The Illusionist's beautiful animation is captivating, but
the story is really depressing.
Triplets of Belleville was a great movie. I loved the
musicality of it, and how there was hardly any (no?) dialogue. The Illusionist
is also beautifully animated. I love the small quirks of the animation, like
how The Illusionist's hands move when he packs up his poster. I loved how crazy
the rabbit was. But ultimately it's basically the saddest movie ever, and if I
had known that going in, I probably wouldn't have watched it.
Death Race is a great movie. Death Race 3: Inferno is not. There
were multiple times when I was watching this that I wished I hadn't wasted my
time. The concept is still cool, and there are a few enjoyable moments and
lines, but not nearly enough to make up for the painfully terrible acting.
Death Race, I wish I knew how to quit you. I thought I was
going to get to see The Illusionist (animated one, not Edward Norton), but the
library didn't have it in stock after all. I was frustrated enough about that
to just watch Death Race 3 without doing any research on it. Death Race was a
great movie, and all I remember about Death Race 2 was that it sucked. The
trailer for Death Race 3 looked promising, so I gave it a shot.
That turned out to be a mistake. The acting was so bad it was downright
painful to watch. The star, the navigator, the villain, practically every actor
in the entire movie was terrible. Danny Trejo, Fred Koehler and Ving Rhames
were fine, but that's about it. There were actually a few good lines, but most
of the writing was terrible. The driver introductions were totally flat; no
info about the driver at all, just a flashy picture with their name. They did
have a couple interesting drivers; I actually felt sorry for all of them when
they died, which wasn't a good direction to go.
I guess because Luke Goss sucked so much, I really didn't
care about Frankenstein, and I wasn't interested in him beating the other
drivers. So much of the movie made no sense. Why were the prisoners always
allowed to tell all the guards to leave? Why was Katrina randomly washing the
floor by Carl's cell?
What Dreams May Come was a little heavy-handed, and I don't
agree with all the things they changed from the book, but I did like seeing where they were
going with it and how they represented things.
What Dreams May Come was on my "to see" list for a
while, but then I kind of lost interest in it. My boyfriend had a copy of the
book on the bookshelf, so I decided to check it out. It was an interesting
book, and that renewed my interest in seeing the movie. I would say about 75%
of the stuff in the movie wasn't in the book, and a lot of what was in the book
probably got lost in translation if you only saw the movie. I think a lot of
the themes were probably only hinted at in the movie; they came through for me
since I had read the book, but if I hadn't, I probably wouldn't have seen them
so clearly.
The Man with the Iron Fists has some cool stuff going on.
Some of the acting is a little flat, but it's entertaining and it looks great.
It's nice that RZA got to make a movie. The Man with the Iron Fists is listed as a movie "by RZA," and that couldn't be any more true. He directed it, starred in it, and wrote the story, screenplay, and music. Crazy. It's a pretty epic movie. I'm not a classic martial arts movie fan, so it's hard to tell what's an homage and what's just not well done.
The costumes and props seemed a little cheap at times. They shot the movie in 52 days, so I guess it's reasonable to think they didn't have a lot of time for the other stuff, either. I could never get over the Lions' hair, but we'll assume that was on purpose. I think Dave Bautista is just the worst actor on the planet. I don't think there's any "homage" justification that can be made for his lack of performance. I liked the idea of this big guy who's just a total stone block, though.
