[Belated] Merry Christmas, everyone!!

 Chug out the 'nog and the prezzies, folks! :D

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Really sorry guys, thought I'd posted this on Christmas day itself (or at least, yesterday).

Right, update of sorts: I'm still working on Twilight, and contrary to everyone's belief and to my own surprise, I'm not sick of it. It's just been a bit tedious for me to read the entire thing on my computer, when I'm more of a paper, book-in-hand person. And besides, I've had a massive headache the past week, so I've been trying not to exert my eyes much by reading the screen.

Which is something like what... I'm... doing... now. Shit.

Anyway, I'm at the hospital scene. That whole action sequence in the movie was just two pages in the book. Yawn.

Paul Sussman has a new book! Titled The Hidden Oasis, it's selling in MPH now. And since this one DOES NOT HAVE Inspector Khalifa, well, I'll just wait for the book to hit RM32.95 mark. I bought myself the first book, The Lost Army of Cambyses, but that one was just alright, after the awesomeness that was the second book, The Last Secret of the Temple [YOU MUST REEADDDD!!~!].

Aside from that, I watched the first two Psycho movies, and the third and fourth, like, glimpses here and there. For the third, the two female leads annoyed the crap out of me so I kinda zoned out whenever they were on (which was for a considerable time), and for the fourth, I went to bed early. One thing that annoys me off is that they keep repeating Psycho II. Someone please put on the first one, I'd like to see it again.

[Plus, Anthony Perkins isn't so yummy in the second one. Understandably, of course, since it was made 20 years after the first film.]

I'm still working on my posts for the first two Psycho films, and expect one on Avatar, which I just watched todayon Christmas! Word of advice, if you're a special-effects fan like I am, do go watch it in 3-D, because the movie is absolutely, absolutely gorgeous and I'm totally kicking myself for not watching it in 3-D.

Storyline, however, is just meh, so you may want to weigh that against the RM15 for Digital 3-D.

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Storm Warriors (2009)

Storm Warriors is the loudest movie I've ever seen, and I've seen Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe.

It is also awesome and fail all in one. This is the first time I've felt that way about any movie.

*spoilers*

Why? Because Aaron Kwok bloody dies, that's why! More on this later.

SW is the follow-up to Storm Riders, from over 10 years ago. This time around, Wind and Cloud has to contend with Lord Godless, a powerful Japanese warlord that wants to take over China, and his son, Heart. To defeat him, both Cloud and Wind have to train and increase their martial arts skills; Wind taking the evil path, and Cloud taking the normal one. Wind becomes demonic, so it falls to Cloud to stop him before he does any more destruction.

First, the good stuff:

The CGI is fan-bloody-tastic, very comic-bookish, and very 300, except more color. Cue 60-plus seconds of badassery 10-15 minutes into the movie, with Heart, Earth and Sky, and a whole ton of Immortals masked soldiers take on the other martial arts schools in China, with the baddies on the winning side, of course, and every other fight scene, really.

Plus, montages of innocent people dying, yeah!

The fight scenes are very comic book-ish, and the choreography is pretty good as well, although some instances they just stand there and throw chi / energies / [insert correct term here] at each other. Doesn't lessen the cool factor, though.

Then, the not-so-good:

The theme song for this movie kinda blows. It's awesome that they got both our leads to sing it, compared to the previous one where it's just Aaron Kwok, but I preferred the theme for the first movie. Overall score is lovely, though, and really went well with the fight scenes.

The love interests are annoying as usual, especially Charlene Choi, whom I've never really liked. I mean, the writers had the chance to kill her off and they didn't. Girls are pointless in these types of movies. It's a bit like Supernatural: we only want to see the boys and the monsters (or in this case, the kung-fu), and only them.


[Everything else can jump off a bridge.] 

Speaking of female presence, where is Shu Qi? I didn't even know her character from the first film was carried forward to this one till I got on Wikipedia. As such, I managed to guess that her character was going to die, but kudos to the filmmakers, her death was so abrupt that I didn't see it coming.


[Just as well, though; ChoCho was even more pointlessly-annoying than the first film.]

The final fight scene should've been longer, and Wind's evil side shouldn't have been defeated that easily. (Though it was pretty cool.). Evil eye should've opened all the way, too.

Annnddd... the downright unpretty:

Pulling a Cyclops (an X-Men 3, if you will) with Heart and the Emperor's soldiers. The whole bunch just vanished into thin air after Wind threw a hissy fit descended deeper to the Dark Side (note the alliteration). No remains, no fight / death scene, no justice done. What pissed me off more was that they forgot to take Charlene Choi with them, but I digress.

As I mentioned earlier, Aaron Kwok dies. Or seemingly dies. Whatev. To save the falling Wind-and-Choi, Cloud dives down after them and kickspushes them back up towards safe ground. Yes, no main character body means he's still probably alive and will have amnesia, but when you do it at the end of the movie rather than in the middle, it's highly unsatisfying.
And I don't know whether there were any after-credits scene, because the theatre people shut it down halfway through the credits, and Wikipedia is not being informative at this moment.

ARGH!

And there was absolutely no mention (in interviews and news articles) of the movie being the first part of a larger story-arc, which really pisses me off because if I had known of the ending, it wouldn't have been so anti-climactic for me. I still wouldn't have liked it, but at least I wouldn't have ended up being disappointed. Despite the movie's treatment of Nicholas Tse / Heart, I was planning to watch the movie a second time, but the ending just blew me off.

At least the Harry Potter people have already announced their movie plans for Book 7.

Overall, CGI and fights are simply lovely; just the stupid ending and that Nicholas Tse-part that killed it for me. Sorry if my review is a bit awkward; it's difficult to rant about all of this in English :P

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Twilight Chapters 7-14.

I was mistaken: she did use the Google, but only to do research on the types of vampires, and not, like, symptoms and such. Anyway, that section didn't seem pointless like in the movie.

Some sentences were a bit, well, weird ("...traitor tears were there, betraying me"? Once you have the traitor, you don't need the betraying), but this took the cake:

"...emphasizing [Edward's] muscular chest".

HA!

At least Rob Pattinson is tall.

It's been rather dull till now. Backstories. In bed. So much for pillow talk.
I'm at page 159 (out of 260) of the .pdf book, and we're roughly at 50 minutes of the movie, if I'm not wrong.

One thing I noticed about the story is the way Bella and Edward describe each other: smell, appearance, but not really personality or actions (aside from Bella having the instincts of a lemming). I mean, yeah, they act like two people in love (all talk and no action), but I feel it's more about what they want than what they like. Temptation, forbidden fruit, obsession... whole nine yards of Lust. Just a thought.

I'm still plodding away. I'll be damned if I let a bunch of romance novels (TEEN romance novels) stop me from being Little Miss Pop Culture.

And there are three books left... *sob*

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New Moon (2009)

I was actually squirming in my seat because I noticed that my butt hurts from all that sitting.

Don't get me wrong, the movie isn't long. But for me, when attention shifts from what's happening onscreen, to what's NOT happening butt-wise... not a good sign.

New Moon is the sequel to last year's Twilight, a love story between the new girl in town and the mysterious pale totally cute dude sitting in the corner in the cafeteria. That's pretty much what happened in the first movie. The sequel deals with heartbreak and abandonment (technically), because after a papercut almost gets Bella killed (she was in the Cullen house at the time), Edward and family leave Forks so that Bella wouldn't be in constant danger. Bella becomes an adrenaline junkie (so that she can get visions of Edward naggingtelling her not to do dangerous things) and goes on the rebound with her friend Jacob, who turns out to be a werewolf.

After some miscommunication, Edward mistakenly thinks that Bella is dead and wants to commit Huge Vampire Faux Pas after vampiric enforcers the Vulturi refuse his execution request. HVFP in this movie means exposing yourself at noon (maximum sunlight) to a group of revellers celebrating the expulsion of vampires in that town. Because it means a LOT of sparkling. I mean, Rob Pattinson isn't exactly short, yannoe. See the irony, people.

Bella makes it in time to prevent Edward's move, though the Vulturi almost kill her for her immense in-knowledge of the vampiric world. After Alice manages to convince the Vulturi with her Foretelling that Bella will eventually become a vampire (we see Bella and Edward running in the woods, where Bella totally $pArK1eD), they let them go, and everyone returns to Forks. Before the movie ends, Bella tells Jacob that she chooses Edward, causing Jacob to leave in a huff, and Edward asking her to marry him (as in, Edward).

Dun dun DUUUUNNNNN!!!

New Moon also marks the first where I actually felt like dozing off. In the cinema. Which has never ever happened before, since I always make it a point to maximize my ticket's worth ('cuz I paid for it), by focusing on the movie before me and not thinking about things like bloody sleeping.
 
The movie could do with a lot less of the scenes where months passed, and Bella moped around the house and yelled in her sleep, because even non-fans and non-watchers of the first movie would've gotten it by then: Bella misses Edward, Bella wants Edward back, and so on. Also, the, "Dear Alice," voice-overs just got tedious after a while, because though kinda unique at first, there were TOO MANY. I shudder to think how that entire section was treated in the book.

The interaction between Bella and Jacob was fun to watch, although I feel that that and the adrenaline parts could be cut a bit (come on, it took Bella half an hour to fall for Edward in Twilight), which would've made the movie shorter than its two hours, and thus, more tolerable. The wolf pack also made for cool chase scenes and CGI; pity they weren't really central to the story.

Also, I don't really like our heroine. At one scene, we see Bella tell Jacob that he can't leave her, that she can't get through getting over Edward it without him (she didn't say it outright, but we all knew what she really meant). Sadly, the fact that bitch's using him hasn't sunk into poor Jacob yet (or he's in denial, I'unno), so he tells her that they can't see each other again, on account that he is a werewolf and it's supposed to be a secret shhhh. I mean, at that point of the movie Bella already knows that Jacob likes her. And in the end she crushes him by telling him that she will ALWAYS choose Edward.


[And the fourth book is gonna be split into two movies. Sigh. At least we have the violent childbirth to look forward to.]

The Vulturi were the highlight of the movie. Headed by Aro and composed of powerful vampires (each with unique mental abilities, outfits sold separately), they are vampire royalty, and they enforce the law that no vampire should expose their existence to the world (which leads us back to Edward's close HVFP). Plus, they all wear black and look really evil, so that's gonna make for interesting times, right?

I was actually looking forward to the part where Bella was running through the courtyards and stuff to try and stop Edward from revealing himself to the world, because that meant that we would get to see the Vulturi soon after. I wish they had more screen time than, what, 20 minutes? I mean, they're not Venom, you know.

Movie also has consistency issues, though very minor. Like the part when everyone finds out that Bella is immune to their vampiric mental abilities (not including biting and hitting and other physical damage). Wouldn't she have been immune to Jasper's emotion-bending at the beginning of the movie?

And was it really necessary to show Bella's dad grounding her? I mean, the movie ended with Bella stopping a fight between Edward and Jacob in the forest. As in, not in / anywhere near her father's house! It's like he never grounded her! That part was so pointless because hellooo, everyone already figured out that the reason the father exists was because the series started when Bella was 17, and therefore, needed a parental guardian.

Score is first-rate, and the soundtrack wasn't bad either, even though it felt like there were a snippets of a million songs throughout the movie. Hearing Muse's Mon Cœur S'ouvre a ta Voix was a pleasant surprise, since I was expecting Uprising, which I didn't like so much. Unfortunately, Muse was only on for 10 seconds. 

One thing I appreciated about was the title of each movie. The previous one was about Edward, so Twilight; this one is about Jacob, so New Moon. The next one is Eclipse: which probably means that she will pick her final choice in that one, since 'eclipse' means half-moon and half darkness. Props to Stephenie Meyer.


Conclusion: New Moon is a romance movie with loads of talky and no action-y (if you know what I mean *wink*). You have been warned.

Random fun fact:

Whenever I try to type 'Bella', I get 'Belal' sometimes. Unlike this story, Belal makes an appearance in Robert Jordan's The Dragon Reborn, and was balefired (read: erased from existence) about five pages later.

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2012 (2009)

Based on the ancient Mayan theory that the world will end on December 21st, 2012 (12 + 21 = 23 ha!!), 2012 is basically about the end of the world brought on by the sun's weird neutrino activity causing the earth's tectonic plates and everything cracking and sinking and magma-ing and obligatory tsunamis. Oh, and John Cusack.

I liked it.

And I don't get why people are bitching about the movie. About how the CGI was "fake-ish", and how the movie was "unrealistic". Now, I've no problems with the CGI, I thought the damage and destruction done was massive, and it didn't look video-gamish to me at all. To each his own, I guess.

On the lack of realism, sure, I see where they're coming with this. Spelling it out: how can ONE FAMILY survive EVERYTHING LITERALLY THROWN AT / FALLING ON them without SPENDING A CENT and still SURVIVE to see THE END of the movie? Even the rich people, who paid €1 billion to be saved, didn't have that much luck (read: Pushing and Stampeding).

But really, is that unrealistic aspect of the movie such a bad thing?

Every movie usually has an underdog, and the really good ones make you root for that underdog, make you want to see that underdog reach his happy ending. I'm not saying this movie makes you piss your pants every time a Big Giant Rock falls their way, but you don't want to see them die either. Although Chiwetel Ejiofor's character was generally good, he already has a complimentary Get Saved card, so it'd be a pretty short movie if he were the main focus. And really, unless it's about zombies, no one wants to see a movie where the entire world is annihilated and the final scene is a view of Earth from space, with all the water and the magma and the random bit of land.

It's downright depressing. People only flock to this kind of movie is if they've been warned fully in advance, or if it's based on a very well-known book.

I've read quite a few reviews, and another issue is with the amount of characters in the movie, which is to say, quite a lot, on top of Cusack and Fam. The more characters you have, the less time you'd spend on each one of them, and thus, character development would suck, and emotional connectivity with the audience would, well, be lacking.

But I beg to differ.

Though we get only 10 minutes (some, only fleeting moments), I still felt sorry all those who went under, especially George Segal and Blu Mankuma (because I like those two geezers). Call me a sucker, but I even felt sorry for all those faceless CGI-ed victims.

However, I'm most pissed with the movie's treatment of Tamara's death towards the end of the movie. Tamara died to save Cusack's daughter, but in the final scene, there wasn't even a BRIEF mention of her. It was like they were trying to wrap up the bloody movie, and had conveniently forgotten that this poor girl had died in place of another. And plus, Gordon shouldn't have died either. It was like, "Oh, we need your character to fly the plane because John Cusack's an author. Now that we've reached the ark, you can go get crushed. Literally." It was pointless.

It'd also be pretty cool if Woody Harrelson had survived Yellowstone (and everything else), and became the first radio host to broadcast to the survivors.

[Honourable mention goes to the Russian mob dude's two little Dan Foglers. They are SO ADORABLE!!]

Also, Oliver Platt seems to be getting typecast as Person Of Questionable Morals #1.

As for that lousy last line, technically the last word in is, "Nice," which really isn't a bad word in itself.

With the exception of Tamara and Gordon, I thought it was a pretty good movie. And seriously, it's like Transformers 2 all over again. In movies like these, characters are secondary. What we want to see is giant robots how the world will be destroyed this time around.

If the end of the world DOES happen in 2012... I hope it doesn't happen before May 5th :)

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