Clash of The Titans: Review

And to think I actually included this turd of a film in my Movies To Watch of 2010.

Clash of the Titans is about Perseus who was born a demigod from his mother and the God, Zeus. He goes on a quest to seek revenge against the Gods for the death of his family by killing the Kraken, the one way he could get to Hades and to do that he has to cut the head off Medusa, and everything is all straight forward from there.

Let me be very clear about this piece of shit disguising itself as Clash of the Titans. This is not Clash of the Titans. As we may already know, the studios have been saying that this movie is a remake of the 1980s classic Greek fantasy film. And let me say this, if you are going to be as bold enough as to remake a classic film... don't think that adding cool special effects will make your shit better than the original. It's not going to work. It's just dumb.

And that's what this movie was. DUMB! The film degrades classic Greek mythology into one big creature feature bringing on one Greek mythological monster after another without any real rhyme or reason as to why any of these scenes are going on other than the fact that they want to jam in as many action sequences as possible.

And this could have been a good thing. The visual effects were really great and could be kick ass in 3-D but beneath all that, we have one hollow film. This film goes on for 1 hour 30 minutes and at the end, you find yourself not caring about any of the main characters, I forgot half of the main characters names what with all the weird Greek names like Yghiski and Haephortaia (yeah i made that up). But I digress, there was no story in this movie, there were no character developments, there wasn't a plot development. Everything in Clash were just sub-elements to aid the visual effects.

And that wouldn't bother me if I didn't love the original movie so much. In that same amount of time, the original movie developed relationships between Perseus and Andromeda, the friendship between Pegasus and Perseus, the father-son relationship of Zeus and Perseus, Medusa's back story and still had the same amounts of fight scenes. How they were able to keep it all in a one half hour movie still amazes me.

Sam Worthington does a really great job playing Jake Sully in this. Lets be honest, the guy is a great actor but he can only play one character and that is the "soldier" dude being thrust into a new culture and screaming lots of times. I have no doubts that he can be the next Schwarzenegger but he is going to get stale real fast.

The better parts of Clash were Liam Neeson and Ralph Feinnes as Zeus and Hades. I really like the fact that Liam Neeson and Ralph Feinnes look like brothers in this. Neeson commands the scenes with the little amount of screen time he had. I like how he gave Zeus a more villainous twist in the beginning. Ralph Feinnes is great but the wheezing got a bit irritating after awhile. What we need now, is have a porno of Zeus and Hades bang Aphrodite. Now that's Clash of the Titans for you hahahahahah.

And I gotta give it to the animators. The monsters in the film were really great. Wasn't so crazy bout the scorpions but I really loved Medusa. She so fine, she made some areas of my body turn rock hard. And how bad ass was the Kraken. You know, the only thing I didn't like in the original was that the Kraken didn't look all to menacing to me. But in here, one roar and I was like "....shit..." Kinda sad Kraken only had like 4 minutes of screen time. It came, it roared then it turned to stone. Yeah real nice climax.

Seriously, if you're going to watch Clash of the Titans, watch the original. And if you just want the special effects, pop in your Avatar DVD lah. This movie blows.

RATING: 3/10

Daybreakers: Review

Hey! Now that's weird.. I actually like a movie with Ethan Hawke in it.... Weird

Daybreakers takes place in a world where vampires has taken over the population. And for the most part, they have become civilized. They have formed a civil society, these vampires have homes, they have cars, they have jobs, the only thing different is that they rely on human blood to live. But as the human population begin to dwindle, the vampires have no choice but to hunt the remaining humans and farm them for their blood. In comes Ethan Hawkes character who is working on creating a blood substitute to ensure the survival of the vampires and the human race.

Now I'm watching this film and I gotta tell you, this has got to be the most original vampire film I have seen since Dead and Loving It. Daybreakers brings the mythology of vampire films to the next level with the experimentation of what the world will be like if vampires really did take over. And the things they do around here to portray the vampire dominant world is so genius, I want to make out with the screenwriter of this movie.

The guys who directed this  are the Spierig brothers and they did this with an incredibly small  budget.  But my God did they blew this out of the park. Daybreakers  looks like a $100 million film, easy. The art direction in the movie can  match that of Minority Report's and every little detail, even the  obscure ones were so original it blew my mind to heaven.

We have emo vampire children committing suicide just by exposing themselves to sunlight, the vampires have their own blood version of Starbucks, African blood Cappuccino and everything, we have special built cars for daylight driving, every little detail about how a vampire world would be like was really well thought out to the point that it blows me away and scares me the same time.

Ethan Hawke was really great playing Ethan Hawke in this. Can he do anything else but be himself in every single movie he's in? The best performance in this was Willem Defoe, who I strongly suspect is a vampire cause that guy looks exactly the same way he did in Platoon in the 1980's, that guy never ages man.

But with all the things I love about Daybreakers, I just wished that the story would have been thought out a little bit more. This movie is only 1 hour 15 minutes long and I can tell you that there are at least 20 minutes worth of scenes here that were irrelevant to the story.

One being the whole side story with Isabel Lucas. Now this girl is fine as hell, I've said it since I saw her in Revenge of the Fallen and she is a decent actress. Only her character had absolutely no reason for being in this movie. She had no interaction with any of the main characters, none of them even knew she existed. Her story kind of comes up like an intermission between the second act and the third act which left me going, "Wha?"

But she's still fine as  hell.

And I was really disappointed that the movie ended in a rather shitty way. I mean they start off with a really big bang. They have one of the most original ideas since sliced bread, they build up great conflict and tension in the first two acts and everything collapsed in the third. I felt like I was watching two different movies. Or watching The Matrix and The Matrix Revolutions back to back. Great beginning, lousy ending.

I can honestly say it was such a letdown walking out of the cinema because I believed that Daybreakers had the potential of becoming the next District 9. But I still loved the hell out of this movie for it's originality.  Hopefully, in a few years time they will consider remaking this again and give it a bigger budget and another look at the script because this is an idea too good to waste.

RATING: 6/10

How To Train Your Dragon: Review

Hey guys! So I've been away for quite awhile but I'm back now bitches!! And in time to, the summer movies are about to start. So let's get to it with How To Train Your Dragon.

Finally after that flop of a movie called Monsters vs. Aliens, Dreamworks has finally returned to making animated movies that could give Pixar a challenge at the Oscars again. I absolutely adored this movie, given that it did have some flaws and is miles below the awesome-nest of Kung Fu Panda, Dragon is quite alright.

The movie is about this viking village that has dragons as pests. It's kind of like an everyday occurrence for them to be attacked by these hoards of dragons and it's become some sort of a sport for them. But with every animated film, we get the outcast of the group and that's Hiccup, voiced by Jay Baruchel who's like this really scrawny kid. But by accident, he manages to capture the dragon that's hardest to kill and through the movie, they form this Witwicky-Bulmblebee bond and Hiccup realizes that there are more to dragons than just killing them.

Okay I gotta admit. I'm not impressed with the storyline. Why? Cause it's the same storyline as any animated film we see. Character is outcast of society. Character stumbles upon rare opportunity. 30 minutes of funny scenes. Conflict towards character occurs. Character steps up and saves the day. Happy ending yay! We've all seen this done a hundred times but what makes Dragon better than the rest was the way they went about telling it.

And by that I meant the 3-muthafuckin-D! Remember how cool the flight scene in Avatar was? Well How To Train Your Dragon is just like that... only it's for 1 hour 30 minutes. The flying sequences in this movie is amazing, especially in 3-D. I haven't had that feeling of flying and falling for a long time, it may scare some of the younger kids but I don't give a damn!

But the star of the film has got to be Toothless, the main dragon in this movie. The film incorporates all the fantastic styles of animation Disney had in WALL-E and put it into Toothless. We never hear this character speak at all but we know everything we need to know about him just from his eyes and his expressions. And for some really weird reason, I kept thinking of Stitch from Lilo & Stich when I'm watching Toothless. They kinda look similar, no?

One thing I gotta respect about the filmmakers is that they didn't try to bring in comedians to give funny voices to the dragons. Thank God they didn't have like, an Eddie Murphy dragon or a Chris Rock dragon, that would have made this movie go from totally enjoyable to complete shit fest for me.

Jay Baruchel is great as the voice of Hiccup. But I think if he really spoke like that in real life, I would slap him because his voice is so nerdy, and I mean like the annoying kind of nerdy. The only reason why I liked him in this movie is because he suited Hiccup so so well, so great casting on his part. Gerard Butler is really good in this. But my favorite of all was Craig Ferguson as Gobber, some sort of a wise cracking, drunken version of Kung Fu Panda's Shifu.

The only thing I wished they would have done in the movie was give more character development to the side characters. In the movie, we have these bunch of characters whom Hiccup goes through dragon training with and they are funny as hell. But nothing much is really done with them, which makes it weird since they served a big role in the climax of the film. These characters kind of reminded me of the Furious Five from Kung Fu Panda only that we got a full side story with the Furious Five but in Dragon, we get the usual Judd Apatow jokes.

But that is just a minor complaint, it may have taken the focus off the story for awhile but that's what I would have done. And I gotta praise this movie for one little twist they add to Hiccup's character towards the end of the movie which is really bold for an children animated film to do, because let's be honest.. these kinds of movies never do.

Dreamworks has released better movies than this, familiar unoriginal storyline, but it's what they do with it that makes this so enjoyable. If you're going to watch this, watch it in 3-D. It's absolutely stunning on the big screen, charming and witty story between Hiccup and Toothless and that big ass dragon at the end made it worth the RM18 I payed.

RATING: 8/10