World of Warcraft

Hey I went cruisin' for trolls today.

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Quantum of Solace

I'm a James bond fan from way back. I can still remember nights from my youth spent watching the movies. Of course the single most lucid recollection is that the movies seemed to have lasted longer than the traditional fare from network TV. A whole two and a half hours at times .. but anyways.

Quantum of Solace. What does it mean? How did it become the name of the 22nd film in a franchise spanning 46 years?

I don't know. I never caught it. I did hear the mention of the word Quantum once as they uttered what the bad guys had decided to call their ultra secrete comic book club. So I'll just assume that it was because it was the coolest sounding name on the white erase board.

To hurry this along a little. The opening sequence continued exactly where the last film left off.

Bond brooding over the betrayal of his previous love interest continues exactly where the last film left off and everything else that could have possibly been injected into this film from the previous one, was ... sigh ... injected into this one exactly where the last one had left off.

Don't you just love having to watch a 2 hour prequel to a prequel. It should have come with a warning. An explanation or as a double feature. Maybe, with one of those scrolling Star Wars explanations that they used to explain why they were to lazy to simply make a self contained serialized movie.

In a movie far, far away...

The are no gadgets. No Q. No witty one liners for comic relieve. Just the constant broodiness of this new version of the character.

All in all, it's a Bond film and worth watching. I simply long for watches that fire laser beams, exploding fountain pens and the occasional funny remark that distinguishes James Bond from...well...every other overly sad and tortured action hero at the box office.



How would I have changed it?

I would have opened with Bond dreaming about the death of his beloved Vesper, from the previous film. Then eerily had the ghostlike incarnation wake him just as twenty bad guys entered his room from every conceivable entry point.

The next minute and thirty seconds would have consisted of James Bond fighting off his attackers with a man-sized goose-down pillow that inevitably rips open, emptying it's contents into the air. What?

I would have then ended the opening scene and started the traditional 007 opening song with a widening shot of him as the only thing left standing in a room of electrical shorts and slowly falling pure white feathers.

..all while wearing Speedracer pajamas.

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Taken

The Short Version is that it's a mindless, enjoyable action flick starring Liam Neeson.

Ok. Liam Neeson. Big Fan!

The totally erroneous and fractured plot points. not so much ...but you say it's an action film!

I say .. If that's all it tried to be, I'd be happy. The only problem I have is that it tried to tell a story. In Fact, just go ahead and skip the first twenty minutes altogether, the last ten if you want to and you'll find an action flick worthy of Jason Statham himself.


What was I talking about again?

Oh yeah, a story of an ex-military Liam Neeson that has apparently given up his career as the self proclaimed 'Preventor of the World' so that he can be closer to his uncaring daughter.

It portrays Mr. Neeson's character as some super, untouchable, wannabe dad who apparently has the ability to find anyone, anytime and do whatever he wants to them with absolutely no consequences and no resources of any kind.

(Insert Jack Bauer Joke here.)

He also has about a half a dozen ex-military best friends who continuously beg him to re-join the ranks of their exclusive 'Preventor Club' but for some reason they completely disappear when Neeson's daughter is kidnapped and sold into slavery as an underage prostitute. Whaa?

As if that wasn't enough to make one's head spin with thoughts of abandonment.

The girl's mother and stepfather are just as obscenely rich as they are totally oblivious to the outside world and literally lift just one finger to help their daughter. They throw bio-dad from their private jet directly over the offending European city (Paris) and tell him to 'Fetch'.

Which he does.

Other than that. I loved to watch the indestructible Neeson use his arsenal of ex-Jedi mind tricks to search the world for the voice that dared to tell him 'good luck' in finding his daughter, because let's face it. You really don't want to be a smartass to an Irishman, turned Jedi, turned American action star, turned bio-dad over the phone from France, if you've just kidnapped his daughter. You will most assuredly get your ass kicked.

Did I hear you ask how I would have changed it?

Glad you asked.

I would have left Liam Neeson and his friends in their para-military bag and sent the entire group into to Paris with all of the ordinance they could carry.

or

Since the movie had at least two X-men in it (Jean Grey, Toad) and a Jedi Knight we might as well of just given all their powers back and tied the little brat on top of the Eiffel Tower so we could have watched the Telekinesis Queen and Master Jedi fight it out.

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The Spirit

The short verison is that it is a poor adaptation of a graphic novel by a seemingly inexperienced Director ... and a bad movie.

Yeah, yeah I know the cinematics resemble movies like '300' and 'Sin City' and for good reason. Namely the director was somewhat involved in all three. If it makes you feel any better, I liked '300'.

However, this one has a different feel to it and that feeling is of confusion. I say this because for the life of me I can not figure out why Samuel L Jackson was wearing a Hitler costume while standing in front of a swastika for a good portion of the film and what was the deal with the genetically engineered jumping/head/foot thing that we were forced to stare at for several minutes while Jackson kept repeating, "That's just damn weird."

My opinion is that after making the film someone on the developing team actually watched the damn thing and pointed out that not one minute of it was remarkable beyond the words 'Samuel L Jackson, in the opening credits.

So they all gathered around a giant mocha non-fat crapachino and decided on the two things that they thought would make people remember that they had actually watched a movie. A black Hitler and a tiny head, on a small foot, hopping around a table.

How would I have changed it?

I would have put Jackson on a plane.

Then I would have put a buncha snakes on that same plane.

Then I would have made The Spirit dance on the wing every time that Jackson looked out the window, effectively driving him insane so that he would attach exactly eight twenty foot mechanical arms to his torso, call himself the Octopus and inject his cat with a serum of invincibility.

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The Tale of Despereaux

The Short version is it's a nice G-Rated Film aimed at the younger audience.

It wasn't at all the best animated film 'aka cartoon' I've ever watched but it's always nice to see Hollywood (aka Disney) make an attempt at a wholesome family oriented product.

It ,of course began like all movies do, as a series of children stories from 2003 called "The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread" written by Kate DiCamillo and then adapted for the big screen.

It begins with narrator Sigourney Weaver telling us about the Kingdom of Dor where apparently the royalty, the peasants and the vermin all lived in perfect harmony around the most perfect substance in the world...Soup.

That is until that rat Dustin Hoffman was running around and fell into the beloved Queen's bowl of liquid heaven, while her back was turned, and gave her a heart attack. Thus, sending the King down a dark hole of grieve that could only be quenched by banning all Soup and Dustin Hoffman's from the Kingdom forever.

Enter our Hero Despereaux. Another tiny, admittedly much cuter, plague carrier with eyes and ears the size of .. well the rest of his entire body. We open to Despereaux playing a very believable Mathew Broderick as a pirate on the high seas that is left stranded in the Kingdom of Dor at almost the exact moment that the Kingdom is Plunged into darkness .

As we flash back and receive a glimps of Matthew Broderick's childhood we also discover that he possesses the mutant like ability to visualize and project his thoughts, in story form, directly on the wall behind him. So much so that if he becomes engrossed in a book we can actually see him injected into the story seemingly as the most heroic character available.

Almost immediately we understand that Matthew Broderick and Dustin Hoffman are somehow related and since Hoffman is banned from the Kingdom of Dor so is Matthew Broderick by association. In fact he is so banned that he is physically ejected from the Kingdom of Dor, or as Dustin Hoffman calls it Mouse World, and falls down a deep hole into another much darker place called...RAT WORLD .. A sort of purgatory filled with decaying bones, dark moody music and a single dish, community feeding trough.

While there Broderick and Hoffman team up into an unlikely duo and embark on the road to redemption. Along the way they they return to the Kingdom of Dor and are befriended by the beautiful princess Emma Watson and peasant girl Tracy Ullman, 'played by Ms. Piggy'. There they find the true meaning of friendship, a closet full of ridiculously large red hats and live happily everafter.

How would I have changed it?

I would have made it live action and dressed everyone up like the characters from Spaceballs.

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