The Sellen River

And since the Internet demanded it in a non-Facebook spot... here's the direction of flow for the East Sellen River, Sellen River, and West Sellen River.

Movie Review—Wrath of the Titans

Those of you who have seen the remake of "Clash of the Titans" know that when I say its sequel, "Wrath of the Titans," is a better movie than its predecessor know that I'm not necessarily saying "Wrath" is a good movie. Whatever it is, though, it's certainly never quiet.

Ray Harryhausen is one of my cinematic heroes. The last movie he did special effects work for was the 1981 version of "Clash of the Titans," so when the remake came around a few years ago, I was wary but hopeful. The trailers certainly made it look exciting. But no... no. It ended up being one of the worst movies of 2010.

"Wrath of the Titans" has an advantage then. It's an entirely new story... well, sort of, unless you count mythology... and so I wasn't spending every single second of the movie mentally comparing it unfavorably to an original. This time out we get more neat mythological monsters, but each time they show up... they end up kind of being wasted. Chimeras make a big opening scene, but even though they're supposedly rampaging across the countryside for the duration of the movie, once Perseus kills one at the start of the movie (in what's easily the most interesting scene in the entire movie), they're never seen again. Perseus and crew head out to Hephaestus's island, and once there they get in a fight with a bunch of cyclopes, but it turns out they're kinda nice if dumpy guys who end up strolling up the mountainside with the heroes to visit Hephaestus. And they end up having to go through THE labyrinth to enter Tarterus to save Zeus, and wouldn't you know it the minotaur does indeed attack Perseus, but he's just a big dude with growths on his head who, after a series of quick-cut fight edits, ends up not leaving much of a mark on the memory.

"WHYYYYY? WHY DIDN'T THEY MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A NORMAL MINOTAUR?"

I suppose that all the lava effects splattering off Kronos's enormous mitts at the end were pretty nifty, as were his double-sided lava warrior thingys... But by then, I was pretty well bored with the absolutely uninspired dialogue and frustrated by the obviously well-done special effects that you couldn't really stop to admire because they were too busy doing fast edits. Fast edits are hard to do well, but easy to do when you're covering the fact that you don't know how to choreograph an action scene, whether or not it has CGI in it or not, I guess...

Oh. Wait. Just remembered... like "Clash" did a few years ago, "Wrath" manages to get a somewhat goofy and nonsensical cameo in for Bubo, so now I hate the movie just a little bit more.

Wrath of the Titans...

• ... thankfully doesn't have any suicide bombing djinn or comedy-relief adventurer duos. It does have a comedy-relief single adventurer, so it's not a total improvement.
• ... makes the mistake that the viewer would rather watch Perseus and Ares have a fistfight rather than see some more special effects in the form of just one more mythological monster encounter.
• ... somehow manages to have less memorable characters than the first movie. Which is, in a way, a blessing, since the traits that made the previous characters memorable were insulting or frustrating or annoying.
• ... spends way too much time trying to make us interested in the human armies that don't have a chance in the fight anyway and end up kinda just standing around and getting dirty.
• ... makes me wonder why, if you steal Zeus's lightning bolt, you don't bother using it in a fight, even if you ARE Ares.
• ... really does want to be God of War, but it doesn't have the courage to even get close to it. Maybe if it had been R-rated and was loaded with gore and profanity and nudity it would have been more interesting.

 Grade: C–

Review—Sucker Punch

Zack Snyder's made one movie that completely caught me off guard and impressed me*, one movie that completely underwhelmed me**, one flawed masterpiece***, and now, with Sucker Punch, masterpiece flaw.

So... what do I mean by it being a "masterpiece flaw"? Well... the movie is never boring to look at, for one thing. But the longer you look at it, the more you become painfully aware of the fact that what you're looking at is trying SO HARD to outdo itself with every single scene that the only thing it really accomplishes by the end is it makes you tired. I mean... when a movie has a fight with three giant-sized demonic warriors from a samurai's nightmare armed with swords, polearms, gatling guns, and rocket launchers against a beautiful gun and katana wielding blonde who just got armed with her weapons by Scott Glenn, you'd think that you'd come to the end of a pretty over-the-top action movie. In fact, that's more or less how Sucker Punch starts. By the end, I was thinking back to that fight sequence and how mundane it was, after wading through clockwork German soldiers and robots and dragons and so on.

I think my primary disappointment with Sucker Punch was that it ended up feeling like scenes from like 5 different movies that I would have really liked to see the WHOLE movie of, then incorporated one of my least favorite storytelling tropes into the whole thing—the fact that a lot of the movie was just a hallucination/dream/vision. (And no, that's not a spoiler... it's pretty obvious from the start when the really crazy stuff—rocket wielding giant samurai—starts showing up.)

I mentioned above that Sucker Punch is never boring to look at... and while that's true... at places it got boring to watch. In a movie with everything I just mentioned above that ALSO has wall to wall hotties in it... being "boring to watch" is what I'd call the definition of a "masterpiece flaw."

Pardon me... do you know the fastest way to Little China?

Sucker Punch is...

• ... a strong piece of evidence that director Zack Snyder should not write moive scripts wholly on his own, but should adapt scripts from better writers. Like, say, Alan Moore or George Romero.
• ... not helped by being PG-13. Netflix failed me there by not sending me the unrated version of the movie, which while I doubt is much better, at least would have been even MORE over the top.
• ... pretty much what you'll see in the trailer below... stretched out to nearly 2 hours with not a lot more story added to what you see in the trailer itself.

GRADE: C –


*Dawn of the Dead
**300
***Watchmen