Dredd

I just finished watching the remake film Dredd and thought I'd throw my thoughts up on here. I was originally holding off until I could watch the orignal, but could never bring myself around to watching it. So I'm coming at this with a fresh perspective. This movie is intense. If you like exciting action thrillers, you will like this movie. There's non stop action and an okay amount of story to enhance it. While not an award winning script or story by any means, it has enough content and twists to keep the viewer interesting. The design work of the film is pretty intense. The world is grim and the setting portrays it very well. Performances all around were good enough to match the blandness of the characters. The only thing acting-wise I wish was different was Lena Headey. She did well, I just wanted her to be a little creepier as the drug lord of the 200 story Peach Trees building where the entire movie takes place.

The strengths of this movie come from it's parameters. As it is a "fishbowl" plot, we see almost nothing outside of Peach Trees once we get there. This allowed them to create the look of the building and use a practical set to minimize their effects which is almost always a plus. Speaking of the visual effects, the story revolves around the use of a drug called Slo-Mo. To represent the effects of the drug they use a slow motion camera and sound effect that did a lot to emphasize it. They use these effects very cleverly, especially when Dredd and the new recruit burst in and start shooting the drug users. They go back and forth between the slow motion of the druggies's POVs and the normal Dredd POV. Karl Urban is quite excellent as the always grumpy looking Judge Dredd.

My favorite scene was the very clever battle of wits when the psychic recruit interrogates a man inside his head. The use of the special effects to have the recruit appear behind the guy and turn his thoughts against him was really clever and very visually fun.

All in all this was a great action flick. It's simplicity was not interrupted by stupid love stories or overly complicated sub plots. Definitely a solid 6.5 for me.

TV

Community started up last night. This show is hilarious and arguably more nerdy than The Big Bang Theory. Not in content manner, just in the subtlety and intelligence of the humor and writing. That being said, the newest episode History 101 was an amalgam of two story lines that both had enough content for one episode. Each one could have easily had it's own episode, or my thought was to have the comeback for the almost full year hiatus be an hour long special where they could more thoroughly explore each story line. Regardless, I'm glad this show is back and am looking forward to #sixseasonsandamovie. #hastagsdontworkonblogs. #Iknowthat.

Netflix has decided to make their own shows now starting with House of Cards. The series is based on the 90s UK Series and novel of the same name. The show follows Francis Underwood who devises a revenge plan against the president after being passed up for being the Secretary of State after being promised the position by the president elect. There's corruption, relationships, drugs. All the staples of corrupt politician stories. The writing is alright, not overly incredible but there are enough twists and surprises to keep it interesting. Granted I'm only four episodes into the series, so I can't speak to the latter half of the season. I am enjoying the show but it's not one that holds my focus 100% of the time. The cast is solid. Kevin Spacey stars as Frank and the only complaint I have is that I don't like his accent. It doesn't seem consistant and sounds off to me. It's such a minor detail though and one to easily overlook. Two of the female characters are stars of two of my favorite movies (Robin Wright was Buttercup in The Princess Bride and Kristen Connolly as Dana in Cabin in the Woods). Kate Mara plays a young journalist who is working with/being used by Frank in order to spread insider information. Despite the big name directors (David Finch, Joel Schumacher, Allen Coulter, etc...) this show isn't overly groundbreaking apart from the whole season being released on one day. In short, a nice character drama surrounding DC politics. Worth a watch, but not the top of the queue.

Next week starts the new TV show Zero Hour. It looks like a Da Vinci Code-esque conspiracy show. I'm looking forward to it. Scott Michael Foster is a star and he was awesome as Cappie in Greek. Almost the only reason to watch that show at times, so hopefully this one will be better.

Fringe ended. I'm glad it's over as I didn't like the route it took after the second season. It was a great ending to the show. Fox had a lot of shows that were being cancelled after last year. In order to keep the turnover down a bit, they gave Fringe a final 13 episodes for them to finish off the story. While again I am not super happy the direction they took with it, I am thoroughly pleased with how they executed the ending. I am wanting to do some podcast episodes on Fringe as a whole so I will be getting more in depth when we get to that.

Anyways, looking forward to Justified each week as that's still going strong. My guilty pleasure Face Off on Sy Fy is still fun. Think Top Chef meets film special effects. Walking Dead is coming back soon. I hope HIMYM is actually onto their final season next year. It's a good time for television I think as Joss Whedon's SHIELD spin off series has been in production for a few weeks and I cannot wait for this show to happen!!

Alright, I'm rambling about nothing important now. Thanks for stopping by.

Blah blah blah.

So I've got a job now. Working at the UPS Store. it's not great, by it's pretty easy and the people are pretty cool so far so it makes it quite the job for me. I get to pack boxes, and sell stuff to people, and ship boxes and all that fun stuff! Apart from starting there, I don't have anything new going on really.

New season of Face Off on Sy Fy started up. It's a great competition show of film make up and special effects. I love it. Kind of a guilty pleasure but not really. Justified is back. I just re-watched the first three seasons to prepare for it. Again, this is a fantastic show! You should all watch it. It's about a US Marshall who gets relocated to his home county of Harlan, KY. The show follows his return and reconnection with all the people he knows there. The writing is fantastic and we get to see the vad guys as well as the good guys since it is on FX. While the first season is a little Mobster-of-the-week, the second and third seasons follow plot arcs. The acting is superb and the writing is sheer brilliance. They rarely go the route you expect, and yet all the stories make sense and you see the world in grey not black and white, since they do a great job of humanizing the bad guys and having the good guys make mistakes. I may talk more on this show later.

I'm trying, and slowly but surely succeeding at getting a website up and running for me to use as a home page for the podcasts I'm producing. Not much to tell, other than word press and mac don't play nicely. That should be up and running by the end of February. Hopefully I'll get on a more steady schedule at work so I can be more adamant about writing. Anyways, I got to go eat and stuff. Thanks for reading. 

2012 Recap

What a year 2012 was. A lot of great stuff happened seeing as I graduated, became a professional director, met some awesome people, saw some incredible movies, had some wonderful experiences. However, life likes to balance itself by throwing a lot of shit in there too. This year we lost two close family friends, ages 20 and 21. 2012 may not have been the end of the world as most people misinterpreted the Mayans' calendar, but it sure felt like it at times. I learned a hell of a a lot about grief last year. I think about Randy and Tim almost every day and miss them a lot.

Good things did happen in 2012. I directed Beyond Therapy at school which was an absolute blast, then I got to light design the new version of Cinderella which was my best light design to date since I had a lot of useful resources to do it. I started up 3 podcasts that are still going strong, more on that later.

There were some great movies in 2012. To know more on that check out The Cinemasters Podcast where we did a movie game of 2012 movies and coming soon we will do a recap of the movies in 2012.

As far as TV goes, Breaking Bad and Justified are still some of the greatest shows on air. Fringe is closing up shop soon, which I'm okay with so it doesn't go too far. Newsroom kicked some major ass in its first season. The CW show Arrow based on the DC comics character Green Arrow, one of my favorites. This is a fun show. Granted it's not the sheer brilliance of say Sherlock or Justified whose writing is incredible, but it's a solid action show and basis for the Rogue Arrow Podcast. House ended,. I kinda faded away towards the end. Need to finish the last 5 or so episodes still. How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory are kinda stale nowadays. They need to end. I watched some of Partners and found it to be quite funny.

Some great music came out last year. Gotye got super huge, which is weird because I was in Australia when he was emerging down there. I got to see his rise of popularity down under then experience it again when I got back to the States. Adele is still going strong. Maroon 5 is still rocking their pop rock grooves. No doubt came out with some new stuff that is pretty excellent. Tenacious D also made an excellent come back with Rise of the Fenix. My favorite albums of the year are The Offspring - Days Go By, The aforementioned Rise of the Fenix, Linkin Park's Living Things, and Hoobastank's Fight or Flight.

On the comic front the new 52 is still going strong. I'm loving Firestorm. I've been picking up the Hawkman: Wanted crossover. It's not great but it's decent. I'm still loving the Sixth Gun series by Cullen Bunn. Really everything by Cullen Bunn, which sucks because he's getting pretty decently into being a Marvel creator so he has a lot more titles for me to buying. Marvel's trying to get the same readership boost with their Marvel Now! The new Thor: God of Thunder series is excellent and I've been enjoying Avengers as well. I wish I had more money to buy more stuff with, but I can only afford so much.

So yeah, 2012 was one hell of a year. A lot of great things with an awful amount of horrific things thrown in. I hope 2013 is a lot better.

Things I want to accomplish in 2013: Get webcomic up and running, find a job, Devon and I are working on eating better, being a better person all around, and just helping to make people's lives better.
I should be able to take care of most of these. So. Here's to 2012. I will always remember that year, though not necessarily for the good reasons... RIP Tim and Randy.

Christmas Movies!

That's right. Time for my review of Christmas movies. Wait. No. I already did that. You can find that here and the Christmas Special of the Cinemasters Podcast that we recorded here. Why don't I talk about the movies that came out this Christmas, well the ones that I've seen (Les Miserables, and Django Unchained.)

First I'll do Les Mis. Before I get into the film, let me go into my past a bit. My Junior Year of High School in 2007 I went with the school's production of Twelfth Night to the Illinois Highs School Theatre Festival which had the all state musical as Les Mis. I fell asleep as I was quite bored with the show. That being said, I was not at all excited when I first heard this movie musical version was coming out this winter. Then as the months went by and the cast was announced I was vaguely interested as I like all the actors in the movie. Finally when I heard that the singing was being recorded live I got super excited as the normal lip syncing tends to leave out subtle emotions in the performances of the music. At this point I decided I would have to see the movie to see the new recording and to see if I had grown as an audience member and if I had just been a young kid who wasn't really into musicals.

So I saw the movie. I first was not impressed by the sound mixing, but that was they recorded the boat pulling scene actually in the ocean and as such were unable to get a good live recording of the vocals. Anyways, the story didn't interest me any more than it did almost 6 years ago and the music, while good was not enough to keep me interested for the almost 3 full hours. That being said I will try to comment only on how the film was made and not the story itself.

The biggest complaint I had about the show was how static the shots were. Through most of the solo scenes the camera was merely a close up of the actor singing and either didn't change or only changed very little. This worked in Anne Hathaway's "I Dreamed a Dream"as her emotions were spot on and her vocal and video performance were synced due to the live recording of the songs. This lack of editing was essentially caused by the live recording since the audio take couldn't be cut and pasted, it had to be one single audio take. Therefore they didn't have the extra footage from other takes to insert into the final. This could have been avoided and improved by having one or two more cameras on set that they could record with simultaneously and get some different angles on the very, very static scenes.

As I said, "I dreamed a dream" is the only song that didn't suffer from this camera restriction as it was one shot of Hathaway singing for four minutes with a close up of her intense emotions to become one of the strongest scenes. The other best part of the movie for me was the kid who played Gavroche. He isn't on screen a ton, but it was a joy every minute. His singing was cute, and pretty good and he had one of the best songs.

In short, I don't love this move and I would be hard pressed to even say I like it, but it is very pretty and technically is pretty well done. I would give it a 4 out of 10.

Next up, Django Unchained. Quentin Tarantino's 8th big movie release. To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to this at first since I knew I would enjoy it. As the months got closer, the anticipation rose. I was able to see this the day after Christmas and it was fantastic. It has all the staples of a Tarantino movie, from the language (wouldn't be surprised if it set a record of number of n-words said in a movie.), the Mexican standoffs (the movie starts off with a tense scene as Christoph Waltz uses his overly professional attitude to try to conduct a business transaction to get Django to help him out. The first of many great tension building moments.), and the fantastic, bloody fight scenes (a great shoot out where most everyone dies.)

The best part of this movie are the performances by... well everyone. I don't think there's any scene with a poor performance, including a great cameo that I will not ruin for you. Christoph Waltz plays a similar character as his Inglourious Basterds character, but that's okay since it's fantastic as always. Jamie Foxx transforms from the run down slave to the free, badass fighting expert. Leo DiCaprio does not disappoint as the slaveowner who owns Django's wife that they are trying to get back. Walter Goggins plays one of DiCaprio's men who has a rivalry with Django as he is a black man on a horse. His character reminded me of his character in Justified which everyone should be watching. I will be re-watching that soon as the new season comes out n the 8th! His interactions with Django are really intense and great and sort of serve as comic relief.

The plot is great! The action is great. A lot of great kills. Classic Tarantino. A bit on the long end, but hardly noticeable and not at all detrimental to the film. Very little could have been done to make this movie better for me. Definitely gets a 9 out of 10.

Fun videos to go with these movies!!!

Those are the only movies I've seen that were released on Christmas so next post will be reflection on 2012 I think. As always, thanks for reading. See you later. 

An Unexpected Review

So we had the pleasure of seeing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey at the midnight showing last Thursday. After 9 years off Peter Jackson has returned to Middle-earth to tell us the tale of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures with the one ring before Frodo's adventures in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Before we get into my thoughts, Spoiler alert! I'll probably end up talking about some specifics of the movie.

First things first, I love Kevin Smith's work and he has one of the funniest reactions to the LOTR trilogy ever. In case you haven't seen it here you go:




Now this is a very satirical look at the films, and I'm not knocking the quality of the trilogy as they are cinematic masterpieces and deserved every award they received. Bring this up, not only because it's a hilarious look at the trilogy, but because I was afraid that the Hobbit was going to also be more walking. So immediately when they got their quest and Bilbo agreed to be their thief and they ride off on ponies, I thought it would be a movie about riding instead. Thankfully, there were plenty of action sequences. The way they managed to get a trilogy out of the shortest book is by using stories from other stories and appendices to fill in some things that happen off page from the book and provide more backstory as to the rebirth of Sauron that leads to the LOTR trilogy.

Anyways, the premise is Bilbo writing his story into the book, which serves to tell the background needed to get the story rolling. They show the dragon Smaug desecrating the town of Dale and overtaking the kingdom of Erebor under the Lonely Mountain. There's an unnecessary cameo of Frodo as Bibo finishes writing for the moment. He runs off and we flash back to Gandalf arriving to get young Bilbo to go on an adventure. The interplay between Gandalf and Bilbo is fantastic at this intro scene. Several dwarves show up to Bilbo's house for a meeting and they eat all of his food and discuss their journey. They plan to trek to the Lonely Mountain to reclaim Erebor in the name of the dwarves. Bilbo contemplates and eventually decides to go along.

As they journey, they tell some tales of others and provide some of the extra story. We meet an eccentric wizard Radagast, who serves to bring the bad news of the Necromancer, a mysterious being that has brought the wicked witch king back from the dead. The group manage to get away from a trio of trolls and find some good weapons at their hoard. They get chased by a pack of orcs led by an albino Orc lord with a grudge against Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the group until they find themselves in Rivendell. They leave there and get captured by some Orcs in a cave under the mountains. Bilbo gets separated and finds Gollum, and manages to steal the One Ring and meet up with the group after they make their escape. After a showdown on a cliff, Gandalf calls on Galadriel for help and they fly off on Eagles. The movie ends at the top of a mountain as they look off to see the Lonely Mountain in the distance.

The opening scene showing the background story was brilliantly done. They pull a bit of Jaws by not showing the Dragon fully as we catch glimpses of him as the fires rage and destroy the town. It was beautifully done and I applaud them for their selective reveals. The Frodo cameo was a nice touch as it gives context to put it in the same world as the trilogy. However, it was about twice as long as it should be and the only purpose it serves are the cute nods to the trilogy with Frodo hanging the sign on the gate and then going to meet Gandalf on his way into town. Being introduced to the Dwarves is amusing as they are frantically running around and eating and all around fun, jolly folk.

The scene with the Trolls is one of the strongest story telling moments due to the physical humor and the characterization of almost all the characters. The first hour or so of the movie was pretty stale as it's just starting the journey, but also it is just them riding along then stopping to tell a tale and so on. It works to break it up a bit, but gets repetitive. Mostly this movie works to set up the world of Middle-earth and give back story to the original trilogy while setting up for the next 2 films. That being said, the action scenes were pretty well done and exciting enough to keep me awake until 3 in the morning.

In this movie we get a cameo of the hilltop where Frodo gets stabbed in Fellowship, as well as the the origin of the elf/dwarf rivalry. When the Dragon was decimating Erebor, the Dwarf king looks up to a hill where the Elf king turns and walks away with the army, offering no help.

The scene between Bilbo and Gollum is a battle of wits where they try to trick each other with riddles. It is really well done all around, but I was pretty burnt out on Gollum as a character from the trilogy.

Now the biggest problem in this movie is that the group escapes on some giant eagles after being cornered and backed to a cliff edge. The eagle then drops them off at the top of an odd mountaintop, within sight of the lonely mountain! Why didn't they just fly them to the Lonely mountain! It was right there!!! The only part of this movie that I think wasn't up to par was the use of CG to create all the orcs. The trilogy had a lot of make up on actual characters and only used CG to fill in the huge battle scens and such. It was definitely noticeable that the orcs were CG and not actually there.

All in all this was a very well done movie as expected. The performances are great, especially Martin Freeman and Sir Ian McKellan as always. I'm excited to see the latter two films and hope they get better as they go. My final thought is this: I'm glad this was a movie not about walking, but rather about running as the group is continually running from the orcs. Definitely a great movie and you should all go see it in theatres.

Marvel Vs. DC movies

Now this is going to be an interesting post. I came across this image yesterday over at Comicbookmovie.com.

This got me thinking about all the problems with this statement. I see what they're trying to do, but I didn't trust the result so I did some of my own calculations. Now, this doesn't take into account several factors. The biggest of al is that all of these DC movies were produced by Warner Brothers, while the Marvel ones are divided. Universal Studios has Howard the Duck and Hulk, while New Line has the Blade movies, Fox has the X-Men franchise, Daredevil, Elektra, and the Fantastic Fours, Punisher belongs to Lionsgate, and The Spiderman and Ghost Rider Movies are with Columbia. After Disney bought Marvel, then Marvel Studios had the Money to make their own films starting with Iron Man and leading up to the Avengers. So is it fair to compare the 19 films put out by Warner Bros. for DC with the 28 movies put out by the 6 different studios?

I don't know the answer, but I did figure out what I could. I went over to boxofficemojo.com to get all the domestic lifetime grosses of the movies. I went over to usinflationcalculator.com to convert the grosses to what it would cost today. I then used those figures to come up with the averages. The averages (just the movies above) I came up with overall are DC: $211,266,988.82 and Marvel: $203,904,841.47 which matches their claims. 

Now, I'm sure a lot of you are thinking, hey what about those other, less popular movies. Why aren't V for Vendetta, or Road to Perdition, or Men in Black on the list? Well maybe not, but I was thinking that. Here's where it got a bit trickier. The Men in Black movies and Kick Ass are based off a comic that is now owned by Marvel. On the DC side they also have Road to Perdition, League of Extraordinary, History of Violence, Constantine, V for Vendetta, Stardust, The Spirit, The Losers, and RED.  Factoring these in we get averages of DC: $165,287,168.47 and Marvel: $204,546,738.69.
Interesting that DC drops so low on the average. One could argue that only Constantine, V, and the Losers were produced by Warner Bros. Using the average from all the Warner Bros. DC movies we get an average of $183,156,576.28 per movie.

Anyways, let's take a look at which Studio on the Marvel side is winning. Lionsgate only has the punisher movies and is struggling at $25 million per film. New Line Cinemas has their Blad films averaging around $90 million. Who knows if that will continue once Snipes serves out his jail time for tax fraud... Universal, with their Howard the Duck and Hulk films average around $100 million. 20th Century Fox with their X-Men franchise, Daredevil, Elektra, and Fantastic Fours average around $175 million. Spiderman is holding up Ghost Rider to just below the $300 million mark at Columbia. Marvel Studios managed to learn from all the others and are sneaking by just above a $300 million average. Just out of curiosity I averaged the Spiderman movies alone, which came out to a little over $400 million. Interesting that the best franchise in Marvel is not done by Marvel Studios. The Men in Black movies are averaging just over $200 million.

Over in DC the Batman Franchise is averaging about $315 million while the Dark Knight Trilogy alone is at $420 million and Superman as stuck at $230 million.

As to who is making better movies, DC has 7 films over 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and 13 over 70%, and 13 under 60%. Superman and The Dark Knight are the only 2 to break 90% at 95 and 94 respectively.

Marvel has 8 over the 80% mark, 14 over 70%, and 15 below 60%. Spiderman 2 (93), Iron Man (94), The Avengers (92), and Men in Black (90) all broke 90%.

Who's the winner? Hard to say. Well not really. Both companies are kicking ass in Box office numbers with a combined domestic total over $11 billion. I'm sure the worldwide numbers are similar and probably wouldn't change them too much. If somebody wants to compile the list of Worlwide grosses for me, I'll do the analysis again. I'm too burnt on the topic to go look them up.

Side note. DC also had Swamp Thing and Return of Swamp thing, but I couldn't find any box office for the former, so it didn't seem right to add the inferior sequel without the original.

Here's my notes on the subject:

Now onto my thoughts on the films. Really Dan? All that and you're just now getting to your thoughts? Hey, you're the one reading it. 

DC. I definitely love the Dark Knight Trilogy the best. While I do have a great respect for the first 2 Superman and Batman films, I don't think they are as quality as Nolan's iteration. Low on the scale of ones I've seen are the Steel movie and the latter two 90s Batmans. I think Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and The Losers are all solid movies and underrated by most. 

Marvel: I tend to stand out over here as my opinion often varies from other people. I like the Blade movies pretty well. I think Spiderman was the best of the original trilogy and that the Amazing Spiderman is better than that. Loved the X-Men movies, but they went downhill after one, until First Class came out. I love the Men in Black movies, as they are right up my alley. Once we get into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I like all of the movies. Incredible Hulk is the least favorite and Avengers is right at the top. 

Pitting my favorites against each other I would have Dark Knight, Superman, and V For Vendetta versus Avengers, The Amazing Spiderman, and X-Men. I think that DC has the better movies, but I would easily choose to watch several of the Marvel movies, depending on the day. Basically, they all have merit (arguably) and I am really glad I don't have to choose between Marvel and DC. Well that's enough of a post for now. Who do  you guys think has the better movie selection?