I have been remiss about posting, again. I also have a lot of things going on with my life, with the the renewed interest in all sorts of sport activities. I may do a separate post on it too.
This post is about 3 major movies that I have managed to see in the last couple of weeks.
Avengers. Everyone have been touting it as THE MARVEL movie to see. Personally, I have little personal investment in the heroes of the movie. For some strange reason X-MEN are my Marvel heroes of choice. That being said, I am more than familiar with Hulk and Iron Man lore. Less so with Thor (always preferring the Old Norse version to Marvel's) and close to none familiarity with Black Widow or Hawkeye. I must admit I really enjoyed the movie. The movie had lots of big action sequences, some of them lasting more than 3 seconds before camera jerk. I think the subdued but mischievous performance by Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Banner was the best of them all (I'll come back to that later). Iron Man had the easiest job of all, since we've already gotten used to R. Downey's portrayal of playboy millionaire. Both Black Widow and Hawkeye, had really very little to contribute I guess, and I would have loved to see more of Scarlet Johansson acting. Chris Evena's Captain America was better in the Captain America movie. I did not get the impression of a hero trying to be normal out of place and out of time. I guess between the five superheroes and a main villain they had do the best they could in the limited time they were give. Samuel Jackson was his usual self, I wondered if Stan Lee or jack Kirby were prophetic in the creation of Nick Fury character and knew that Samuel Jackson will be playing the role someday. I also liked Loki and the way he was portrayed. Here was a villain who elicited more than one emotion, thanks to Tom Hiddleston. I actually hoped several times for Loki to get a chance at redemption. I haven't mentioned Thor yet, and I won't. I liked the Thor movie well enough, but in my opinions Thor as a character should display less smirking and more high, mighty, haughty, demi-god type of attitude, possibly even holier-than-thou above reproach.
So after picking apart performances by actors I got nothing more to say except that it was an enjoyable flick to watch. I won't go into probabilities of this or that happening. The move was moving fast enough and was interesting enough that I did not have time to stop and ponder: "Why doesn't he just kill him?" Action sequences were good, and meaningful in way that they moved the story along, not just becoming random acts of violence. Was it a great movie? It definitely was a good one. Was it the best Marvel Comic movie to date? I believe so!
The Incredible Hulk. I watched the movie just to get a sense of the character. There seemed to be another one in 2005, but the badness of it has been all over the Internet. I am not going to go into deep detail. The movie was OK. No more than that. Did I like the portrayal of Banner by Ed Norton? It was OK. I couldn't get involved with it, too much suffering and too much love story. Stepping back and comparing I will say that Mark Raffulo in The avengers did a better job of showing what Hulk/Dr. banner would be going through. Knowing the genius and the brain power and the awful violent secret behind it. The Hulk story is your basic Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde thing. And there should be haunting-ness in the performance. While Ed Norton is good, there was little genius and weariness, and more love sick puppy performance, which left me wanting.
Prometheus. This is a movie that I asked about, whether it was worth seeing. Alien was my first American Horror/Sci-Fi flick that I've seen. And as all things seen as a kid it left a lasting impression on me. I judge a lot of movies based on this single picture. It was ok, the movie moved along fine and there are a lot of things in the Engineers ship that left me thinking, ooh I wonder what that means or how it would work. But a lot of things seemed rushed or not thought through to me. A lot of times I've asked myself: "Now why in the world would that happen?" That also shows the flaw in the movie, it gave me time to pause and think about plausibility of what is happening on the screen. A lot of people told me over the years: "It's just a movie. Somebody's imagination at play. Let it go." I can't if you put me in front of you work, don't be surprised if I say that something doesn't make sense. I consider myself a smart person, I can follow logic or stop baffled by the lack of it. It was an Ok movie.
Let me give you an example from this movie (spoiler alert). There is a scene of the first killing (or the second one) when the cobra like proto-facehugger strike one of the scientists constricts him like boa, and then proceeds by killing him by a fairly gruesome way of entering his mouth. All right fine, fun way to kill a human also make a homage to Alien's face huggers and also play on all homophobic fears. That's besides the point. The intelligent nitpicker in me thinks. Engineers (the superhuman race, that supposedly genetically engineered all humanoid life, including earth) are supposed to be super-smart. Why in the world would they design such an inefficient killing method? First of all non-intelligent animals(even genetically engineered ones) don't kill for pleasure (again super smart probably benevolent super alien race remember?), procreation, hunger or defense are the only reason to kill. Second of all there are more than a thousand way to kill a human being on alien planet, that would make more sense and be also not very pleasant. So by putting this kind of scene in the movie, the writers and director make me question their commitment to the story and take away my belief and enjoyment of it. There are a lot of head scratching moments in the story. BTW if you see two people running away from something big falling on them, you know somebody is going to get squashed. That was also very unsatisfactory, as I didn't feel the person deserved to die in such fashion, up commence not earned.
Overall, again the movie was OK on a little side of cold.
This post is about 3 major movies that I have managed to see in the last couple of weeks.
Avengers. Everyone have been touting it as THE MARVEL movie to see. Personally, I have little personal investment in the heroes of the movie. For some strange reason X-MEN are my Marvel heroes of choice. That being said, I am more than familiar with Hulk and Iron Man lore. Less so with Thor (always preferring the Old Norse version to Marvel's) and close to none familiarity with Black Widow or Hawkeye. I must admit I really enjoyed the movie. The movie had lots of big action sequences, some of them lasting more than 3 seconds before camera jerk. I think the subdued but mischievous performance by Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Banner was the best of them all (I'll come back to that later). Iron Man had the easiest job of all, since we've already gotten used to R. Downey's portrayal of playboy millionaire. Both Black Widow and Hawkeye, had really very little to contribute I guess, and I would have loved to see more of Scarlet Johansson acting. Chris Evena's Captain America was better in the Captain America movie. I did not get the impression of a hero trying to be normal out of place and out of time. I guess between the five superheroes and a main villain they had do the best they could in the limited time they were give. Samuel Jackson was his usual self, I wondered if Stan Lee or jack Kirby were prophetic in the creation of Nick Fury character and knew that Samuel Jackson will be playing the role someday. I also liked Loki and the way he was portrayed. Here was a villain who elicited more than one emotion, thanks to Tom Hiddleston. I actually hoped several times for Loki to get a chance at redemption. I haven't mentioned Thor yet, and I won't. I liked the Thor movie well enough, but in my opinions Thor as a character should display less smirking and more high, mighty, haughty, demi-god type of attitude, possibly even holier-than-thou above reproach.
So after picking apart performances by actors I got nothing more to say except that it was an enjoyable flick to watch. I won't go into probabilities of this or that happening. The move was moving fast enough and was interesting enough that I did not have time to stop and ponder: "Why doesn't he just kill him?" Action sequences were good, and meaningful in way that they moved the story along, not just becoming random acts of violence. Was it a great movie? It definitely was a good one. Was it the best Marvel Comic movie to date? I believe so!
The Incredible Hulk. I watched the movie just to get a sense of the character. There seemed to be another one in 2005, but the badness of it has been all over the Internet. I am not going to go into deep detail. The movie was OK. No more than that. Did I like the portrayal of Banner by Ed Norton? It was OK. I couldn't get involved with it, too much suffering and too much love story. Stepping back and comparing I will say that Mark Raffulo in The avengers did a better job of showing what Hulk/Dr. banner would be going through. Knowing the genius and the brain power and the awful violent secret behind it. The Hulk story is your basic Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde thing. And there should be haunting-ness in the performance. While Ed Norton is good, there was little genius and weariness, and more love sick puppy performance, which left me wanting.
Prometheus. This is a movie that I asked about, whether it was worth seeing. Alien was my first American Horror/Sci-Fi flick that I've seen. And as all things seen as a kid it left a lasting impression on me. I judge a lot of movies based on this single picture. It was ok, the movie moved along fine and there are a lot of things in the Engineers ship that left me thinking, ooh I wonder what that means or how it would work. But a lot of things seemed rushed or not thought through to me. A lot of times I've asked myself: "Now why in the world would that happen?" That also shows the flaw in the movie, it gave me time to pause and think about plausibility of what is happening on the screen. A lot of people told me over the years: "It's just a movie. Somebody's imagination at play. Let it go." I can't if you put me in front of you work, don't be surprised if I say that something doesn't make sense. I consider myself a smart person, I can follow logic or stop baffled by the lack of it. It was an Ok movie.
Let me give you an example from this movie (spoiler alert). There is a scene of the first killing (or the second one) when the cobra like proto-facehugger strike one of the scientists constricts him like boa, and then proceeds by killing him by a fairly gruesome way of entering his mouth. All right fine, fun way to kill a human also make a homage to Alien's face huggers and also play on all homophobic fears. That's besides the point. The intelligent nitpicker in me thinks. Engineers (the superhuman race, that supposedly genetically engineered all humanoid life, including earth) are supposed to be super-smart. Why in the world would they design such an inefficient killing method? First of all non-intelligent animals(even genetically engineered ones) don't kill for pleasure (again super smart probably benevolent super alien race remember?), procreation, hunger or defense are the only reason to kill. Second of all there are more than a thousand way to kill a human being on alien planet, that would make more sense and be also not very pleasant. So by putting this kind of scene in the movie, the writers and director make me question their commitment to the story and take away my belief and enjoyment of it. There are a lot of head scratching moments in the story. BTW if you see two people running away from something big falling on them, you know somebody is going to get squashed. That was also very unsatisfactory, as I didn't feel the person deserved to die in such fashion, up commence not earned.
Overall, again the movie was OK on a little side of cold.
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