New Addition to Blog

Hello all. I've decided to add a new feature to my blog. It will most likely be a weekly feature. It's going to be called "What's the Deal?" I will focus on a topic or topics that has been given a lot of press, media, attention, etc. and try to decipher why or why not it should be a big "deal." This shall start next Sunday. Have a good night all.

Superhero Movie Review

Parodies should be funny. A bad parody is an even worse type of bad comedy. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth and not to mention, a really big hole in the wallet. Superhero MOvie treads that line between some funny laughs, but with many headfirst diving into a concrete pool not so funny laughs.

Credit must be given when it's due. The film has a plot! It's thinner than an anorexic person, but still holds together. Teenager Rick Riker (Drake Bell) is the quintestianl loser. That all changes when he is bitten by a radioactive dragonfly that gives super dragonfly abilities. Ironically, he doesn't have the power to fly. Evil scientist Lou Landers (Christopher McDonald) has created a machine that will cure him of his illness. One catch: it backfires and now whenever he touches someone, he takes their life energy, which he now must survive on. Pretty creative.

I have to admit some parts made me laugh out loud. However, most of that came from comedian extradonaire Leslie Nielsen. He brings that trademark look of not being in on the joke, which gives off some hilarious results including a very funny scene when he explains the facts of life to his newphew Rick.

Drake Bell, most famous as the dimwitted brother in Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh seems to think that comedic timing is about making reaction faces to absurd situations or events. That is why many of these parodies fail. The absurdity of the situation should speak for itself. We don't need the charcter to tell us that. It distracts from the comedy. While I blame Bell for that, the fault must also lie with the writers and directors. It simply is not funny.

Most of the jokes consist of making fun of the obvious pop culture sensations including Youtube, Tom Cruise, and 2girls1cup. While I did get the jokes, this is where the film fails. The humor is already dated. The great classic parodies like Airplane and Naked Gun did not have constant barrages of reference to the contemporary culture of the time. They aren't dated. Superhero Movie is already dated. Not to mention, unless you know the references, you won't get the jokes. Comedies, good comedies, shouldn't do that. Would Shakespeare's comedies be remembered if his comedies made only references to his period? No. They have a feeling of timelessness.

The film does succeed in noting the absurdities of the Superhero genre itself, like the cliched characters and archtypes that are so prevelanet in the genre. However, most of that humor falls into the category of making fun of the obvious that it's not funny. When the humor is obvious it fails for exactly that reason; there is no surprise.

Superhero Movie is an okay movie. Like all parodies, it had the possibility to be great. It certainly doesn't reach the status of Naked Gun, but it certainly doesn't reach the lowly status of the Epic Movie line.

Rating: 6/10

10,000 B.C. Movie Review

Hollywood churns out so many bad movies one would think that it is done like an assembly line. However, assembly lines build good, new, impressive looking cars for the most part. 10,000 B.C. is like a car that was made from other car parts that do not go together. Not only do you get a bad car, you get a horrid looking and useless product with money spent on it that could have gone to something else worth making. It is a cliche ridden epic that is one of the worst films that has been ever made.

The film follows a young hunter's journey to find his kidnapped lover. Like we all haven't heard that before. That's it in a nutshell. Explaining the plot would be taking up useful space to tear this film to pieces.

Where to start. The film is directed by Roland Emmerich, who is by no means a bad director, but not a good one either. His past films include The Patriot, Independence Day, and The Day After Tomorrow. They are not excellent cinematic excursions, but the films serve the purpose to entertain. Emmerich's goal with this film does not seem to entertain, but to try to immerse us with inane scenes that are supposed to be profound and philosophical in some way. Instead, they read like the kid who always raises his or her hand in class to say something smart while they come across looking like an idiot actually. The action scenes themselves are of little concern for the most part. Yes, they are fun to look at. However, the film should be more than mere action scenes if it wants to be a good film. And ironically, the action scenes are so short, perhaps they shouldn't even be considered action scenes.

Unfortunately for Mr. Emmerich, he has to get pounded twice as he also co-wrote the script, which is the worst thing about this film. The script is a mishmash of so many cliches it borders on plagiarism. One thousand monkeys on one thousand typewriters could create a better screenplay, even on their worst day. Cliche #1: You have the old, wrinkly, wise sage (a female sage in this film) that has blurry visions and spills out prophesies with wide eyes and a foreboding voice. She sees everything and knows everything. We've seen that a thousand times before and this is one thousandth and first time we see it. Cliche #2: The "meaningful deaths." Usually on these adventure films, the main character is supported by a band of friends. What winds up happening is a few of them die. As we all know, they don't just die, they have to give a structured monologue about something or other. That happens in this film too often. Cliche #3: Horrendous dialogue. Why is that a cliche? Because it happens too often in films. You have everything from the main character comparing his girlfriend to the moon to talking to a rabid sabre-tooth tiger. It boggles how someone actually was sitting at a typewriter and thought "Hm, this is profound."

Wait. But there is one good thing about the film: the ending. I don't mean that as an insult. I mean that the ending has a nice (and the only good) action scene. It's enough to get a filler of a twenty minute action scene.

Alas, this is simply put one of the worst films that I have ever seen. Period

Rating: 2/10