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Realm of Rikonia
Rikonian Revuze
(Movies)
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Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 6/3/2013 12:23:59 AM)
Rating: 3.00 shapeshifting sword things
Genre: After Earth
Starring: The Fresh Prince, the other Karate Kid, a shapeshifting space sword
Plot: I liked this movie, but I have problems with it. There's a few things that borked my suspension of disbelief. For one, the scene at the start with the one legged soldier. We have bionic legs now, so him having to rely on friends to help him stand up instead of having a bionic leg seemed unbelievable. He has a floating wheelchair but not a bionic leg? I call shennanigans. But whatever, maybe it was in the shop that day, I'll let that slide.
The alien monster smells fear pheremones, that's it. It can't smell people's sweat or their blood or their hair oils, just the fear pheremones? This is the sort of detail that, when I let myself think about the movie, falls flat. It seems like it was shoehorned in to make the "Fear is a choice" tagline work.
While the future wildlife was cool, it wasn't varied enough, and for the most part, every weird creature appeared in its own self contained scene (with one notable exception).
Those are my problems with After Earth. But aside from them, it was a good movie. Far better than any of M Night's post-Unbreakable work. The pacing and tone was exceptionally well done. M Night may suck at putting twists on things (thankfully, After Earth doesn't have a ludicrous twist ending), but he is very good at creating a good atmosphere (which is ironic considering how much of the film's man vs. nature conflict is due to toxic air). The gear is very cool, especially the sword. Forget lightsabers, I want a Cutlass. The adventure Jaiden Smith embarks on is epic, visually stunning, and very fun to watch. The quality of the characterization and the relatively straightforward plot do much to salvage this film, but the problems I mentioned at the beginning of this review do weigh it down.
I think if they had left out the whole Ursa thing (or not given it the exact weakness they gave it) then this movie would have been a 4 instead of a 3.
Viewing Advice: Annoyance is not real. It is a product of thoughts you create. Do not misunderstand me. The flaws in the film's plot are very real. But annoyance is a choice.
Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 12/17/2009 5:12:26 PM)
Rating: 3.00 undead levitating skanks
Genre: Bram Stoker's Dracula
Starring: Commissioner Gordon, Hannibal Lecter, Neo, Spock's mom
Plot: You know this story. Gary Oldman is Dracula, the undead vampiric prince of the night. And he spends the first part of the movie living up to his last name as Theodore S Logan Esquire travels to Transylvania to help the evil undead Commissioner Gordon move to London.
After pricking his finger, and seeing Dracula go all semi orgasmic at the blood, Neo decides to, instead of backing out of the room and running like hell, go ahead and stay in Dracula's castle, where he is assailed by the levitating lesbian threeway from Meat Loaf's I Would Do Anything For Love video.
Despite these travails, they arrive at London and Commissioner Gordon is a huge hit with London society and it looks like he will take over Old Blighty uncontested, until famed vampire hunter Hannibal Lecter comes in to kill him.
Can Hannibal Lecter, the dude from Speed and some other people stop Commissioner Gordon's nefarious plot to create an army of bat-men?
Viewing Advice: This movie is fun, but not great enough to warrant re-watching, so it's a definite rental.
Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 10/26/2009 6:15:23 PM)
Rating: 3.00 adamantium lightsabers
Genre: Psychological thriller
Starring: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Wolverine
Plot: Ewan Mcgregor is an accountant quietly wishing he had a more interesting life. Then he befriends a lawyer played by Hugh Jackman who gets him involved with a crazy underground sex club.
The Obi-Wannabe has a few awkward encounters, including one with an old chick. Then he meets the girl that makes him break the rules of the sex club (no names, no business talk, not feeding your sex partners after midnight, no talking about Fight Club, messing with the Zohan, etc).
Of course, this relationship goes disasterously wrong and now McGregor must try to save his new girlfriend and figure out the truth behind Jackman's agenda.
My main complaint about this movie is the plan, which when it is revealed, is somewhat unbelievable. It relies on Ewan falling for this girl, but really there's no way that could have reliably been foreseen. What's to say he wouldn't have followed the rules of the sex club more dilligently? Or that he wouldn't have fallen for some other girl in the sex swinger circuit? Or that he wouldn't have gone nuts and started hacking off hands with his lightsaber? But still, if you can get past this hail mary pass of a plot, the film is fairly entertaining.
Viewing Advice: This movie starts out slow, but gets more interesting about midway through.
Also, you might wanna fast forward past Kenobi banging the old chick. There's not much really relevant plotwise in that bit.
Of course, you might just want to watch that movie where Wolverine and Batman fight each other with magic. It's much better.
Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 2/22/2011 12:40:03 PM)
Rating: 3.00 glowing leg scars
Genre: Sci-Fi action/whiny teen drama
Starring: A bunch of people I've never heard of, and Hitman with hair
Plot: The movie is like what would happen if the Smallville writers wrote a screenplay and Michael bay produced it. Mainly because that's what happened.
The lead actor was kind of "meh, whatever", but the supporting characters and villains were entertaining (kinda like in Smallville). Olyphant was a pretty cool protector, and the lead evil alien was both a credible threat and a nice bit of comic relief ("Don't you want to play with it? It wants to play with you!")
The evil aliens were interesting visually. They look kind of like Eastern European MIBs, only with short fangs and nose gills. I like that they didn't look like generic space villains, but look close enough to existing archetypes to click with the viewer.
The action was very cool, with explosions, awesome leap moves, #6's wicked cool teleport-fu, and a variety of space weapons, car crashes and TK stuff to keep me entertained. Michael Bay's influence on the action scenes is apparent. And that is a good thing. Unfortunately, the action scenes take far far too long to arrive. We had to deal with far too much winy teen angst in the interim.
And it's cliched whiny teen angst. As soon as they showed the douchey football bully kid and the love interest chick, I knew right then that space teen would fall for her, the bully kid would get his friends and either try to grab the girl or beat up the space kid or both, and the space kid would easily beat them. I knew all that in under 30 seconds. But I had to wait about a half hour or so for it to play out.
Still, despite its faults, the movie is entertaining. If there is a sequel, I hope they focus more on alien on alien fighting and less on whiny teen stuff.
Viewing Advice: On the one hand, if you rent it, you can skip past the boring drama stuff. On the other hand, if you don't have a kickass home theater setup, you should see it in the theater for the awesome Baysplosions.
Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 10/19/2009 7:35:35 AM)
Rating: 3.00 pointless voiceovers
Genre: Comedy drama based on real events
Starring: Jason Bourne, the time traveller who ruined Star Trek, a bunch of people in suits
Plot: Matt Damon is Mark Whitacre, a goofy ADM exceutive who blows the whistle on a large price fixing scheme, goes undercover for the FBI and is an effective but amusingly bumbling undercover mole for the feds. Then, things start to fall apart, as Mark kind of becomes unglued. Quite frankly, the whole story is kind of ludicrously unbelievable. Which is quite common of stories based on things that really happened, apparently. People who make up their stories can't get away with the same hack writing that reality can, apparently.
The actual movie itself was pretty good. Damon is funny, Scott Bakula makes a great straight-man for his antics, and there is a certain amount of suspense in the film over what will become of Mark Whitacre. My one complaint is the voiceovers. You see, the movie has these voiceovers throughout of Damon musing, as Whitacre, about inane stuff. It's like the voiceover musings that Ed Norton did in Fight Club. Except those were good and helped push the movie along. The random voiceover observations in the Informant, on the other hand, just dragged me out of the picture. Looking back, I think maybe it wasn't so much that they were bad in this movie, but that there were too many of them.
Actually, the movie kind of reminded me, stylistically, of another film adaptation of a Chuck Palasomethignorother book, Choke. Sure Matt Damon wasn't faking choking to death in restaurants to make connections, but he had the same sort of lost craziness to him, and the film had the same sort of dark yet funny path to self-destructiveness.
Come to think of it, he did mention in a random musing that he saved a guy from choking in a restaurant and gets a card from him. I wonder if it was the guy from Choke. That'd be something.
Viewing Advice: I'd say this movie is worth a look, as a rental or on cable. But I would not advise buying the DVD. Unless they have some good features.
Also, if you're a Transformer's fan, pay attention to the scene with Whitacre's dad in it. That's what Megatron and Soundwave really look like!
Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 10/17/2009 5:10:34 PM)
Rating: 3.00 of Speakman's 15 minutes of fame
Genre: Action
Starring: Fred Ward-- er I mean Jeff Speakman, Captain Kirk, Mac from Night Court, a lot of bombs, and Roberto Benini (just kidding!)
Plot: Speakman works for Kirk's senate campaign, doesn't believe the guy's corrupt (hey, he's Captain frickin' Kirk for cryin' out loud!) but steals a disk from him for the FBI anyway. The FBI swears they can protect Speakman and his family, but it turns out they're a bunch of goddamned lying pussies, so Captain Kirk's "problem eliminator" who happens to be Mac from Night Court (and you thought Bull was the badass of that show!) tries to kill Speakman, but fails, because, well, dammit, you just cannot beat a martial arts superstar like Jeff Speakman!
Viewing Advice: If you see this movie and feel like a moderately good action movie, go right ahead. It's not a must-see (but then you know a movie isn't a must-see if you see the name "Jeff Speakman" on the DVD box), but it's not that bad.
Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 10/3/2012 6:52:58 PM)
Rating: 3.00 spoiler tags
Genre: Sci-Fi
Starring: Cobra Commander, Die Hard, Diarrhea Dude From Dumb and Dumber
Plot: This is a fun movie. But it has some flaws to its logic. Unfortunately, one does not simple discuss time travel logic without spoiling the movie for everyone else. And unlike walking into Mordor, it's not like one can just get on one's giant eagle and drop the ring into Mount Doom. Seriously Gandalf, are you a fucking idiot or what?
But I'm not here to talk about how stupid Gandalf is. I'm here to discuss Looper.
As an action movie, Looper is fucking awesome.
As a noir movie, Looper is pretty good.
The characters in Looper are all very well done. In particular, they made it believable that Tommy Solomon's Young Joe grows up to be John McClaine's Old Joe. And kudos to the Fifth Element gag in the montage. I laughed my ass off at that joke.
As a time travel movie, however, Looper has some pretty goofy issues. For these, I shall use my spiffy new spoiler tag that the awesome webmaster of this site (That's me!) added.
The basic starting premise is fairly sound. The Mob in future has a time machine. They send enemies to the past, where they get killed and disposed of by guys called Loopers.
They also have a rule where
| Spoil me, spoil me hard! |
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if a Looper is still around when time travel is invented, they nab him and send him back to where his past self will kill his ass. They call this "closing the loop."
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OK, fine. As the narrator puts it "Loopers aren't exactly the most forward thinking people."
But right at the start, we get the major time travel screw up. This is bad. It's "Marty McFly's Amazing Headless Brother" bad.
| Spoil me, spoil me hard! |
Joe's buddy Seth gets his loop closed. Except, instead of killing future Seth, he lets him go. So now the Mob is after Young Seth to get Old Seth. They catch Young Seth. OK, so they kill him and Old Seth vanishes, right? Right? Wrong! Killing Young Seth would make a paradox. And that's bad. OK, so the Mob is more responsible with time travel than Starfleet officers. I'm oddly ok with that.
The mobsters send Young Seth to the surgeons. Ooh! I bet I know what they do! They put a bomb in Young Seth that'll go off in 30 years, killing him while he's on the run in the present! The sort of bomb that can't be removed without killing the patient! A foolproof and fairly temporally responsible plan. A nice surprise for a time travel movi... oh wait, they're not doing that. They're cutting bits off of Young Seth so we get to watch him fall apart in real time. A cool and creepy and brutal scene, but also a fucking stupid scene, which culminates in a fingerless, legless, noseless Old Seth driving to the rendezvous point carved onto his arm flesh until his disintegrating body can no longer drive and rams the car into a dumpster, leaving him to hobble to the door to get blasted.
Let's think this through. This means that, basically, Young Seth got his limbs hacked off and got himself denosified. Then the Mob keeps him alive for 30 years, sends him back, and he runs from Young Seth (How? You ain't got no legs, Lt. Old Seth!) and manages to get to the rendezvous point by driving a car he's incapable of driving until he suddenly can't.
And how is delimbifying Seth less of a paradox than killing him? It's not like Seth will be able to do any of the stuff he would have done in the original timeline. And, unless the Mob is keeping him in an isolated room with no contact, then he could conceivably say things that would alter the timeline further. But if the Mob is just keeping him in a black box room for thirty years, then temporally speaking, they might as well just kill him. This whole subplot is so silly, I'm surprised that zombie Graham Chapman didn't make a cameo to put a stop to it.
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OK, that's done with. If you can manage to get your suspension of disbelief back, the rest of the movie is actually pretty clever. There's a funny comic "beat" you'll chuckle at (then groan at your remembrance of this pun).
Most of the story is pretty engaging and dark. And aside from the bit in the spoiler tag, the time travel element is fairly well handled.
But I do have to wonder
| I've been bad, spoil me! |
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if killing the present self of the future traveler is such a horrible paradox, then why is it that when JGL offs himself and Bruno disappears, everything else seems to be ok?
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Viewing Advice: If you don't mind some daft time travel logic, then watch this film. If you're still hung up on Marty McFly's brother being headless in that photo then maybe this isn't the film for you.
BTW, what the fuck? His body was born but his head wasn't?
Zemekis, TIME TRAVEL DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!!!!
Oh yeah, I should also warn you that this film does delve into some dark territory like
| I've been bad, spoil me! |
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Bruce Willis going around shooting kids because one of them will grow up to be a bad guy who kills his wife.
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Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 10/21/2009 6:51:24 PM)
Rating: 3.00 stupid head-bobs
Genre: Comedy
Starring: Will Ferrel, that creepy little dude from SNL, Molly Shannon, Molly Shannon's cleavage, Colin Quinn, Mr. Tortelli, some dude who I thought was Ben Affleck, but isn't, and Richard Grieco
Plot: Two idiots dance badly at nightclubs, behave like total jackasses and get pushed around a lot. Actually, there is a surprising amount of depth here. This movie did something I would have figured impossible: given the "SNL dancing idiot guys" a depth of character. You will find yourself actually caring if they get their nightclub dream or not. Molly's cleavage was actually nominated for an oscar for best supporting cleavage. Oh yeah, and Colin Quinn plays kind of an asshole.
Viewing Advice: If you liked all those weird slacker party-dude comedy movies in the 80's, you will love this movie.
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