The Incredibles
Mood:  happy
Topic: Movie Review
The Incredibles is simply one of the best movies I have ever seen. The animation is truly amazing and I was laughing my ass off during the whole movie. But, even though it's the best animation I've ever seen, the film stands on the strength of it's characters, and the depth of the script.

I would have liked to see a lot more of Sam Jackson's character Frezon. He was absolutley hilarious. The film is about the Incredible family though and it's not all about beating up the bad guy.A very entertaining and well thought out film. I will see this film again. It's great.

The Matrix Reloaded - Spoiler: The FX could not save it.
Mood:  d'oh
Topic: Movie Review

The special effects were amazing and the acting was great. The movie on the other hand.... sucked! Even the spectacular action gets tiresome after a while. In the much hyped Agent Smith fight scene for instance it quickly becomes obvious that neither side can win, but the fight goes on for about 5 minutes after we realize it's a stalemate, and after about 15 minutes of fighting Neo realizes it too, and flies away. Leaving the audience to wonder, why didn't he do that 10 minutes ago.

It started out good. Nice action right off the bat. Then we get to Zion. This is where the movie really started to fall apart for me. The probe machines are going to attack Zion and everyone needs to head back to get ready for the big fight. Morpheus disobeys orders and asks a single ship to stay in case the Oracle contacts them.

The ship docking area in Zion looked like something out Star Wars. Amazingly high tech computers everywhere. Morpheus gets yelled at by the military commander for asking the ship to stay (The Military commander is Morpheus rival, hates him and is dating Morpheus' ex, can you say cliche). Then Morpheus talks to a council very reminiscent of the Jedi Council in Star Wars. The council lets Morpheus tell the people about the threat to Zion and agrees to let Morpheus take himself and two other ships out of Zion to let Neo try to shut the Matrix down.

The cave where this happens is completley out of place with the Zion we have already seen. There is no technology in here. In fact Morpheus has to shout to be heard because amazingly huge room in this amazingly high tech world doesn't even have a sound system. Morpheus tells them they are going to be attacked by the machines, and tells them Neo is The One. Neo and Trinity go off to get lucky and the rest of Zion throws a big Rave in the Cave with musical instruments made out of junk. The scene was sexy. Fading back and forth between the rave and Neo and Trinity doing the nasty. Normally, I like sexy, but this was very forced and very unnecessary to the story.

Morpheus is obssesed with Neo being The One. Neo is almost a religion to many. However in the Matrix we find that all of Neo's choices he has made before and everything is predestined. References are made to his predecessors (the program stating this also makes reference to beating him before, but if that happened the rest of the movie doesn't make much sense). The Oracle who knows all is actually a computer program. Neo is himself programmed human (which is how the Oracle knows what he will do), he is Neo 6.

After a long fight through the Matrix, Neo meets the Architect and discovers that the Matrix has been ended 5 times by Neo, and apparently he must end it again to save Trinity's life and stop Zion from being destroyed. If he goes through door #1 the Matrix will end, but the attack on Zion will be stopped and he will get to chose several survivors from the reboot to rebuild the Matrix and the whole cycle will start again or he can go through door #2 and try to save Trinity the hard way and then help Zion find a way to defeat the quarter of a million probes heading to destroy it. Neo 1-5 chose the reboot option. So after having it hammered into us that Neo has no choice, at the end he of course makes a choice that keeps the Matrix going and Trinity dies, but Neo, using his Matrix magic brings her back to life.

They exit the Matrix to be confronted by several of the probe robots. Suddenly Neo has a new power outside the Matrix that allows him to destroy the probes. Neo's new power makes me think that maybe, just maybe the real world is actually just another cog in an even bigger Matrix. To be concluded shows on the screen.... credits roll. If you don't know, there is a trailer for Matrix Revolutions at the end of the credits. I will probably go see the 3rd film when it comes out this November (that's right - two in the same year), I won't get my expectations up, but it's like putting down a novel halfway through the story. Even though the writing is not as good as the first few chapters, it's hard not to want to see how it ends.

Gangs Of New York - This movie blows!
Mood:  don't ask
Topic: Movie Review
This movie was visually stunning in costume and set design, very well acted and the dialogue was good. I am not a Leo basher either, I for one think he is an excellent actor and the entire cast did a great job. But the story was very poorly written and could in fact have been written by the lowest hollywood hack.



Warning - spoilers below:



First up, we have a priests son out for revenge. I think that Priests are supposed to be, uh'm, what's that word... Celibate. The Priests mandate that required celibacy was issued in 1139. I understand priests make mistakes, but without telling us the background story as to why this particular priest has a son it seems like just a really poor script error.



Also, I have no idea why these people (the Irish) started following Leo's character. He was not a leader, he showed no leadership qualities at all. He was not out to help them, he was a petty thug out for revenge. He never seemed to care a bit about the plight of the irish.



The movie is a menagerie of cliches



Cliche: Son of slain man wants revenge.



Cliche: He falls for the whore with a heart of gold who works for the villan.



Cliche: His friend wants the girl and betrays him to try to get her.



Cliche: Villan spares hero so he can come back stronger to defeat him.



I am suprised there was no training montage.



But, the clincher was they couldn't even do the cliche ending correctly. Leo does not defeat Daniel Day Lewis, a random cannon blast takes care of that, and we are robbed of even a semi satisfying climax.

Deathrace 2000
Mood:  happy
Topic: Movie Review
Watched Death Race 2000 tonight. This has to be one of the worst movies ever made, and one of the funniest. It was one of Sylvester Stallone's first movies and it is truly a great bad movie.

Set in the year 2000, (the movie was made in 1975) It's the story of the Transcontinental Road Race where the object isn't just to finish first, but also to finish with the most points. How do you get points? Killing pedestrians!!!

Now what I am wondering is did people put point values on pedestrians before this movie came out, or is this where it all started?