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Showing posts from December, 2009

AVATAR (AKA totally awesome)

Ok, first of all, I need to clear the air about something: yes, Avatar has the same basic premise as the 1990 Kevin Costner film Dances With Wolves. However, and that's a big however, pointing that fact out as if it were some sort of impediment to the movie and as if you were somehow clever and intelligent is completely false. The fact is that yes, this storytelling convention has been used several times before: outsider joins indigenous people to better understand them so they can be defeated, falls for tribe member/becomes engrossed in the culture and decides to switch sides (circa dances with wolves, the last samurai, the last of the Mohicans, the new world, etc.). What the aforementioned fallacy illustrates is an inability to recognize that storytelling conventions are not always bad things, and used properly can actually make the story more accessible to an audience and save you lots of time on unnecessary exposition. Lets all face it, we could all do with a bit less unnecess

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

You might be wondering why I took so long after this movie was released to review it, that's because it wasn't released everywhere at the same time. This movie didn't come to my area until this week. Oh well, limited releases and all that. Ok, so first off let me dispel a lot of hate speech people have been putting out concerning this movie, it's not bad, not horrible, not awful. What it is could best be described with the use of a single word: schizophrenic. Bear in mind: crazy is not always a bad thing, Vincent van Gogh was arguably pretty nuts and that worked out pretty well for him, at least from a historical and artistic perspective. So while this movie isn't BAD, it is nuts, but it does manage to take the pigskin of lunacy and run with it. There have been endless complaints by people comparing this movie to the first and while those arguments would be valid with most sequels like the matrix trilogy where the quality steadily and systematically went down in a