Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Green Lantern not terrible, lots of things die in Transformers

By Jeff

Sports is in a lull right now. I could go through the MLB all-stars snubs and surprises, but Mike is doing a fun job of that already. All I'm going to say about it is that it's frustrating to see players like Andrew McCutchen and Mark Teixeira get jobbed out of spots. But this is a game for the fans, and they vote who they want to see. It's an unfair system, but it makes sense. Well, Bruce Bochy doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, because there is nothing exciting in sports, here are few movie reviews for your reading pleasure.

First, we have "Green Lantern". It wasn't that bad. People are trashing it pretty good, but it entertained me for the most part. Ryan Reynolds was good, not great, in the starring role of Hal Jordan. Blake Lively was OK, Peter Sarsgard was solid, Tim Robbins was useless, and Mark Strong wasn't around nearly enough.

The rest of the movie had it's usual comic book movies draws and flaws. The special effects were fun and a dogfight early in the movie was pretty cool to watch. Ridiculous like every movie dogfight, but still enjoyable. Seeing the filmmakers create all the different constructs the Green Lanterns used was interesting and surprisingly tame. Maybe that's because Jordan has yet to fully harness his power. I mean the ring he wears allows him to create anything in his mind. There are literally endless possibilities.

A major flaw was character development. Sarsgard's character, Hector Hammond, and Jordan clearly have some kind of history together. But that history is never explained in any way. It was pretty lazy. They could have looked at Jordan and Lively's character's history, but they hardly did that either.

The main problem with the movie was Strong as the Green Lantern Sinestro, only had a few scenes. Of course, if there is a sequel he is going to be in it a lot more. But when you have a talent like that on staff, use it! Why not have him team up with Jordan to take down the bad guy, which was a giant being known as Parallax that eats people's and planet's fear, which then kills them rather than making them fearless. That would have made his fall all more powerful and gut wrenching than it will be. Yes, I just played spoiler without warning and don't care. If you know anything about the Green Lantern comics or cartoon appearances, you know Sinestro is a pretty bad dude.

Overall, it was a B-. It was more entertaining than "Thor" but not as clever or well-done as movies like "X-Men: First Class" and "Iron Man".

Then there was "Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon", the finale of the Transformers trilogy. Listen, if you go to a Transformers movie for plot, you're silly. It is giant, robotic space aliens fighting each other and humans while Shia LaBeouf runs around screaming. If you take out the words, "bumble", "bee", and "no", LeBeouf would have had maybe 15 lines in the three movies combined.

What's I'm trying to say is that the acting isn't very good, nor does it have to be. Although, Alan Tudyk and Ken Jeong were great in very limited roles.

"Dark Side of the Moon" was just a fun, blow everything up movie. The last hour of the movie is just non-stop action as the Autobots and Decepticons tear Chicago to pieces as they attempt to kill each other. The special effects are great. Some of them are ridiculously stupid, even for a movie about a warring robotic alien race. But those scenes are still fun.

The movie is well over 2 hours long, which is a bit much. There are a lot of scenes that could have been cut, as they served little to no purpose.

This review isn't very detailed because there isn't that much you need to know. The acting was the typical Transformers quality, the action was intense and lots of stuff blows up. Optimus Prime talked a little bit of shit, but should have been talking a lot more.

If you like the other two in the series, or just the first one, you will enjoy "Dark Side of the Moon." If you hate robots, dumb action, ridiculous stunts or fun, you won't like this movie. I love all of that stuff so I give it a B.

Alien Ant Farm - Movies

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