made by professionals, and had real funding. Not a lot probably, but more than the bologna sandwich that saves the young boy at the end of this film.

Rarely do movies like this see the light of day, and if they do get published they land on the direct to video isle, or stuck on late night TV as a joke, but every once and awhile a movie this bad reaches the public at large and it is hilarious.

June 30, 2013

I revisit Zombieland!

With Brad Pitt’s new zombie movie doing well in theaters I thought I would watch one of my favorites zombie movies Zombieland. It came out in 2009 and it was directed by Ruben Fleischer, and written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. I love this movie because it adds some humor to the zombie lore.

The movie follows Jesse Eisenberg’s character as he at first is trying to get to Columbus, and is so named for the rest of the movie, but he soon meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone), and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) and he decides to follow them. He has survived the zombie apocalypse by living by thirty-two simple rules that will flash up on the screen when his life is being saved by them or someone is dying because they didn’t follow them.

This doesn’t sound like a funny setup to a movie, but the humor comes from them not trusting each other, and the crazy things they do with and too the zombies. Plus since these characters have lived so long with zombies, the undead don’t pose a huge threat to them until they are cornered.

The actors all do their jobs well. Woody Harrelson plays a man who has lost everything, so he has decided to destroy the zombies with glee. Jesse Eisenberg’s has never trusted people so not trusting zombies comes naturally, and Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin play two sisters that are just looking out for each other.

The special effects in this movie are great too. The zombies look like zombies and they are satisfyingly gruesome, and they explode wonderfully when hit by bullets. They must have used a ton of cornstarch in this movie, but that is the way it should be, and Columbus’ rules are always popping up at the perfect times for maximum humorous effect.

This movie makes me laugh the whole way through, but they made the characters lovable, so you actually care if they survive or not. If you are looking for a great movie that provides tons of laughs and a couple scares then look no further than Zombieland.