Orble - Reviews from a Pigboat

Reviews from a Pigboat

follow this blog

1 daily readers

rank of 5651

E-mail Subscription

Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:

Someone Started This Repo Sh*t Before...

March 22nd 2010 18:42

Miguel Sapochnik - Repo Men (2010)

Ok, this movie wasn't near as bad as I thought it was going to be. That is by no means an endorsement. Seriously. Wait till this comes out on cable TV. It's not worth the ticket price.

For starters, the plot of this film was wholly unoriginal. The futuristic setting with the entire premise of a man who worked an evil corporation that repossesses organs given to patients who for whatever reasons, let their payments go lax, and undergoes a betrayal of sorts which causes him to turn against said corporation is directly ripped off of Repo! The Genetic Opera. Sure, Repo! wasn't the only movie ripped off here, but the first act of this film was an almost exact retelling of that story.

The middle had me convinced that maybe I wasn't going to hate the movie. It was an action packed, character building segment. I rather enjoyed it. I don't quite understand why Jude Law felt the need to fall in love with what was essentially the world's prettiest toaster. Mutual trauma brings lovers together, I suppose.

Then comes the end. Seriously, dude? What the hell was this bullshit? Was it necessary to edit the "self-repo" scene as a porn? It wasn't erotic. It wasn't even hot. It was silly. Ridiculously silly. It would have been fine if the movie had ended there. It didn't. What a crock of shit this was.

All in all, if you took "Logan's Run" and mixed it with that scene from Meaning of Life, where Cleese and Chapman confront Gilliam, and remove his liver, despite the fact that he is still, as he says, "using it," then sprinkled in a bit of Paul Verhoeven's violence and satire, along with a dash of "Brazil," you have this gem of a story. Barf. Unfortunately for us, this story lacks the grace and vitality of any of these influences. Also...seriously? Did you need to slap us in the face with bad social commentary? Really?

It wasn't downright terrible, but hardly anything I'd seek out to watch again.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Joe Harris - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

Dances in a Gully with a Samurai Named Pochohantar

March 18th 2010 01:04

James Cameron - Avatar (2009)

Oh my Lord.

This is an example where people got caught up in the fact that this film is epic and the director has had some critical acclaim.

This film is, without a doubt, the cutting edge of cinematography (with the cinematographer being an alum of Columbia College, but seriously...who the hell cares?), but it suffers from (and pardon my Wonderland reference) "painting the roses red" syndrome.

There is a reason that the title of this post is what it is. Take any of those movies (Dances with Wolves, Fern Gully, The Last Samurai, Man Named Horse, Pochohantas, or Avatar) and compare their plots. Eerily similar. In fact, the similarities are so apparent that people all over the internet have been poking fun at it.

Did it deserve Best Picture? No. Why? That one reason. The story was predictable, cliched, and tiring.

The acting was dull, the dialogue was trite, and the CGI Na'vi were just bad. I was disappointed in WETA's efforts on the characters in this. They did such an amazing job with Gollum, and then took this big shit on the screen.

Even talking about this film makes me want to throw up, so I'm gonna stop.

See it for the visuals, not for the story. And a lot of you out there need to shut the hell up about it getting screwed by The Hurt Locker.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Joe Harris - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

Johnny Depp shakes his ass in Wonderland

March 17th 2010 22:51

Tim Burton - "Alice in Wonderland" (2010)

What a piece of crap this was. There. I said it.

This is a great example of people getting far too attached to a director, and letting mediocrity slide as brilliance. This has Burton's familiar style visually. Unfortunately, it also has far too many other aspects of Burton that are equally familiar. Perhaps too familiar?

Sure, Burton’s trip down the rabbit-hole looks amazing, with details of the locations and character being nothing less than astonishing. However, this visual style cannot overcome the fact that there are gaping holes in the narrative and character development. What's worse, Burton had said prior to this that this was going to be the one that got it right. What resulted was a bastardized mythology resembling something closer to a parody of the source than a continuation/improvement on it.

It felt as if Burton re-enacted the classic scenes from the film for the sole purpose of saying, "Look...it's like I'm actually doing the story....BAM....fooled you....I'm just toying with you." He gave lines that belonged to characters in the mythology to other characters that had no place saying them.

Why was the Jabberwocky alive? He was slain in the poem chronicling the history of the land. There was said to be only one, so where did this one come from? Burton, if you want to make the definitive version of an Alice story, follow the damn mythology of the source.

Where was the whimsical nature and love of linguistics and puzzles that Carroll had in the original?

The characters were particularly flat, with a few notable exceptions. Alice (Mia Wasikowska), was brilliant as a 20 something Alice returning to a world she was so familiar with through her dreams.

Obviously, though, she was not familiar enough to realize that she had been there before, and had been seeing the ins and outs of certain parts for YEARS in her dreams. The "drink me" "eat me" thing would have been a huge part of the dream, since it was implied that the entire original story was what her dream was.

Ugh. Onward. The Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), The March Hare (Paul Whitehouse), Absolem (Alan Rickman), and Christopher Lee as the Jabberwocky did not disappoint. However, Depp and Bonham Carter have gotten perhaps too familiar, and fell flat in this film. Maybe it's about time that Burton make a film without those two.

Maybe it's time also that Burton go back to his original stuff. Think of the greats..."Beetlejuice," "Edward Scissorhands." Classics. Nice to see that he's redoing "Frankenweenie," but even that feels like he's recycling his old ideas.

I just think that Burton is falling victim to his own cliches; The same generic Danny Elfman soundtrack, the continual casting of Depp and Bonham Carter, the kabuki-esque makeup, and so on. I think it's high time to ditch some of that stuff and reboot. Go back to your roots. That's what made you what you are. You are getting far too familiar...and you know how the old saying goes...

Familiarity breeds...well, you finish it.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Joe Harris - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

Welcome to the Blog.

March 17th 2010 19:13

I'm not the greatest at introductions, but I suppose I should tell you about what I'm going to be doing here. I have a very strong opinion about everything, and believe me when I tell you this, I am not afraid to share it. I figured the best way to do it would be to review movies.

I recently graduated from Film School in Chicago. Columbia College Chicago, to be specific. Let me start by saying, complete waste of time. Apart from the networking, it was terrible. Film School makes pretentious assholes out of people that went in loving film. I was no different when I got out, but have wisened up, the more I see the mentality floating around me

[ Click here to read more ]

Vote