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Saturday, July 26, 2014

How to train your dragon 2






There are way too few dragons in movies . Dragons have always had this mythical status in media, a kind of "the less is better" status. Dragons are often talked about on books and movies but very seldom seen. Dragons are amazing, powerful and awesome creatures and they deserve to be featured a lot more in movies.

Que How to train your dragon. A delightful movie filled with childish innocence, mature writing and lots of dragons. It was a great movie that wasn't afraid of using as many dragons as possible.

A few years pass by and along comes How to train your dragon 2, my expectstions ran very high. Not only was this a sequel to a very good movie, but it also promised way more dragons. So, how did it fare? Before we go into the actual review, let's taje a look at the story.

A few years has passed (mirroring real life) since drafons and humans found peace. Hiccup and his friends have grown up and so hace the rest of the village. The humans now live in symbiosis with the dragons and life is looking really good. Hiccup and tooth are as inseparable as ever. They constantly exploring the world, expanding the map and discovering that the world is a lot bigger than they thought. At the same time, Stoick is coming to terms with the fact that hiccup woll havr to take over the role as chief soon. Something that Hiccup has no interest in doing. Tensipns are running high, but when a threat appears on the horizon Hiccup will have to lead the rest of the dragonriders to save all of humanity and... dragon...ity from an evil warlord.


How to train your dragon 2 is a perfect example of a sequel. It's bigger and it's louder but in terms of quality it lacks that certain something that made its predecessor so great. The magic is still there but it can't topple the feeling you got when you saw the first one, not that they aren't trying. The movie is full of all the stuff that made the original do good. Great voice performances, awesome flight sequences and a blistering sense of forward momentum. All of this is great but all the time I was sitting there I couldn't stop thinking that I had seen this before

A very nice detail, that most "kids movies" forget to use, is the progress of time. Where the first one was about kids having a fun time, this movie is all about teenagers on the cusp of becoming adults. It made the characters come alive a little more than if they had still been 12 years old.

Other than that, How to train your dragon 2 did'nt bring anything new to the table. It was just more of the same wich in this case meant more dragons, more action and more fun, so I am not really complaining.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Transformers: Age of extinction





I always liked the Transformers, the old TV-show as well as the new movies, I even liked Revenge of the fallen. I always knew in the back of my head that these movies were actually crap, but my argument was always the same, big ass robots and even bigger explosions. Now, normally, that shouldn't be enough. Normall you would need plot, character development, directing and good acting to be called an actual movie, but in the case of Transformers I have always just accepted it for what it is. Big ass robots and even bigger explosions.

Last night, as I sat down to watch Age of extinction, I was expecting just another Transformers movie. What I got instead was a...

You know what? Trying to describe what I experienced in that movie theater with mere words is impossible, there are no such words in the human vocabulary. I find it hard to even explain to you what I felt as the credits rolled. All I really can tell you is that I was exhausted when got up from my seat, I was physically exhausted, because I had just witnessed 165 minutes of pure and utter hell!!

From beginning to end, Age of extinction was a disaster, a trainwreck, a fucking piece of shit. There was no rhyme of reason to any of it, it was pure torture.

To go into any detail would be a waste of my time because I can describe every aspect of the movie with the same word; SHIT.

Acting was shit, plot was complete shit, directing was non existant and when ever it showed up it was so much shit. The sound effects, CGI, the music, the action and especially the editing were all fucking shit.

This movie had no redeeming qualities, it wasn't even a movie. It was a robbery, this... thing was designed to steal money from anyone who even remotely enjoy Transformers.
When I started writing this review, it was my intention to not tell you my opinion but after writing about my anger and actually getting more angry I feel it is my duty to spread the message, together with every other filmcritic out there.

Do not watch Transformers: Age of extinction. Don't throw your money at this garbage, spend it on something good instead (like helping starving children or an ice cream, anything but this). Because if we continue to give all our money to Michael Bay and his kind, we will forever be plagued by shit movies like this...

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Deliver us from evil






"As a cop, I've always had a... heavy hand"

This sentence is uttered more than once and I find that "mantra" to be very fitting when dissecting this trainwreck of a movie.

The story revolves around Liutenant Sarchie. A police from the Bronx that stumbles onto several cases of the same nature, the same supernatural nature. Together with a priest he begins unraveling a mystery of apocalyptical proportions.

This movie must have been some kind of dare from the producers. Can you actually mix horror with a procedural cop movie? The answer is...not in this one. Horror and cop is mixed together in this movie, with varying degrees of success, but in the process of fuse these two very different genres something happened. The movie has influences from almost a dozen different genres. Horror, cop TV-show, buddy cop, action, kitchen sink realism, faith and spirituality, found footage and even a little bit of comedy.
The director, Scott Derrickson who also did the much better The excorsism of Emily Rose, can't seem to handle the fusion of the different genres and somwhere along the way he got lost. The movie switches between the genres back and forth and the script suffers. Issues are brought up and used to instigate certain emotions and reactions but then never spoken of again. All this makes the movie very confusing and the actors aren't helping. Eric Bana does a good enough job of playing the obnoxcious but still releatable Sarchie but the rest of the cast, including Joel McHale as the comic sidekick... in a horror movie, feels out of place. I can't put the blame solely on the performances but also on the characters them selves. Very few of them actually fit in a horror movie and even the point was to work against all the clichés, it all still feels weird and out of place.

The story hints at a very large scope and this movie could have been played out on a large canvas but instead it limits itself to the confines of the Bronx and about five people, the threat never feels real and because of this the movie fails to scare at all. I usually scream and jum and cover my eyes when I watch horror movies, but thus time I sat absolutely still for the movie

To say that this movie was a terrible fucking movie would not be a complete lie. It was a very interesting experiment that sadly, failed miserably.