Reviews

First off, I'm not really sure why this movie had to be made. Watching the trailers I suspected that it was by and large a shot- for-shot remake, and... yeah, it pretty much was.

The Beast himself is far more expressive here. The CG is really good, he comes across the most different of the characters (except Gaston's sidekick, who's now apparently dealing with the fact he's in love with Gaston, but it's all very minor stuff). He seems more human, and while it's surprisingly easier for me to relate to him in this version, I worry that it might be at the expense of the story's message. The original beast looked like a wild animal, covered completely in hair, almost always hunched over. Here he's often standing straight, and because he doesn't have much hair covering his face he seems more human. I liked the idea that you have to judge him based on his actions and words rather than his looks, so I feel he should looks less human.

Emma Watson was a pretty good Bell here, too. She didn't really get anything new to do that the original didn't, but she works extremely well with what she's given. Oh, and she can also sing, apparently. It's kind of funny that it never occurred to me until I sat down in the theater that I had no idea if she COULD sing, but once the first song began I was no longer worried.

The curse is more fleshed out here, which is nice. We learn that the servants will turn into ordinary appliances if the curse isn't broken, losing all sentience. Compared to the original where they didn't seem particularly unhappy with their lives, this gives it more weight. We also learn that everybody outside the castle was made to forget they all even existed, and see that the path to the castle was blocked by a (possibly magical) tree.

There was a subplot with the enchantress who cursed them all to begin with returning at the end of it all, which I sort of liked. I always found myself considering her to be the real villain of the original film as she essentially cursed a little boy for not letting a total stranger stay in his magnificent palace for a night, so seeing that she made sure to show up at the end of the allotted time to see how things played out made sense. That said, it turns out she apparently spent the last 10 or 20 years just sorta hanging out in the local village, which if I'm being honest is really, really dumb.

There was also another subplot that literally went nowhere in which Bell laments never having known her mother. They try to link this to the Beast also never knowing his mother and how their fathers treated them very differently. I was honestly worried they were going to combine these two different subplots and shout out 'SURPRISE! Bell's mother was the enchantress ALL ALONG!' but fortunately they didn't do that. It's like finding the original had half an hour of deleted scenes that someone just decided to edit into the movie.

It is really hard to talk about the characters with this movie because this whole thing is so close to the original in it's script, music, and appearance that I find myself associating some character behaviors and motives with their original cartoon version. In the original movie Gaston was one of my favorite Disney villains, and while he's still fun here, he seems less villainous. The original Gaston was an egocentric dumb-dumb. He never really made any villainous acts until partway through the movie when he deliberately schemed to have Bell's father locked away in an insane asylum unless she agrees to marry him. It's a calculated move to get what he wants, and he has plenty of time to turn away but chooses not to. Here he just seems to react in the moment; when he's told by Bell's father that he can't marry her, he punches the man out in anger and leaves him in the woods. When he's confronted about this by some angry townspeople, he decides to have him committed to cover up his act. When Bell shows up and reveals that there IS a Beast and her father is NOT crazy, Gaston then insists that she's only saying this because the Beast placed a curse on her to say these things, and they have to all raid the castle to stop him from cursing them, too. Again, it's all reactive. It wasn't pre-meditated, which makes him less menacing and more...well, kinda wimpy, actually.

Also, Gaston goes out like a bitch. O.G Gaston fell to his death because he cowardly attacked the Beast's back and was thrown from the castle. It's his own cowardice, dishonorable tactics, and unwillingness to relent that leads him to get himself killed. Here he shoots at the beast, and the bridge he's on just sorta... breaks.

I know I mostly talk about the bad things here, but that's the whole problem. There is a LOT to like about this movie, but unfortunately it's all the stuff we've seen before. The new and/or changed stuff is mostly forgettable or mismanaged, but it's largely overshadowed by the stuff we know and love from the original. The music is still memorable, the characters still lovable, and the story is still one of the greats. If you liked the first one and don't mind the fact that it's trying it's damned hardest to be as close to the first as possible, then you'll like this one, too. If you don't particularly care to watch the same movie all over again, though, then just save your money.

I went to see Annabelle on the good faith I felt towards the movie it was spun off from, The Conjuring. To put things in perspective, I enjoyed the Conjuring but didn't find it particularly frightening once they revealed it was another exorcism movie. However, the cinematography and the repeated tendency to make legitimately scary scenes without relying on jump scares earned some serious respect from me, and I went into this expecting a similar experience.

It was not to be.

First off, the clichés in this movie are overwhelming. From the disbelieving husband to the wise old black woman who dispenses sage advise when exposition is needed, this film hits on all the tropes we got used to seeing in horror movies back in the '80's. It also relies heavily on jump scares to trick the audience into thinking it's scary. When you use wind to make the audience jump then you are probably doing it wrong.

They heavily foreshadow certain elements and devices in several places only to have it either turn out to be completely irrelevant or a total letdown. Early on they keep showing her at a sewing machine with her fingers right next to the needle while she distractedly watches TV. "What's going to happen?" you wonder, "Will the machine whir violently out of control? Will the ghost startle her so much that her fingers get stabbed and sewn up?" The answer is none of those things. She accidentally cuts herself watching TV, but then washes it off like nothing happened and goes back to work. Then the house catches fire (not because of the sewing machine, though).

There are also certain plot points introduced only to never be explained, such as a symbol that's left upon her arm that she finds in an occult book (of course there's an occult book lying around, why wouldn't there be?). They point out that it's from a cult, but never explain what the mark itself means. My friend had to tell me it was some mark of a ram's head, but I thought it looked like a really shoddy attempt at writing the letter 'A' in cursive. It's also a little strange that the demon left the mark on her arm just by grabbing her, only to have it disappear a short time later.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that there's a demon in this movie. Apparently even the director realized that a possessed doll wasn't very scary and decided to have a demon appear halfway through to scare the woman. This made no sense since up until this point it seemed pretty clear that it was a cultist lady who was possessing the doll. So it turns out that a demon was moving it around the entire time? Why? Well, supposedly it's a link to our world for the demon to come through. Even though he has no problems leaving it far behind, can seemingly teleport it at will, and whose very presence seems to change the entire tone of the story. It makes it even more nonsensical in that there is no reason for the doll to be moving around. If the demon is just picking it up and moving it when nobody looks then... why? What does that gain him? Is he just messing with everybody? When you realize that this entire movie is basically about a demon playing with dolls it becomes a lot less scary.

What's sad about the demon is that his main appearance in which he confronts the girl in the basement is actually really damn scary. However, since it's more or less his only real scene I couldn't help but feel it was extremely pointless. I'm not even sure right now if the movie was about the doll or the demon since it was that exact moment that the entire movie derailed itself into an unfocused mess that left me with more questions than I was likely supposed to have about the film.

This is a movie I really wanted to like because of The Conjuring, but since the audience kept laughing throughout the film (except for some high-school girls sitting in front of me who kept whispering how they were "about to cry" only to turn around after the movie and assure each other that they totally weren't scared you guys)I feel like I'm not alone in the assessment that it was actually a comedy in disguise. A comedy with some scary bits, to be sure, but a comedy none the less.

DC seems cursed in the last few years to sit idly by while their top competitor, Marvel, takes in all the money in the world on their various franchises while all DC can do is put out a few good Batman flicks. The good news is that the dry spell is over - Superman is a good movie, proving that the Dark Knight isn't the only comic book they are capable of translating. The bad news is, it's not nearly enough.

First off, let's talk about what this movie gets right, which is honestly most of it. The action is fantastic, although it often feels like Superman is holding back (and I'm still not sure how Zod's soldiers can have the strength of Superman while simultaneously wearing suits that block out all elements of Earth around them after specifically saying it was the sun that allowed Superman to grow strong). The acting is top notch, and I love how they showed Clark going through life trying to suppress his powers.

Initially I was worried when the trailers showed his father apparently talking to him on a spaceship, which lead me to believe that he had survived and that Krypton might still be intact which would ruin the character (don't laugh; when JJ Abrahms wrote a script for a Superman movie ages ago they had Krypton still survive and Lex Luthor was also Kryptonian *shudder*). Fortunately this was not the case, and his father only appears as a hologram-type apparition.

For all the movie does right, however, it is lacking one thing: heart. There's really not a lot of emotion to this movie, and what's there is not predominantly what is associated with Superman. I guess that's what happens when you take Christopher Nolan, a brilliant director who's great at smart, analytical, realistic pieces, and put him in charge of an over the top character who's more about emotion. The relationship between him and Lois Lane is not believable, and despite the amazing line from the trailers where Jor-El talks about giving hope to the people, we never really see that idea come to fruition. It's less 'we have faith in you' then 'I guess you're all right'. Which is a pity. It seems to me that we could have used a superhero who's a bright, optimistic person when compared to the others out there. Instead he seems angsty, shouting out 'noooo' a lot and looking sad. Oh, and he actually kills someone at the end... which is VERY unlike Superman.

It's really too bad that it went that route, though I am sure that a lot of people will see the fights then nod to themselves after and say 'see those fights? What a great film.' It may be enough for some, but it doesn't do anything to separate itself from all the other superhero movies out there other than just how strong he is. I'm glad I saw it, but I think in a few months I won't be able to remember any specifics about what happened in it. Overall I give it an 8/10. Good, but could have been much better.

This is not a good movie. If that's all you need to know, then you don't have to go any further. It's badly acted, badly directed, has no budget, the script makes no sense, there's no continuity, the camera work is pathetic, and the story flat out contradicts itself on several occasions. As a purveyor of bad movies, I naturally enjoyed it a whole lot.

The story follows Jonah and Ella (no, not Hansel and Gretal... that would be stupid!) as they are kicked out of yet another high school because her brother has misbehaved in some vague manner. They are accepted into one of the most 'prestigious' schools in the nation at Salem Massachusetts. I say 'prestigious' because they keep talking about how well respected it is despite the fact that there would appear to be only one or two buildings, the dorms consist of a single room with two beds and, oh yeah, people have been murdered and/or found severely brain damaged on campus, although from what I can tell nobody has really made a big deal of it.

Jonah gets into a fight almost immediately with the most stereotypical jock ever, and after complaining that nobody ever talks to him he immediately tells the only people who want to talk to him to f**k off. He's then invited by the jock that beat him up to come perform witchcraft and suck out the souls of other students, which he readily agrees to (I can't stress enough how fast he goes from 'nobody likes me' to 'i'm a complete jerk').

Ella, meanwhile, begins to think that something is afoot as she repeatedly talks to her guidance councilor who tells her all about the rumors of witchcraft at the school, telling Ella that it was prophesied that a set of twins would kill the cult of witches that reside there. Spoiler alert, the councilor is the head witch (who told her all about them). I'd say it's a surprise except every time you see 'mysterious robed witch' it's clearly a middle-aged woman, and the only woman the characters have any real interaction is the middle-aged guidance councilor.

Along the way, Ella finds that her parents were witch hunters who were killed by the same witch group, so she decides to kill the witches with a knife she found while investigating a bookshelf because... it had.. circles on it? She learns how to kill witches from her creepy stalker principle who trains her by throwing baseballs at her. They do this while the witches stand not 10 feet from them watching, and are then surprised when one of them stabs the principle in broad daylight.

Anyways, she eventually convinces her brother that killing people to drain their souls is bad, and after the shortest non-fight ever they kill the witch and decide to leave. To say it's a short fight would be an understatement. The head witch reveals her identity, says they don't stand a chance, is immediately stabbed by Ella, then explodes. Then they find out their real names were Hansel and Gretel, because apparently they didn't know their own names due to their parents dying...or something...

Where to begin on what this movie does wrong? You already likely noticed that this movie has NOTHING to do with Hansel and Gretel outside of the eventual reveal that their names are coincidentally the same and that one of the school buildings is called 'gingerbread house'. The witches are completely non-threatening, and seem to sabotage themselves at every opportunity. They claim that it was 'destined' that the two would go to the school yet it was the school THAT INVITED THEM THERE in the first place. Then they decide to stop them fulfilling the prophecy by TELLING THEM THEY ARE WITCHES.

While both actors ARE siblings, it's strange that they both have black belts yet have maybe 2 seconds worth of fighting. It's a waste that I'd think even THESE directors would have noticed, but apparently not.

The night scenes are clearly filmed during the day and they just tinted the screen blue... you can even see the sun! And at one point they are inside at night then someone opens the door and it's clearly the middle of the day!

Ella's shirt changes between every scene, and she even wears it backwards sometimes. Not to say she has a large wardrobe, she just changes back and forth between 2 or 3 shirts over and over.

There's 10 kids in the entire school that occupy the backgrounds, making 'afro-boy' and 'girl with pink backpack' my favorite characters in the whole movie.

They re-use the same stock footage too many times (not just same angle, but same people in same position), and they have still images as establishing shots.

They say it takes place in Massachusetts despite looking a lot like California and having the California flag in the corner of a room in several shots.

For some reason witches explode into stars when stabbed, using CG like in the original Star Trek.

You can see the camera crew in several reflections throughout the movie.

Oh, and the scene on the cover where they wear leather armor brandishing crossbows while walking away from an exploding castle? Yeah, that never happens. They never change out of t-shirts, and the only weapon in the entire movie is the dagger that Ella finds. There is no castle, and nothing explodes.

Honestly I could keep going on, but when I tried listing all the flaws I ended up going over the 1000 word limit.

This movie is a complete waste of time and money, unless you're looking for something that's so awful it's funny, in which case go for it. In that regards I liked it enough to give it a 2, but it probably doesn't deserve that.

In this movie, we follow the adventures of a princess from a land of eternal winter. She was forced to flee her kingdom after her father wisely sealed up all the countries wealth in a vault somewhere, and her uncle cruelly took over to restore both economic and military prosperity as well as bring back springtime to the land (which was also somehow sealed away). It turns out that the key to the vault is a crystal the former king gave his daughter before she fled. She arrives in a nearby nation where she immediately goes into hiding by becoming the MOST FAMOUS MOVIE ACTRESS OF THE NATION. The villain pretty much immediately identifies her since it's the equivalent of finding out that Robert Downey Junior was really an exiled king in hiding.

Her producer, who is actually a former servant of hers, decides to trick her into going back to her homeland by having a movie take place there. After she tries to flee so she doesn't have to risk certain death for the sake of cinematic art, he hires the main characters, a trio of ninjas and their teacher, to knock her out, kidnap her, and put her on a boat to her old country against her will. Also, the teacher steals the key to the wealth of her nation from her and replaces it with a fake he just happened to have lying about.

After trying to escape from her ninja escorts, and literally being carried back against her will, she is then kidnapped by the villain who gives her food and wine, and even refuses to kill her after she freakin' stabs him in the chest. In fact, in the entire movie the only people the villain kills are a bunch of idiots who charge at his knife-shooting train wielding swords and screaming like idiots. Even the main character, having failed in an assassination attempt, is merely locked up.

Anyways, at the end he releases springtime back into the land, turning the snow to grass, the sun to come out, and rainbows to shine. However, after releasing the effects but immediately before they came into effect, he is beaten up, and the princess takes all the credit for it. The heroes leave the princess in charge of the nation she wanted nothing to do with, and the villain is presumed dead, having saved them all from an endless winter. So, all things considered, it's a happy ending!

In all seriousness though, this isn't that much of an exaggeration. The princess acts like a jerk the whole movie, and has legitimate reasons to do so (kidnapping, threat of assassination, nobody listening to her) but her complaints are completely unrelated to those. The main characters do every single thing I said. And while the villain DOES act like a jerk (he IS the villain after all), his overall goal seems to be bringing back spring to the land. I finished this movie very confused about what I just watched. A skilled director would have made this seem like a very moralistically gray movie, making us realize we might be following the villains after all, but they throw just enough clichés and drawn out mindless speeches about 'not giving up' that it's obvious who we are supposed to think the villain is... but from the beginning the 'good guys' do reprehensible things, and the villain even says at the beginning that the former king sealed away all the countries wealth in a vault. The fact that the same king apparently sealed away springtime as well (not an exaggeration, they bring it up several times) just makes him seem cruel and stupid. Yet we are meant to hate the guy trying to fix it. *sigh*

I went to see this movie with two girl friends of mine. Throughout the movie, one of them kept groaning and sighing at the same parts I did. The other later accused us of never having been kids. I think they might both be right.

If you were ever a child, you are probably familiar with Doctor Seuss's 'The Lorax', a tale of a world where man's greed and selfishness has eradicated all the trees in favor of their escapist man-made town. It's a charming yet somewhat depressing book as the main character realizes what he's destroyed, yet leaves a glimmer of hope at the end as he passes off the last tree seed to a young boy to plant. As a kid, I loved the bittersweet end, as it got the message across and made me want to care about preserving nature.

The movie, on the other hand, left me thoroughly unimpressed. Let me get the good parts out of the way first. Naturally, the art style is fantastic and whimsical, as all Seuss work is. Danny Devito does a great job as the Lorax, and I feel it's pretty safe to say that the parts of the story actually focusing on the Lorax himself were indeed enjoyable. That is, with the exception of a badly placed musical number, which makes any sorrow at the trees being destroyed seem diluted. You should be upset that the Lorax leaves us, but I was more upset that I WASN'T upset.

Unfortunately, the part of the story focusing on the boy trying to find a tree was tiresome. It's a case where the book was more dramatic than the story - nature had been ravaged, and nobody cared about it except for one boy. In the movie, it's basically all because of some horribly stereotyped evil characters - Once-ler himself is painted as naive but still a good person, but the creators apparently didn't want him to seem corrupt in chopping down all the trees so they have his redneck family do it for him. And the business tycoon Mr. O-Hare is just ridiculously evil. I'm not going to say that big businessmen shouldn't be villains or anything like that , but the point of the original book was that all of mankind had stopped caring, whereas the movie says it's the fault of Once-ler and O'hare entirely, the latter of who deliberately is keeping people clueless about trees. I just feel the ending would have been far more dramatically appropriate if, instead of having a cliché'd (and underwhelming) chase scene where he shows everybody O'hare is evil, if he instead needed to actually CONVINCE people that trees were worth caring about (he convinces them by knocking down a wall at the end. Apparently in the last 15 or so years nobody had even once looked outside.) Additionally, when he finally plants the seed, all the other trees start growing again. Not sure how, but it makes me wonder - if that's all it took, why didn't Once-ler try to plant the seed 15 years ago?

Also, they throw in a 'hip grandmother' pretty much entirely because they know grandparents will be taking their kid. At one point the romantic interest actually says 'Wow, how cool is your grandmother'. This bothered me for some reason. Perhaps because I have no soul.

Also, it's apparently a musical, something that the ads failed to mention. I'm not against musicals, but the combined fact that 1.) i wasn't prepared for that (Despicable Me, their previous movie, had none) and 2.) the music was... bland. I can't remember any of it and i just got out 20 minutes ago. Also, as I said earlier, one musical number completely ruins the tragic mood it tried to set with the trees getting chopped down.

I know that it can be hard translating a Seuss book, usually with only 20 or 30 pages, into a feature film is a tough task. But honestly, if you don't even get the theme right then you have failed in your task. Lorax is enjoyable in a lot of parts, but the parts that aren't AREN'T.

Final verdict: 5/10. Your kids might like it, but the uninspired music, botched ending, and boring finale are real game breakers.

Do you like tits? If you're watching this anime, let's hope so, because that seems to be the main focus here. Sure, there are a lot of zombies, but you only see them in between bouncing breasts and underwear flashing out from under a skirt that's too short for any kind of modesty. Like logic? It appears occasionally, but is forgotten just as fast as it is brought up.

It's not all bad, though. Well, most of it is, but I have to give credit where credit is due. The dark, urban landscape of Tokyo proves to be a most haunting area for a zombie apocalypse to take place, and the animation is nothing short of wonderful. Blood splatters on walls, boobs bounce, cars screech around corners sending dust and pebbles across the street, tits jiggle, skirts fly up, boobs get groped... and these things happen a lot. Except the cars. By the way, if you haven't figured out by now, kids shouldn't be watching this.

So, what is wrong with this series? Well, let me ask you this: are you offended when girls are portrayed as nothing short of sex objects, whose sole purpose is to follow the men and never really do anything? Do you hate slimy characters who nobody in their right mind would trust for even an instant yet inexplicably do? Do you sometimes find yourself thinking? If you answered yes to any of these questions, this anime is not for you. None of the girls wear bras, their tits defy gravity, all the girls have the exact same personality except for one trait that separates them (one claims to be smart yet just states the obvious, one is a whiny annoying bitch, one kills things with swords, and one has BIG ASS TITTIES. Like, super huge. She literally uses them as pillows. Unfortunately, her tits seem to sap her intellect because I've never seen a more stupid character in any anime. EVER.)

One big flaw this series has is bringing up topics or observations that are excellent points but NEVER explained/elaborated/acted on. For example: the zombies can only hear. They cannot see, they don't seem to feel (they keep walking into objects until they hear something else), and they only react to noises. Does anybody exploit this? Hell no! As soon as zombies appear everybody who knows this fact starts shouting. It's only ever used when the author wants them to seem clever, and even then it just seems like common sense. At one point they try to distract the zombies by banging on a pipe. When the zombies ignore them, they ask 'why aren't they coming?'. Excellent question! Why aren't they?....... still waiting on that response...... aaaaaany day now.... ... ... Okay, well I'm sure they had their reasons. This isn't the only scene like this though. They have plenty but for space reasons I can't get into them all, though my favorite is when zombies somehow find them and while trying to figure out how they found them they decry 'the leaves! THEY HEARD LEAVES IN TREES RUSTLING!'. I guess their vegan zombies or something.

I was annoyed at this series early on, but it only took one episode for me to want to turn this off out of sheer rage. Why didn't I? I don't know, maybe i'm a masochist or something. The episode goes like this: after finding a safe house, the girls get naked, take a bath, GROPE AND FONDLE EACH OTHER, get drunk, and try to have sex with the main character (totally ignoring the only character who actually DOES something in this series and is also a male). What do the guys do? Talk about guns, how to survive the zombie apocalypse, discuss their next move... you know, all the stupid things nobody cares about, right? Now back to the tits. Oh look, now a girl is fingering herself! CLASSY!

Did I mention that out of the 7 characters there are only two guys? One of them is a fun character, who is only good at one thing: guns! He's fat, nerdy, and thoroughly likable. The other character is a total Mary Sue. For those that don't know, a 'Mary Sue' is a character mostly reserved to fanfics who is perfect in EVERY WAY, EVERYBODY likes, and is stronger than everybody else. All the girls want him, he's less interesting than a can of tomatoes (at least there's something INSIDE the can) and he just frustrates me. But thank God for titties, am I right?

If this was a comedy show these might fit, but everything else about the series takes it incredibly seriously while also focusing solely on boob and panty shots. These moments just don't fit in, and the girls often become frustrating to listen to. I find myself skipping over segments with the blond woman because I just can't stand her anymore. But if you force someone else to watch it with you, turn panty/boob shots into a drinking game, and assume the show is a comedy, you could actually have a lot of fun watching it.

Just remember: DO NOT WATCH WHILE SOBER.