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Faster (2010)
A pleasant surprise
Being someone who absolutely despises story-less movies that use guns and cars and explosions to get movie-going goats to part with their dollars, I put this one off, thinking it would be more of the same. After finally watching it, I was very surprised! Good suspense, not an obscene amount of action that takes away from the story - and .. a story! With twists even! One of the few 'action' movies where I found myself WANTING it to go on so I could find out what happens! A pleasant surprise of a movie indeed. I would even go as high as an 8/10 but that would rate it the same as some other movies I've rated an 8 which were truly greats, so I'm happy with giving this a 7.
Transformers (2007)
I walked in to this moving hoping for some serious scifi... boy was I misled!
I walked into this moving thinking (hoping) it was a "serious" sci-fi movie, kind of like Independence Day. Sure have comical characters but the flick having a dark undertone. It starts off this way, showing lots of human death, but the unrealistic and comical characters of the Defense Secretary (Jon Voight) and Agent Simmons (Turturro) throws all this out the window.
Pros: good effects for the most part, good action.
Cons:
- although the CG was good for the most part, there were some scenes when the CG guys seemed to have decided they just couldn't be bothered to get the lighting/shadows/focus of the subjects done correctly - some of the CG scenes were poorly done in comparison to others. - since when does the Defense Secretary run around shooting guns with a bunch of high school kids? Isn't the defense secretary usually considered a military VIP?? - since when does a military captain get to call the shots on what the entire military does? He orders in all sorts of things throughout the film without ever having to get an OK from anybody, and talks to the defence secretary like they're cop partners. - what happened to the rest of the army!? It was basically Josh, Tyrese, and Voight representing the military the whole movie. - THE TRANSFORMERS. In the cartoons/figures they were made up of maybe a dozen or so large solid moving parts. In the movie they're made up of, I don't know, say a HUNDRED THOUSAND parts all of which being no bigger than a Rubiks Cube. They were such a huge collection of such small parts there doesn't seem any way their overall structure could have ANY kind of strength. Being made up of such a massive amount of tiny parts they look like they'd just fall apart, and have pieces falling off them all the time. - THE TRANSFORMERS: Some times it takes then a full 5 seconds for their thousands upon thousands of parts to move around during transformation, but in another scene they do it in the blink of any eye! Then in yet another scene they start changing, and the changing goes on.. and on.. and on... and on.... - How convenient the downtown core was completely void of people within half a minute for them to have their battle in. - just too much junk on the screen at once during many of the fight scenes.
All in all, it's a movie that teases you as a serious sci-fi flick, but ends up being a movie made up of comical characters, possessing little realism, and is best suited for an audience 13 and under if it wasn't for the masturbation references and large amount of human death and violence.
Dope Sick Love (2005)
Depressing yet eye-opening
One of the most macabre, depressing, yet eye-opening docs. I've watched in awhile. There's no narration or story that's told, just a "third eye" type camera following around 2 couples of heroin addicts in NYC through the seasons. Watching them shoot up on the floors of public washrooms then "clean" their needles in the public toilets... sometimes it's a bit too much and you need to hit pause just to go for a breather.
Anyone currently in recovery of alcohol/drug addition should watch this when they're craving - it really shows you to what you could be going back to! After seeing this it's a wonder how anyone could even try this drug to begin with.
The only thing it needed was a follow up at the end to tell where these people are today. Judging from what is shown in the doc., there's no hope for any of them. They mention wanting to get better and quit, but it seems the only end to their habits is to quit by way of dying.
This definitely isn't for all audiences. I found myself kind of like watching a car accident - after I started watching it I just couldn't turn it off. I had to keep watching with a dark/morbid fascination of what it's like inside the lives of these addicts.
Slasher (2004)
A documentary about society falling apart...
How this guy got a documentary team to follow him around I'll have no idea. This character was one of the hardest to watch that I've across in a long time. Alcoholics are depressing to watch, hyperactive people are just frustrating. But a hyperactive alcoholic? C'mon... the guy was hanging off the back of the driver's seat right from the beginning, and was obviously on more than just the beers he had for breakfast. Throughout the entire film Michael Bennett looked like a crystal meth addict who had gone without his fix for far too long.
For me, this was a very depressing show to watch. It basically documented the down-and-out ripping off the have-nots. It was sad to watch he had a family and a wife. People like this, in neighborhoods like this, behaving this way, and the intelligence levels of basically everyone on camera from beginning to end (except his poor family), give a glimpse of the possible tragic future awaiting America.
This is a documentary of an American city falling apart at the seams.
Doom (2005)
Resident Evil with a different cast
To sum up shortly: If you've seen Resident Evil (another movie based on a video game) you've seen this. Not to say it isn't worth watching (renting, as I'd advise against paying theaters prices to see it). Same plot - a biotech firm has something go bad, nobody knows what's going on, insert trigger happy soldiers, fight the mutated monsters and try to escape. "The Rock" 's character was a bit underdeveloped. It was hinted towards his take-orders-blindly attitude at the beginning, but this is taken the absolute extreme at the end, which I found was a bit too out of character. The effects were good, the acting of the 2 main characters (Urban and Pike) was as good as it could be given the genre of the movie. Towards the end you got about 5mins of video-game-style (1st person shooter) camera work. Don't expect much plot, which is basically "Don't let any bad guys leave the research facility. Period." Simply put, if you're the type of person that liked the video games "Doom" you'll like the movie. If you just watched Resident Evil, you'll suffer from severe deja vu.
The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
A movie with the best war/battle effects ever - too complicated to follow.
Matrix 1 - great, good intricate storyline with good effects. Matrix 2 - far to complicated to follow with fight scenes then left you feeling "ok, can someone just hurry up and die already". Revolutions: a mix of 1 and 2. It is definitely watchable for the sole purpose of seeing the massive battle and the hardware that's used in it at the end of the movie, but again, too much of the Oracle's talking in riddles, fight scenes that lasted too long, a love subplot that didn't really work, and an ending that I just couldn't figure out, although I'm sure philosophists could give you a good answer without actually knowing what they're talking about. Maybe a good movie for those that studied it's story in arts classes in more detail, but it just added to the confusion of Reloaded. But, definitely worth it just to watch the man vs. machine battle. They should release that onto DVD as a movie by itself.