G.I. Joe - The Rise of Cobra Review

"Knowing is half the battle" - G.I. Joe

Don't watch this. Ever. And now you know.

G.I. Joe the Rise of Cobra decided that the Transformers movie didn't destroy our childhoods enough, so it had to try to reach the bar of ineptitude set by Michael Bay. Unlike Transformers, you can at least tell what's happening in the fight scenes. Somehow, this movie is still just as bad if not worse.

I can't even give this mess a proper review, and it probably doesn't deserve one, so I'm just gonna copy-paste my immediate post-movie rant.


why did Snake-Eyes mask have a molded mouth?

why is his nickname Ripcord if he isnt a paratrooper?

why did the writer/director think that Zartan had to whistle to make me understand he shapechanged?

why does Cobra Commander look like...I don't even know what he looks like?

I am 37 and what is this? I don't even

why did Snake-Eyes carve up Storm Shadow without even getting touched?

if it's called the Rise of Cobra, why did the top 4 ranking bad guys end the movie "dead", imprisoned or under gi joe medical care?

why did Heavy Duty exist?

why did the writers feel the need to make everyone related through blood or sexual partnering?

why was everything a computer generated effect, including the sand?  is real sand too expensive?

why did the heavily guarded nanomite case have a security code...of 6 digits?

why did the bad guys drill their way into the Pit...without setting off alarms?

why were the joe computers unable to figure out who the Baroness was....BECAUSE SHE DYED HER HAIR?

why did they need to shoot the Eiffel tower only from the top of one particular building instead of down the long avenue they were driving on that had a perfect view of the tower?


I watched the Transformers cartoon in the 80s, but GI Joe was my second-biggest-thing. (after Star Wars, duh) I used to run home from school to catch episodes and the GI Joe comic was how I got into comics in the first place.So I might be biased. But this was AWFUL on every level. It wasn't funny, it wasn't dramatic, it wasn't pretty to look at, and even the action sucked.

I don't know how they decided to go with this mix of characters instead of some of the more usual pairings from the cartoon or the comics. Surely Gung-Ho or Roadblock or Quick-Kick or  Alpine and Bazooka would have provided better character interactions.

I also don't understand removing the Joes' individual uniforms or specialties. That was the whole point of the unit.

Whatever.

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland Review

"I wish I knew how to quit you." - Brokeback Mountain

Ok, so I haven't posted in a week again, I warned you this would happen.

I did watch Alice in Wonderland like I said I would, but it was kinda meh, so I didn't feel the need to run back to the internets to talks about it. Then I didn't rant about other stuff, cuz I wanted to comment on this first.  Let's chalk it up to work in progress and move on.

The movie was Alice-revisits Wonderland with some grrlpower thrown in, and absolutely ZERO actual sets or props. EVERYTHING was green-screened in except perhaps one table and a chair or two. Most of the effects are passable, except for the Knave who looked ridiculous, but if you're not going to use anything real, you might as well just make a cartoon.

The movie tells you how it's going to end about 20 minutes in, and then just builds to that spot. Depp's Mad Hatter and Bonham-Carter's Queen are dripping with been-there-done-that because the two of them and Burton have obviously spent one too many nights together sharing a brain. (The funniest thing on the Blu-ray was the extra where Burton and Depp show their character sketches of the Hatter, and they're almost identical.)

Spooky.

Alice's armor at the end of the movie was pretty, but the Jabberwock kinda just stood around acting like target practice, so the movie never rose above meh at any point.

So it sounds like a good time to rag on Tim Burton

I have a love-hate relationship with Tim Burton. As in...I watch all his movies and then I hate them. I figure he must be doing SOMETHING right, because every time I see trailers for a new Burton movie I want to see it, but I'm never satisfied at the end. I've been trying to figure out a a valid explanation for years.

Beetlejuice was bad.

Batman and Batman Returns both sucked. You can blame the scripts, you can say that letting Jack Nicholson over-act and chew on scenery was the reason they were successful, but at the end of the day, they were both horribly bad movies.

Edward Scissorhands was actually pretty good, probably just a little bit of luck due to right place, right time for both Burton and Depp.

Nightmare Before Christmas is one of the most over-rated movies of all time, Mars Attacks! was awful, Legend of Sleepy Hollow was boring, Planet of the Apes wasn't any fun.

By the time Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd rolled around, I was wondering why Burton didn't find a dead body to have sex with and get it over with already, to which some internet denizen replied "How do you know he hasn't?". Which should probably be the end of the conversation.

Except I really liked Big Fish. I've only seen it once, but I have very positive memories of it, and I'm sure it's better than most of this other stuff. What makes it different? I'm betting he was more willing to let the screenplay work for itself, and had less control over the final product than most of his other films.

Liking 2 out of 10 movies isn't a very good track record. but every single time I see a new Burton trailer, part of me says "gee, that looks swell". What is it that appeals to me? I'm not a necrophiliac. I never did drugs. I was never a goth kid. Do I have a little goth kid inside of me? I really wish I could figure it out, so I could fix myself and just avoid these movies altogether.

Anyway, I'm gonna go listen to some Depeche Mode.

hmmm.

Percy Jackson book and movie reviews

"Peter Jackson cut Tom Bombadil? How dare he! Who does he think he is?" - Internet, 2001

Percy Jackson & the Olympians - The Lightning Thief is the first in a series of young adult novels by Rick Riordan about a 12 year old boy named Harry Percy, who finds out his parents are wizards his father is Poseidon and he has special magic demigod powers, so he goes to Hogwarts Camp Half-Blood, plays Quidditch capture-the-flag and teams up with clumsy but loyal Ron Grover the satyr and smart and loyal Hermione Annabeth, daughter of Athena. The "similarities" to Harry Potter don't stop there and include some Slytherins children of Ares, mythological creatures that have no idea how to fight and can be bested by pre-teens, adult authority figures who are dumb as rocks, and a film adaptation!

The book is pretty much what you'd expect. Percy has dyslexia (because his brain is hard-wired for Ancient Greek not English) and ADD (because his mind fogs out all the random mythological things that happen around him) and keeps bouncing from school to school. His home life sucks because his mother is married to Vernon Dursley Gable Ugliano (Ugliano, really?), a crude and smelly dirtbag (his overly foul human odor actually masks Percy's demi-godness and protects him! TRUE STORY!)

You might wonder how any of this plagiarism is legal, but I'm still wondering how Harry Potter didn't get sued seven ways to Sunday by Tim Hunter...




This is Tim Hunter. Yeah, I had the same reaction.

Anywho, the book drags on the mystery of which god is Percy's dad for a few chapters, even though it's blatantly obvious to anyone reading. Percy is good at swimming and kayaking, controls water, heals when he's in water and it still takes some time for his guardians to figure out that his dad is Poseidon.

Zeus' lightning bolt has been stolen, and as son of Poseidon, Percy is the main suspect. Riordan tries to keep you guessing as to the identity of the god pulling the strings, but the best guess is Hades framing Poseidon, so the kids set off on their quest to the Underworld. But first Percy is given a vague prophecy telling him to not trust gifts from his friends, casting suspicion on Grove and Annabeth, Luke, son of Hermes, who has given Percy some flying sneakers, Chiron, protector centaur who has given Percy a pen-sword and anyone they meet along the way.

The quest takes a few stops in a statue garden (I wonder who lives there), the St. Louis arch, an off-road diner for a meeting with Ares and a Las Vegas hotel before the gang arrives in the Underworld. I thought Riordan had done a pretty good job mimicking the early Harry Potter books up to this point but he continued straight through the unsatisfying ending of half-explanations and exposition.

At the end of the day, because Percy, and more importantly Grover and Annabeth don't have the same charm as Harry, Ron and Hermione, the book can't even match the level of Harry Potter.

The movie on the other hand... is a contender for the most horrible adaptation of all time. To anyone who has ever nit-picked any other adaptations casting, or timeline or mash-up of comic book stories, I demand you read this book and watch this movie and realize would a truly terrible adaptation looks like.

The names of the characters are the same, Poseidon is Percy's dad, and there are battles with a minotaur and a medusa, but everything else is different.

Little changes in scenes create giant nonsensical plotholes. In the book version, the mom is snatched enroute to camp Halfblood. In the movie version she can't enter the camp due to her lack of god-blood, which causes her to get snatched. But if she can't enter the camp, why did Grover stop to get her first and bring her with them? GAH!

Minor quibbles like hair color (Annabeth's now a brunette) and race (Grover is now black) never bother me but a questionable decision to age the characters to the 16-17 range does. The guardians know that Poseidon is Percy's dad at the beginning of the book, and so does Zeus. Ares' children, so Annabeth is made tougher to take on the early-novel tough girl role. The prophecy and the secret mastermind and Ares himself are also removed from the story, taking away all suspicion and tension with them.

With the secret mastermind missing, I'm left wondering just how the ACTUAL lightning thief managed to pull off the heist by himself.

And the oft-repeated "Percy can't fly because Zeus will become aware of his presence and strike him down" is completely abandoned so that Percy can wear the winged sneakers in the movie and have his final battle take place in the air.

ALL OF THIS could still be forgiven if the movie had any redeeming qualities whatsoever. But it fails on every level. The special effects are on the level of a Sci-Fi SyFy made-for-TV-movie and the acting...oh, the acting... is an abomination in the eyes of god and man.

Logan Lerman (Percy) and Brandon T Jackson (Grover) spend the movie having a who-has-less-talent battle. I don't know who won, but the audience lost. In what particularly offensive scene, Percy wakes up after his encounter with the minotaur, thinking it all a bad dream and relating it to Grover, before realizing that Grover is standing in front of him on satyr-legs. Percy jumps back, "you mean it's all true? My mom... my mom is gone?" Horrible dialogue, but delivered with such a lack of emotion, that it can only be explained if Logan has never experienced the death of a family member.
Or known someone who has. Or took acting lessons. Or watched TV.

Clearly someone had blackmail photo or really big paychecks for really little work and wasted money on Sean Bean (Zeuss), Kevin McKidd (Poseidon), Uma Thurman (Medusa), Pierce Brosnan (Chiron), Joe Pantoliano (the evil step-dad) and even Rosario Dawson (Persephone). That money would probably have been better spent on acting lessons for the kids, a big-boy computer for the special effects department, or a studio executive with the balls to say "THIS MOVIE IS AWFUL AND SHOULD NOT BE RELEASED"

This movie should only be watched as a bad example.

Tune in next movie review for: Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.