pirates of the caribbean

JusWondering… Sequels With Lady Problems

Posted on by sgottahurt

I’ve noticed a trend in sequels to popular films, and it’s one that I consider an exercise in lazy screenwriting.  Heh… exercise… lazy…

Anywheredidshego, where did she go?  To me, the writers couldn’t develop the characters’ relationships further, so they broke them in order to fix them again, to varying degrees of suck-cess.

  • Bill Murray seemed to be with Sigourney Weaver at the end of Ghostbusters, and then she (well, her character Dana) went and had a baby with someone else.
  • Sure, Bruce Willis and Bonnie Bedelia wouldn’t have won couple of the year in Die Hard, but by Die Harder, they seemed to have worked out all their kinks.  In Die Hard with a Vengeance, the kinks won.
  • Orlando and Kiera’s love Bloom-ed, um, Knightley in the first Pirates of the Caribbean.  In the second, they didn’t get married and fought only to draw out a boring plot point for two films.
  • Nick Cage found whatever it was he found in the first National Treasure; Diane Kruger was his booby prize.  Then repeat the above, but place a “2” before the semicolon.
  • The Night at the Museum sequel doesn’t even begin to explain what happened between Carla Gugino and Ben Stiller, just so they could get to (hot?) Amelia Earhart’s doppelgänger, Amy Adams. What is this movie really… Mannequin 3: Skies the Limit?

Actually, I’m going to carry on with my Night at the Museum tirade.  It’s not like he’s Austin Powers or James Bond, picking up new ladies every flick…

Actually again, James Bond has loved Vesper Lynd for two movies so far.  One can imagine that every woman he bangs from here on out would be in an attempt to mask his pain of loving her too much.  He probably would still be with her if she didn’t, you know, die.

So in closing, writers do yourself a favor and imitate the always excellent Transformers series – instead of blowing the relationship up, blow shit up!

This scene could be from either movie.

The Sh– To Just Sh–ty… Fantasy Movies

Posted on by sgottahurt

NOTE: Everything that follows is my opinion… and it’s all fact.

Fantasy movies are geared toward the audience that longs to be whisked away, and that’s namely the pre-teens of this world.  The reason why they are so susceptible: there’s still imagination (child-like wonder) remaining in their brains.  Any adult that is too into fantasy films obviously has a mental/social disorder (hello PotHeads and Twihards)…

I’m not meaning to be mean.  I’m merely meaning to get to the bottom of why fantasy films don’t do it for me anymore.

Growing up, I loved Clash of the Titans, The Beastmaster, The Dark Crystal, Gremlins, Tron, The Princess Bride, and some movies had to deal with a Star War or a few. There were others that I couldn’t quite get into like Legend and Labyrinth, but I always felt they were more for the young ladies (for the record, The Princess Bride was being read to Kevin Arnold Fred Savage).

Outside of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (it’s insanely absurd and clever), when I was turning thirteen, Willow wasn’t even cutting it anymore.  If I was going to like a dopey fantasy movie, it had something else going for it, such as my crush on Winona Ryder in Edward Scissorhands or me still being a fan of Steven Spielberg when he made Hook.

Let’s use The Neverending Story trilogy (yes there were three – and a TV show) to reiterate:

The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

The first film released in 1984: AWE-SOME (hyphen added for pause worthy emphasis).

The second film released in 1990: (Avoid making tasteless joke about Jonathan Brandis, avoid making tasteless joke about Jonathan Brandis, avoid making tasteless joke about Jonathan Brandis…)

The third film released in 1994: Really?!  Highlights from an IMDB review:

I cannot begin to describe how awful this movie is… NES3, for lack of a better term, sucks.  The storyline was as unimaginative and vapid as you could hope for… After the fart jokes and potty humor commenced, I just couldn’t take it any longer.  My advice is don’t wast your time and ruin your childhood memories with this piece of refuse.

Now I don’t count superhero movies or animated films because they’ve almost attained the status of having their own genre.  Outside of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, what do you have left to defend?  The Mummy films?  Van Helsing?  (Not fair – those are mostly Stephen Sommers‘ pieces of crap.)  Okay, then.  MirrorMask?  Eragon?  Beowulf?  Lady in the Water?!  Stardust and Coraline were even kind of meh.

(SIDENOTE: I will give props to The Last Mimzy, The Bridge to Terebithia, and Big Fish for tugging my heart strings, 300 for being new, and the first Pirates of the Caribbean for the laughs. Am I missing any others?)

Ultimately, have fantasy films declined from being the shit to just shitty, or am I just getting old?  I guess the proof will be in the pudding (sorry for the oldtimer-y expression) when the following films get remade or updated:

(FINAL SIDENOTE: I really, really, really, seriously hope that M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t fuck up The Last Airbender.  I looooove that cartoon.  That ended it’s run.  On Nickelodeon.  Just last year.  Stop looking at me that way!  I don’t have that serious of a mental/social disorder!  Use this blog as proof!)

Drunken Recollection… Flying Bags, Trashing Toilets, Saving Bathrooms, And Other Weird Thoughts

Posted on by sgottahurt

Sometimes things you enjoy can get ruined by the mere fact that someone points out the obvious to you, well-enough is not left alone, or something becomes cliché about it.  Examples:

  • One episode of South Park lampooned Family Guy and pointed out the show makes pointless jokes that have no basis or bearing on the plot.  It sounds highbrow, but it ruined Family Guy for me.
  • Matrix 2 and 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3, and Star Wars Episodes 1-3 all turned the awesome originals into tripe.  What wonders the first works brought us were repeated and retreaded until the wonder was no more.  The signs of forward thinking creativity became watered down to levels of… luck.
  • Don’t get me started on using famous songs in commercials.  Too late.  I’d give anything in the world to NOT think of KFC when I hear Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”… but alas, that’s not to be.  The classic Southern rock anthem is now an unfortunate cliché.

The reason I bring this all up is fuck American Beauty.  Especially this scene:

Why do I have such disdain for this sequence?  It’s not that I hate it… at all.  It’s that I quite actually agree with it wholeheartedly.  I’m the type of person that likes to look up at the clouds every now and again and feel small.  I enjoy remembering my minuscule place in the universe that I share with the floating grocery store bags and the tumbling cardboard containers blowing in the wind.  What makes me mad is that I liked paying attention to the things too many people ignore before the movie came out (ten whole years ago), and when I do so now, I feel like a cliché because I’m reminded of that movie.

I thought of that on the way to the bar before soccer last night, and I needed to get that off my chest.  On to the Drunken Recollection!

SIDENOTE: Does it bring anyone else extreme amounts of joy to see toilets being discarded on the curbside?  Oh, the stories they could tell.  And it looks so juxtaposed with its surroundings.  Can you imagine being the garbage man that has to hoist the porcelain throne into his compactor?   I tried to Google Image Search “toilets being thrown out” for additional laughs, but all that showed up were pictures of Lily Allen. Weird.

Once at the bar, time constrained nicely between basketball and soccer, I had to save yet another restroom from flooding.  What’s up with people not being able to turn off faucets!?!  Have we gone numb?

Anyway, a few topics of interest came up that I thought I’d share:

  • My (possibly brilliant, or perhaps stranger than I) cousin Steve brought up the suggestion that adults should start referring to their age in months as opposed to years.  It’s more specific, it sounds impressive the older you get, and it gives clues to your birthday… that is if you’re good at math and know your times table.  Just remember, you have to be older than 252 months to drink and older than 216 months to vote, see Rated R movies, and be considered “legal.”
  • I was reminded of an old daydream I used to have where people kept growing the older they got, so you’d have to have bigger homes and bigger cars and bigger clothes and bigger factories to make all those big things.  Nobody could lie about their age or get Botox or plastic surgery to stay small.  And even if you were fifty, your seventy year old parents could still pick you up if they needed to, or you had a bad day and wanted to be nuzzled.  (I’m probably stranger than Steve, hands down.)
  • Do celebrities have insurance?  Do movie stars walk around with Blue Cross cards or Medicaid, or do they simply pay cash?  Maybe they get comped like with stores and restaurants.  “Hey, guess where Angelina and Brad went when they got the flu?  Kaiser Permanente.”  “Man, I wanna go there, too!”  I could research this further, but I only really cared about it last night.