Category: Movies

Today we’ve watched the most lame, stupid, and boring animation created in the past few years – “Brother Bear“. It is a pretty standard Disney animation with all the usual faces, emotions, and characters that was turned even worse.

There was an attempt to base everything on a more-or-less original story, but it turned out to be really simple and undeveloped. Not enough evolved characters – there are many faces, but none of them are complete. If it wasn’t for a couple of elk’s with Canadian accent it would have been totally empty.

Music deserves a special mention. It was totally gay (in the bad meaning of the word). Timing was really bad. Accompaning animations were irrelevant and really really boring. Phil Collins was even worse than Elton John.

Closing titles were totally unoriginal, but there were a couple of nice jokes which were really needed by that time.

Canadian elks count for 1 point. Closing titles earn another point. There you go – 2 out of 10. Summary: total crap and a waste of time.

Watched “Chasing Amy” on DVD. This is yet another film written, directed, and partially played by Kevin Smith. It is an OK movie, though much simplier than anything I’ve seen so far of the Kevin’s work.

The story is pretty standard – a guy falls in love with a girl. The girl is a lesbian. The guy tries to “turn her over”. And because of the true love and stuff like that he successeds. The problem turns out to be a big bigger though. Before the girl jumped into a lesbian camp she experimented a lot with all sorts of sexual relationships. The guy, of course, feels a bit akward. There is another small touch to it. The guy has a best friend who is trying to protect him from the lesbian. He tries so much, that the guy thinks that his best friend is actually in love with him.

All of this is pretty tough already. The guy is under a whole lot of stress and naturally he cannot think clearly. The solution he proposes is for all three of them to have sex. This way, he will get OK with his girlfriends past, he and his friend will have sex, and his friend and his girlfriend, he hopes, will get OK too. Fortunately, his girlfriend was smart enough to explain to him that this is a very stupid way of solving problems and that it will do nothing else except for complicating further.

There is a nice line up of actors in here. I just don’t like Joey Lauren Adams. She is not my type and she has all this artificial look around her. Everyone else is just in place. Dialogs are not as strong as they could have been and in places they seem overdeveloped. Soundtrack is nice. It is not my type of music, but it does fit pretty good.

I’ll rate it as 6 out of 10 for now.

I watched “The Full Monty” on DVD. Somehow I missed this film when it was going in the cinemas and since than I wanted to see it. But every time I was updating my ToWatch List I miraculasly forgot about it. Today I finally remembered and since the rentals were still open, I grabbed it and… enjoyed it.

It is a nice comedy which is very realistic and routine, but that has a whole bunch of English humour. It changes paces all the time – at times it is slow and boring and at other times it is as fast and funny that you don’t have enough time to laugh through all the jokes.

It is does not fit into a family kind of movie, but it is great to have fun at during the slow and tired evening. I’ll rate it as 8 out 10 for a good average density of jokes.

“Akira” is a 16-year old animation we have seen today. There are some pretty neat drawing techniques which make it feel more like a movie and not an animation. The story is a somewhat usual Japanese twick with an almost executed global trouble. By “almost executed” I don’t mean something that almost happened. I mean that there was alsmot nothing left of Tokyo and that happened very fast.

I am not a huge fan of Japanese movies and animations. They are too sad and depressing for me. This one started off as something much lighter than I expected, so I decided to watch. Somehow it was getting bigger and bigger towards the end. And the result was as usual – I was unable to stop watching it and ended up with shocked and depressed mind. And I was feeling glad when the animation finished. For some reason I do feel glad every time I watch Japanese cartoon or film. Maybe I am broken…

Anyway, I’ll give a 7 out of 10 for the excellent graphics techniques.

Today we watched “WarGames“. It is rather old and outdated, but still is the one of the best movies about hackers. What makes it so good is that people who made this movie did their homework. There are real computers in the movie, real problems, and real solutions. People are displayed and behaved exactly as they should. There are different types of hackers too. Some techniques displayed are real, but somewhat outdated.

What is especially interesting is that most of the things are done right, although it was much more difficult to do them right in the beginning of the 80s (the movie is from 1983) than now. There was no common stereotype by that time since computers were pretty rare still. There are some things done right that are regularly messed up in modern films. That is awesome.

The story is blown out a bit, but still pretty good. 8 out of 10.