Sunday, January 27, 2008

Rambo and his 80's metal hair

Rambo is a miserable 60 year old living in Thailand.

Now I always dug John Rambo, and sure he was a loner...but his first line in the film, about 10 minutes in is:

"Fuck You"

His second line, about five minutes later, is:

"Fuck The World!"

Goddamn Johnny, did you ever hear if life gives you lemons make lemonade?

The thing is there's an obvious solution. EVERY Other male in the film, which takes place mainly in the steamy jungles of Burma, has a nice closed cropped haircut. Sure they're sweaty and dirty and probably stink to high heaven like JR, but they're not wearing a thick sopping mop on their heads.

A buzzcut will do wonders for your attitude in 1oo degree heat and 100% humidity.

How's the movie, c'mon, you already know if you want to see it, it's Rambo. In this one he joins up with a group of mercenaries to rescue some holy roller group from Colorado from an army of 100 savages. Much more believable than when he took on the entire Russian Army in the last film, although the violence in this one looks video game silly. Every exploding head or limb or full body (and there are plenty of them) looks like a giant water balloon filled with blood getting popped.

Go see it...it's a good one to tide you over until (I have my fingers crossed) Over The Top 2 comes out.

After the movie I went and got my haircut. That was my weekend.

Fuck The World!

Saturday, January 19, 2008

I can't leave Manhattan without my 8-track

So I went to see Cloverfield and I dug it with two exceptions.

About half way through the film when I decided I did indeed dig it, I wondered how many critics would describe it as "Blair Witch Project on Acid." Well I just did a quick google and there were well over 600 hits when you search on Cloverfield Blair Witch & Acid. Granted those are not all reviews, but there's easily dozens...why do things like this annoy me so?

As for problems with the movie, I won't go into the plot one bit. Sure there's some plot problems and things that just wouldn't happen, but what bugged me throughout the whole film was a technological glitch.

As you've seen in the commercial, much like Blair Witch Project, it's supposed to be a straight unedited showing of found footage that a character in the movie shot. Before showing this footage a top secret government title screen states the film about to be shown was found on an SD Memory Card. Great. That makes plenty of sense....so what's the problem?

About 20 minutes into the movie, one of the main characters, Rob, sees his friend Hud filming everything. Rob realizes Hud is using Rob's video camera to film and asks Hud if he removed "the tape" that was in there or if he's filming over it. Hud doesn't know. See "the tape" that was in the camera showed a day Rob taped a month earlier that was one of the best days of his life. Throughout the movie you see bits and pieces of this day from a month earlier whenever the characters stop the camera for a while. They evidently leave a little space before they hit record again so you'll see the madness in New York, then 20 seconds of Rob a month earlier being happy. If a video camera that used video tape was being used, this would be fine and expected. But it's not...it's an SD Card!

Now I have a fancy new camera that uses one of these memory cards (Do they even make cameras anymore that take video tape?). When I start recording a month after the last thing I recorded it has this nifty way of NOT recording over my old stuff. It creates a new file to record the new segment. If the card is full it will ask me if I want to delete something, not just start recording partially over the file.

Yes I realize I sound like I'm nitpicking, but once I noticed this it bugged me every time I had to watch another 30 seconds of Rob's happy day from a month earlier! It also bugged me because the happy day footage adds NOTHING to the film and almost seems like it's in there as 15 minutes of filler to bring the movie up to a reasonable length.

But again, don't get me wrong. I'd recommend this film. It will be as much fun as listening to 90 minutes of your favorite tape on your Sony Walkman cassette player!