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randychico
I just finished studying communications and I dont see myself in the job Im in for the rest of my life.
Reviews
Psyclops (2002)
B-Movie? More like D-Movie (or worse).
True, this movie comes with horror b-movie stamp well placed in its forehead. But some of us will usually get a kick of bad movies for being bad, but that doesn't mean that people should start making awful movies without even trying, at that's what this movie feels like, effortless. Its about this guy, who's very "into videos", but after a witch, a curse video and an old machine he gets transformed into Psyclops (I don't even recall him being referred as psyclops but it's not really important), a guy with a camera inserted into his skull (of course we've seen this before in movies like Hellraiser, La Cité des enfants perdus, Brazil, and Star Trek, but we're not actually looking for originality here, are we?), I gotta admit, the make up effects were quite good, the camera didn't seem too displaced and his whole head (camera included) seemed proportionate enough for the character, unfortunately that's the only good thing coming from this movie. The guy also make electricity come out of his hands and he starts harassing his friends and at the climax he tries to use one of his woman friends in a experiment for something (I wasn't paying that much attention) The movie tries to make us sympathize with the main character/villain, like Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, we don't want to see him harmed, but he is harassing his friends and trying to rule the world or something, of course it doesn't succeed, the character tries too hard to be funny or weird/creepy.
The worst thing of it all is the acting, i've seen better in a porn video, it gets irritating, I know you're not supposed to pay attention to those kinds of details in these movies, but at least make an effort! I'm surprised there's even a mention of a director since clearly there was no talk of how and when to say things. In the end, we see these type of films to get a laugh at the absurdity of it all (sort of present in this one) and the laughable & cheesy effects, sure the "special" effects are in effect, special, but nothing a 10 year old couldn't conjure in your run of the mill video editing software.
There's a scene at the end where Psyclops makes a beyond the grave (or beyond another parallel dimension/hell whatever) appearance and starts talking (in a oh so clever meta-film fashion) about how could they (his friends) not expect a sequel, in a way ripping of a film like Scream, I mean, who rips off a film like Scream? (well, aside from Scary Movie)
In the end the movie doesn't belong in the "good because it's bad" category, it's just annoying.
The Ring Two (2005)
Edgy thriller tries to be "edgier".
The Ring Tw"o" stars out very much so like the first one, two people (in this case a girl and his "boyfriend" or whatever kids these days call it) and you know the drill, one has watched it and is gonna die within 7 days of having watched the tape. We see the intentions of the guy trying to save his own arse by forcing "some stupid girl" into watching the same cursed tape. He seems a little too determined, leaving her alone to watch it by herself... "did you watch" "not yet" "what are you waiting for?", if I where the girl Id be suspicious about his intentions, "whats the big deal?" even after she came onto him, he only wanted her to watch the tape. Well the hell with you, you hardheaded eunuch. Anywho, he died anyways because she didn't watch it, she only heard it as she had her hands covering her eyes while it was playing. The death scene starts playing similar enough to the one where Naomi Watts ex-boyfriend gets his face twisted by the girl in the TV, no, not Caroline... Samara! The evil spirit that hops from VHS to VHS. The scene from the first movie was one of its high points, in "The Ring2" they show it at the beginning, and from a different point of view, we suddenly see "guy in distress" in some sort of TV world complete with scat lines and some interference, it's the same type of special f/x's but for some reason, it doesn't look as cool. Maybe it's the fact that they are trying too hard to surpass everything that worked in the first film. And then they try to include something else that they think looks cool but clashes with what at least looked cool in the first place. And the fact that the guy who watched the tape needed to make the girl watch it in order to save himself goes against what the first film taught us, it has destroyed the whole mythology created by "The Ring" where supposedly, we tough that creating a copy of the tape was enough to break the ring curse, but now it seems that you also have to make someone else watch it.
Fortunately they've found a way to get rid of Samara by mass producing DVDs and using TIVO, making VHSs obsolete. Unfortunately for the poor saps in some generic small town in the US, they still have VHS players. And unfortunately for Naomi Watt's character, she decides to move where "guy in distress" has just went and joined his ancestors. And she being a reporter she finds out and (just like in the first film) she wants to talk to the traumatized girl who saw it happen. So we're not even near half into the movie and we've already encountered a bunch of problems. For starters the IL'Hollywood standards dictate that if you have a successful movie and you want to make a sequel you better have the same "movie star" in it since she was the reason it was successful in the first place (we know that's not entirely true). Then we see that the style of the movie is definitely trying to remain the same but it just doesn't manage to, it seems that Gore Verbinski did a very good job with it not unlike the new director appointed to direct this sequel. Instead of trying to dig deeper into the meaning of the tape, Samaras life, etc. the creators are trying to duplicate most of what worked on the first one (not forgetting that "Ring 1" was itself a remake) and of course trying to adapt all of those moments with the life of Rachel (Naomi Watts) and her son. Thus going into one of sequelitis symptoms of failure, trying to mimic the original. Sure there are some authentic scares but that's not enough to make this a good movie.
The rest of the movie involves looking for answers about what is Samara up to, why is Rachels son acting so weird and why is Samara going after them once again. In between there's a social services lady that suspects that Rachel is abusive of her son, this could have been an interesting subplot, but they just took it to obvious roads killing her in a questionable way (rember Scanners?), if Samara has that much power then we can just throw the rest of the movie and the first "Ring" into the trash. After that we see Samaras mother, played by Carrie herself Sissy Spacek, this had to be the best part of the movie, even if she was just mumbling and not making any sense in what she was saying, unfortunately it lasted only a few minutes. All of this takes us into the "climax" of the movie where Rachel makes one of those out of the blue conclusions that saves the day in bad movies like this one.
Oh and one more thing, the movie is supposedly called "The Ring 2", the sequel to "The Ring" about a cursed video tape that once you watched it you only had seven days to live. The Ring is an allusion to the white ring that formed in the well Samara was thrown in after it was being closed. So I just want to point out that none of this is part of the main structure of the movie. And that's what happens when you include the protagonist from the main film. Poltergeist 4 or The Exorcist 1 1/2 would be a more fitting name.
In conclusion, if you see the ring 2, you won't necessarily die, but you'll feel like you did for least 2 hours.
Uzumaki (2000)
Its a pretty dumb movie about evil spiralssslrips live touba eivom bmud ytteep a stI
Uzumaki, which translates into "spirals", arriving within this new wave of Asian Horror films following such hits like Ringu, Ju-On and The Eye (two of them with remakes.. and much more coming like Dark Water and Tale of Two Sisters), falls short of the spooky, supernatural thriller element so characteristic of the other movies, the only thing that remains is weirdness and not in a Tim Burton or David Lynch kind of way, but in a irrelevant and dull way.
Its start with a girl, some other kid with a crush on her, her best friend and his dad who's obsessed with Uzumakis! Everything that happens concerns Uzumakis, people die and you see Uzumakis. So okay, It'll go along with it, I'm kinda amuse by spirals myself, characters don't seem to go anywhere, but I'll play along. We find out the town is cursed by Uzumakis, people start screaming at Uzumakis and the point is Uzumakis are everywhere, the movie is a disaster, it doesn't know where to go, except to show you the power of Uzumakis!!!!!!!!! There are some cool concepts like when the mother cuts her fingers because she sees Uzumakis on her fingerprints but then there's another scene where she hears her husband (from beyond the grave!!) tell her that she also has Uzumakis in her ear, the way they handled that scene was just laughable, not even cheesy fun, there are also some (a little bit) of cool visuals, like the collection the father has of Uzumakis and the girl with the Uzumakis hair.. yep, Uzumakis hair, its out of context though, its seems like it was taken out of a Fruit Snack commercial where if you eat an Uzumakis fruits snack, its taste is so incredible your hair turns into Uzumakis, now if this wasn't bad enough, suddenly, out of nowhere there are Snail Men.. or ManSnails
whatever
and you know why? right? Because in their shells they have Uuuuzuuuumaaakiiiis
. That only left time enough for a crappy anti-climatic ending and by that time I was sick of friggin' uzumakis.. uzumaki here uzumaki there, sure, look around you, how many Uzumakis can you find
If you want to see a movie about spirals go see PI (3.1416) now there you'll find some pretty cool uzumaki concepts in between the meaning of life and Dark City has also a little bit of a spiraling thing in there.
This movie could have worked as a music video, it has already garnered a cult following and thats why I was compelled to see it, but after doing so, I'm not sure why people think it's great. I was truly disappointed.
How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass (2003)
A Badasssssssssssssssssssssss Film
This is a cool movie about a guy trying to make a film.. yes, we've seen that before
but this one is a true story about the first guy that tries, struggling against the studios, against "The Man ", to make his movie in an independent fashion. Directed and starring an actor I mostly never paid attention to, mostly because his movies suck, Mario Van Peebles. Surprisingly hes the son of the guy who made the first movie that started the whole Blaxpoitation era and the indie filmmaker way of life, Melvin Van Peebles
. There are some very cool bits about the way black people where portrayed back then and how that interfered with Melvins desire to do his movie "Sweet, Sweetbacks Badasssss song" For starters, how could a black man be the hero of a movie??? Blaaasphemy!!! There's a montage I liked later on about how not only black people where portrayed stereotypically, but also the Latinos, the "Indians", the Chinese (and the rest of the Asian community), etc. Of course it seems that if we played Cowboys & Indians right now it would seem disgraceful and politically incorrect. But anyways, another part of the movie was how they got their whole team and how they went about to filming the movie
there even comes a point where everything is going wrong, nobody believes in Melvin, not even him, but hes a Stubborn MoFo and at the end he only gets to distribute his film in one measly theater owned by some old Jewish twins but with a little help from radio advertising and the Black Panther coalition, the movie is a huge success and it gives way to this little gem of a film I just saw
now, the only thing left to do is see "Sweet, Sweet Backs bad ass song"
Random Trivia learned from the movie: Did you know that Shaft was originally intended to played by a white guy? Shut! your mouth.
Robots (2005)
Had Potential....
I got to see this movie in a prescreening, unfortunately I didn't see it in English, but fortunately for me I wasn't looking forward to hearing Robin Williams coffee-high antics for an hour and a half. I did like him in Aladdin but from the trailers I think this would have been in the too much Robin Williams zone.
As for the movie, it looks amazing, I guess the main reason for this was the decision to make the movie a "Robots" movie, thus making the whole process of rendering and texturing a whole lot easier and just having almost everything made out of metal made the look of the film very realistic. So that's a point in favor of the movie. And the standards for todays CG animations are in place, even the "themed settings" are there, we've seen a toys world, a bugs world, a fairytale world, a superhero world, a monster world & underwater worlds... so now we have a Robot world filled with metal detectors, street performers doing "the robot", cup of oil instead of cup of coffee and a whole set of robotic and mechanical parts replacing human organs. So it seems we've stumbled into a patter, but it hasn't bothered me before so just lets see where this movie takes us. Well it's not a bad movie but it just doesn't give us anything new and it suffers in the joke department the way Shark Tale suffered, it was to forced, it's like the creators are going, LOOK... they are doing something and its FUNNY, except that it is not, sure there are some nice moments, some that make you laugh, a little chuckle here and there but the rest just made me confused whether it was meant to be funny or not. There's also the music factor which also affected Shark Tale, they abuse the number of song they include in the movie, its like if its a little popular we can include the song somewhere in the film, from Walkie Talkie Man and Low Rider to some James Brown song and several HipHop hits, I'm surprised SirMix-a-lots "Big Butts" wasn't in the movie (especially since one of the characters does have a bit butt), I guess DreamWorks must have the rights to that song. There's even a totally unnecessary sequence where Robin Williams character does this Britney Dance to fight other robots, this clearly is an example of what I was saying in both forcedly trying to make something funny and including a song (and in this case a more known pop-reference). I could have let all this slide if it there was at least some decent story line, not even the characters are all that memorable, in conclusion I think they tried to hard.
The things I liked in the movie where some very dynamic sequences involving Robotic Transit(even if it defied Laws of Gravity & Nature) that I think would be very fun at an IMAX showing (or very nauseating), as the title said the film had potential for much more, more story, more endearing characters, an even meaner villain (and a better excuse to go against him).. even the jokes had potential but they where not fully carried out, like the Robots doing the robot.. at the end, a robot town is seen celebrating and dancing, if they would've shown more of them doing "The Robot" or everyone doing it in unison, it could have been funnier.
I gave it a 7 (out of 10 in the IMDb)
Timecode (2000)
Innovating but exhausting.
I saw Timecode the other night on TV, it peaked my interest, I didn't know nothing about it and at first I thought it was a reality show and it that sense, as a reality show maybe it could have worked: follow 4 interweaved story lines at the same time but the difference in reality TV and movies is unpredictabillity Vs quality & production, so what does that leave Timecode with? um... Salma Hayek!?? You have to give props to the director for the labor it must have been to shoot his stories in real time, with long continuous shots and still make them criss cross with each other, the preparations for this movie must have been done extensively, considering this, we can't really complain about lighting and camera movements. If we see it for a couple of minutes it can get intriguing, but more because of the gimmick, and since the format never changes, it gets tedious, this works on a music video level like with the Orbital video for "The Saint" or maybe Michel Gondry's twopanel puzzle for Cibo Mattos "Sugar Water", now thats innovating and the look is much, much, much better. 24 employs the same gimmick, but doesn't stick to it the whole friggin' time and besides, that show is really well scripted to begin with.
So in conclusion, I was intrigued for the first couple of minutes, got tired but tried to follow the story, but then it got unnecessary and got bored and even a little irritated.
4 out of 10