So, yeah, that tagline above is pretty much correct. “More Alien Robots, Bigger Explosions, and Much More Megan Fox.” Cuz that’s pretty much what Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is. Or as I like to call it: “Transformers: The Quest Of Random Pointless Stuff Mixed With So Much Explosions You Have No Idea What The F*** is Going ON.”

Ok so first off how many people liked the first film? Even remotely? Anyone?

Mm. Ok, I’ll say this. The first one wasn’t that bad. No, really! It wasn’t. It wasn’t an amazing film–but then again it’s Micheal Bay. You don’t expect great stuff from the Bayster–unless it’s gobs and gobs of explosions filled with fire, lots of slo-mo, and hefty amounts of even more explosions added for lovely effect. Because that’s what he’s good at.

And he delivered on that. But Jesus– my eyes hurt, because it was all just too much.

I will say this first and foremost–I didn’t hate Revenge of the Fallen. But I didn’t neccessarily like it either.

If there’s anything I don’t like about sequels, it’s that they drag back everyone from the first movie to give them some sort of role to some degree. Or because they were the comedic releif in the first film and they have to be brought back because no one else can deleiver like they did. There’s a lot of that here in Revenge of The Fallen.

Who can’t forget the famous “Sam’s Happy Time” line from the first movie spoken by Sam’s Mom? I chuckled at it. It was funny, sue me. Well the writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, decided it was time to ramp up Mom’s role a bit more. “Oh, let’s have her eating reefer brownies!” “Dude, fistpump! That’s an AWESOME IDEA!” And in the script it goes.

We even see more of John Tuttorro then I really cared to see. I mean–really. More then I cared to see. There also seems to be for some reason two Robots who talk, for no reason, like they’re street tough gangsters. I think they’re channeling the spirit of Jar-Jar Binks. But that’s not either here or there. Because you want some sort of idea what the story is and if it is worth paying your hard earned cash to see it.

Problem is kids I can’t give you a story. I have a vague idea of a time line of events, sure, but it all seems to be mashed into one incoherent mess of random explosions, Megan Fox screaming more than Sam, Robot Heaven, and good lord– everything in between. To keep it spoiler free as possible, basically Sam finds a shard of the All Spark from the first film, it makes him go crazy like the crazed nut that he is, and he starts seeing symbols that lead to something the Deceptions are looking for. And of course the Deceptions have an intimate knowledge of whatever Sam knows instantly because they’re awesome. Cue in plot holes.

Seriously, this has a lot of plot holes. I won’t go into a lot of detail but a good  portion of the movie could have been avoided if the writers had thought about it for a second. Oh well. Whatever.

So is it worth seeing? I don’t know. I won’t condemn it. If you like explosions and lots of action crammed down your mouth non-stop for what feels like hours, and want a summer film that keeps dragging on and on rather pointlessly, sure! By all means, go spend your $7.50 on Revenge of the Fallen. Just please, don’t expect to follow the plot. At all. In fact you might hurt your brain if you attempt to, that’s how bad it is.
Let me know what your thoughts are by leaving a few comments below.

Thank ye.

I purchased a Moleskine notebook, one of those nifty little pocket journals that you can cart around with you anywhere. At first I was kind of skeptical I would use the thing but damn if it’s not just the handiest thing to have with you. I recently felt that the book I’m writing (which is to be apart of the series, now that I’ve begun thinking about it) has kind of no direction. Because I write really sporadically, and nothing has this real sense of purpose, I felt I needed an outline to gather some sort of structure. Thus you cue in the Moleskine notebook.

It’s holding quite a lot of stuff–about a half finished outline for the first book, and a little bit of this and that for the latter books in the series. I didn’t really intend for it to be a series at first, but this is a pretty large scale story I want to tell. With lots of rich characters. And that requires a bit more ink and paper then one book can hold marginally well.

It also has some rough sketches of a few of the charachters, and I can tell that my drawing hand has gotten a bit rusty. Still, I’m making due.

I’m also in the process of writing a screenplay, one of my actual first if you don’t count the rough outline that was my structure for the “Lost” video. It’s a very real…human piece I guess. There’s this underlying sense of dramatic reality that I’m trying to pull but at the same time have a bit of heart and comedy. Nothing like Superbad comedy but you know…genuine comedy brought upon by a totally plausiable situation and circumstance.

In some ways it’s kind of like Garden State I suppose but not. It’ll be different then that film but in most ways the same, if that makes any sense whatsoever.

I dunno, sometimes I almost never know what I’m talking about when I write. It’s the way I get my ideas for stuff too. I’ll be staring at something or hear a snippet on the radio and my brain will just fly into overdrive. Over the simplest stuff! It’s even worse when listening to music, because I just envision these random scenes with characters I haven’t even been properly introduced to let alone have created set to the music I’m listening to.

Maybe I’m crazy but that’s just my method for gathering ideas.

A small note is that I really write for fun, when I don’t have much to do or just want to. I really, really don’t expect to get my books published. Or my screenplay sold. Sometimes I think my writing is utter rubbish but some people think it’s fairly decent and I guess that’s all that can be expected.

Who knows, though. I can dream. I know what I want to do–I just hope I can. I don’t want to be doing something I don’t love for the rest of my life. I’m already experiencing that, and dude, it’s hell.

Till next time,

Geoff

Inkheart was a book I read back when it first came out in 2005 or so. It’s by an German authour named Cornelia Funke, and the basic premise is that Mortimer Folchart, (Mo for short) is a Silvertoungue, one of the few gifted people in our world who can read items, charachters, and other things straight out of the pages of books. The only tradeoff is that something from our world has to go into the book being read out of. One night, Mo reads the book Inkheart aloud, and the main villian, Capricorn, and his henchmen come out of the book, as well as a fire dancer named Dustfinger. Mo’s wife goes into the book, and so now on the run from Capricorn, Mo is desperately try to find a copy of Inkheart to read his wife back out of the book, while trying to keep his daughter Meggie safe.

The movie, which I have been eagerly anticipating ever since it was announced about 3-4 years ago, follows the same plotline as best as it can with changing  few details here and there as most novel-to-movie-transitions do.

Brenden Fraiser is cast as Mo, and he pretty much fills the same role he usually does in his movies. Eliza Bennet, a new comer actress plays Meggie, the daughter of Mo. Then we have the amazing Andy Serkis (of Gollum fame) fill the sinister role of Capricorn, and then Helen Mirren playing the role of Elinor, the quirky and somewhat crazy great-aunt of Meggie. Paul Bettany also steps up in a wonderful performance as Dustfinger, the fire dancer.

The visual styles of Inkheart are simply amazing. The movie was filmed in various parts of Italy and the Swiss alps, and has many diffrent breathtaking vistas throughout. The music by one Javier Navvarette (he also did a little movie called Pan’s Labryinth) creates a sweeping addition to the movie, and the whole thing is really just magical.

All of the performances are spot on, (although perhaps Helen Mirren’s and Brenden Fraiser are starting to replay their roles across movies) the plot works and doesn’t try to water down the story for the sake of Hollywood, and all in all it’s just a fantastic movie to see from beginning to end.

But, ah, the end. If you’re read the novel, you’ll know that they *spoiler ahead* basically screwed over the attempts for a sequel by Mo sending back Dustfinger, and changing a few things in the ending. This is probably the only complaint I have  about the entire thing, and even that is very minimal.

I give this a solid:

9.5/10

]]> http://starfox221.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/inkheart/feed/ 0 starfox221 inkheart-official-poster dustfingerandgwin600 http://starfox221.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/meh/ http://starfox221.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/meh/#comments Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:38:28 +0000 Geoff Stevens http://starfox221.wordpress.com/?p=26 ]]> A while back, while I was still using my old Insignia 4GB mp3 player,

I could easily say that I had no problem filling the device with my favorites, and that’s all I really needed.

Fast foward a bit more to the present, where I’m now using a 80 GB Zune, and am now finding a good deal of space to fill. It appeared to be a quandry, until I realized that the internet is my friend, and so I started looking into other Music blogs. A few I stepped onto were Music Ramen and Movies of Myself, respectively.

Quickly grabbing a few tracks and sampling them, I reliazed I had far more content then I knew to fill up my hungry Zune.

This brings us to Seabear, a band I recently discovered. The track is simply wonderful, very folksy, very good. Have some cheer, would you?

Cat Piano

So, I’m a huge comic book movie type of guy, even though I never really was much into comic books. It’s just now, through these movies, that I’m starting to get a good overview of who these wonderful heroes and their stories are.
I guess this is about as much as an unbiased review of the film that you’re going to get from a non-Iron man fan.

To date, I’ve thought there has been a few good comic book movies that I’ve liked. I enjoyed Xmen and Xmen 2, as well as Spiderman and I didn’t think Fantastic Four was really all that bad. The Hulk, Superman: Returns, and a few sequels were not so great.

I’ll just say this: out of all of the comic book movies that I’ve seen, Ironman definitely takes the cake.

The basic premise of Ironman is that the famed Billionaire-Playboy type Tony Stark, who manufactures weapons among other things,–sees the errors of his ways after a life threatening attack, and builds a suit/life support system to combat the evil that he’s created.

Jon Favreau, the director, certainly had some shoes to fill. There was a lot of hype behind this movie, especially since it’s Marvel’s first self-financed film, meaning there wasn’t going to be any reason to screw around with the details. All in all, I think he did admirably.

His first great choice was to cast Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark. He just exudes and adds wonderful comedy and brilliance to the character. This was the role he was born to play, and the talented Downey Jr. nails it on the head.

The second choice Favreau went for is not to mess with the damn story too much. It really irks me when someone takes a perfectly good story and twists and molds it to make it completely unlike what it originally was. That being said, there’s been a few minor changes that only serve to help the story, not completely butcher it. Favreau decided to update the time era from Vietnam to the modern setting of Afghanistan, so movie watchers would be able to relate to it better. Other then that, very other few things were changed.

I also respect his decision to keep the film grounded in reality. Instead of using a well known villain such as the Mandarin, a more fantasy based villain, Favreau opted for a more lesser known villain called the Iron Monger, or Obidiah Stone. Obidiah Stone is played very well by a bald and bearded Jeff Bridges.

I think the director did fantastic at grounding the movie in reality: You could almost just imagine that perhaps someone could build a suit similar to Ironman’s–perhaps it’s already even out there!

Speaking of Jeff Bridges, the supporting cast in Iron Man was something that surprised me. You had Terrence Howard playing James Rhodes, Tony Stark’s best friend, who seemed to fit the role quite well. You could almost feel the two men had been friends for years. Gwentyth Paltrow almost came out of no where as well, filling the role of Pepper Potts with a wonderful grace.
All in all the supporting cast was wonderful, and reminded me of how well Batman Begins did with their supporting cast, in regards to how everything felt real, not fake.

Some movies have some CGI thrown in to power their movies, making films pull off even bigger and greater things.

Iron man is no different, employing Industrial Light and Magic, as well as Stan Winston to create some of the most realistic CGI that I’ve ever seen. Honestly, I can’t even tell if the suit that Ironman uses is real or not. WETA ( a rival studio) is going to have some trouble keeping up at this rate.

There’s really nothing more to say about this movie other then that I loved the story, loved the actors, and felt for an instant that this wasn’t just another comic book movie, that there was something that genuinely set it apart from the others. Here’s to hoping that the impending sequel can live up to its predecessor, and that Marvel keeps making movies just as good as this.

Rating:

9.5/10