| Comments on Tuesday 13 July 2004: |
| A triumvirate of movie reviews. The cinema told us again that making digital copies of data is exactly the same as removing physical objects from people's possessions. Lies! By way of revenge, we left the cinema with low-resolution highly compressed copies of the movie stored in our biological RAM disks. They didn't think to check inside our heads for recording implements, the fools. The first movie watched was Equilibrium, which was moderately entertaining but tremendously frustrating as a waste of a fun idea. You can have people kung-fu shooting with any plot - there's no call for wasting a post-apocalyptic society mandatorily drugged into emotionlessness on it. Not that I would object to a good movie about said post-apocalyptic society containing karate gunplay, but this wasn't a good movie about the removal of emotions, in that most of the characters spent the whole time expressing emotions they weren't really supposed to have. Not quite as bad as it seemed, as in the end it turns out that pretty much all of the major characters have been off the mandatory drug the whole time, but the presentation of the dystopia is totally lost behind the martially artistic projectile-launching. And the kung-fu marksmanship is mostly only entertaining in its abject silliness, a fact which, admittedly, the movie uses to its advantage in at least two scenes. And there are trenchcoats. Then there was Spiderman 2, which is excellent. The portrayal of the mundanities of superhero life in the first segment of the movie was lots of fun, Doctor Octopus was acted and animated fantastically, and there was some delicious foreshadowing of some characters likely to appear in the next movie. Unfortunately, there was also some foreshadowing not nearly so subtle which was gibbering about how the main villain will be the Green Goblin Version 2.0, which is a shame since the Green Goblin is the crappiest villain there is. Not that Spiderman has any really good villains other than Mr Octopus. Aside from the implication that the next movie will feature the crappiest villain, the only major objection I have to Spiderman 2 is that there were a few too many clumsily done emotional scenes. People who shared the cinema with us chose these scenes in which to go to the toilet, which is a fairly good indicator of how bad the scenes are. Oh yes, and the other annoying thing was that they spelled "Doc Oc" as "Doc Ock". Google-count sides with the movie, as does a cartoon; I'm not sure whether the original comics did, but if they did then they're wrong too. He's Doctor Octopus, not Doctor Ockham. Though that would be pretty cool too. Observe!  Anyway, as I was saying before I went insane and decided to actually draw a Doctor Ockham cartoon, albeit desultorily, um, Spiderman 2 is quite good. Yes. And the third movie, which won't be getting its very own silly comic strip scrawled, was The Punisher. The Poonisher more like! He doesn't even become Angry Frank Castle until a third of the way through the movie, and it's another third before he decides to call himself the Punisher and actually bother with body armour or being cool at all. And then it lasts for about one minute. There are a few good moments, but the movie as a whole is boring and stinky. The actor of the Poonisher does an alright job, but everything else sucks like the vacuum of deep space when it's especially thirsty and has a long straw. The Late 80's Punisher with Dolph Lundgren was better. [13:20] |
| C. Copperpot |
| Ohoho! I am a dork. |