3D movies

As I mentioned some weeks ago, that I'll go to see two more recent movies this month. The first one was True Grit, and for the second one I decided to wait for this new 3D movie, Sanctum. I hadn't seen a 3D movie before, so that's pretty much why I chose it.

So.. How was the 3d? At first it looked a bit strange to me, it took like 20 minutes for my eyes to get fully used to the 3D picture. The 3D glasses weren't very comfortable either. There were some cool effects, but sometimes it looked like there were multiple 2-dimensional layers in a 3d space, it's a little difficult to explain. Another thing which I found a bit annoying was the objects placed very "near" in the corners of the screen, such as tree branches or computer screens. They were annoying because they were blurry. I guess it's are supposed to create some sort of 3d impression, but they often cover like 1/4th of the screen and you can't focus your eyes on these objects, because they're intentionally blurred.

Overall I think the 3D was "ok", some effects were really cool, but there were so many distracting details which you don't have to worry about in a normal film. And the 3D video quality didn't look as high as you could expect. So while the 3D techniques are still under developement, I'd probably watch ordinary films rather than 3D.


I also made a short review of Sanctum. But to avoid too long posts, I'll post it separately later on.

Cheers.

Platoon (1986)

Let's continue with the Charlie Sheen movies shall we? Although this time it's not a comedy.

"Platoon is a 1986 American war film written and directed by Oliver Stone and starring Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen & Keith David. Stone wrote the story based upon his experiences as a U.S. infantryman in Vietnam, as a counter to the vision of the war portrayed in John Wayne's The Green Berets." (Wikipedia).

The movie follows a volunteer infantryman Chris Taylor's (Charlie Sheen) perspective of his platoon's encounters in the Vietnam war. The movie creates a very ruthless image of the nature of Vietnam war. While having very tense and realistic atmosphere in the war scenes, it also shows the developement of the soldier's psycological and ethic values, and the significant decrease of the value of human life. How the inexperienced newcomer struggles to retain his sanity while turning into a cold blooded killer.

The acting performances are surprisingly good in this movie. According to IMDb, the actors had to go through a real 14 day bootcamp practice, including night patrols etc, before they started filming the movie, and it shows. I think it's actually pretty clever idea to create more authentic look and behaviour to the characters. Charlie Sheen seems to be a bit lost once in a while, but it's probably intended since his character is a "newcomer". He does also a good job as the narrator. The other main characters, Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) and  Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) do great job aswell, and give also very interesting personalities to the characters, other being more compassionate and friendly, and the other a harsh and obstinate psychopath.

Unlike many newer war films, Platoon doesn't have much of bloody gore, severed limbs or blood splatter. And tbh, it doesn't need that. It's still extremely brutal and ruthless, could say it's more brutal than Saving Private Ryan.

It's interesting to see Charlie Sheen in a serious role after seeing so many comedies. In many movie ratings Platoon is considered as one of the best war films ever made. Have to agree, I actually liked it more than Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now.

Mr. Nice Guy (1998)

I had a little trouble finding a movie to make a review of, so I decided to review the next film I see on the TV. The next film was a Jackie Chan movie, "Mr. Nice Guy", directed by Sammo Hung. Immediately when the movie began, I knew this would be one of those silly late 90's action flicks. But since I had decided to review it, so be it.

This time there's no need to hide any spoilers, if there was any, so I wrote a bit longer scene-by-scene type of review. For tl:dr -> the last paragraph.

The movie starts when a news reporter Diana (Gabrielle Fitzpatrick) and her colleague manages to record footage of a drug deal between a group of mafia and drug gang members. Although the drug deal goes wrong and the shooting reveals the hiding journalists. Diana escapes with the videotape but gets chased by the crooks. And when she's just about to get caught, she bumps into Jackie (Jackie Chan). We see a few fast paced and some what clever fighting performances by Jackie, and endless amounts of stereotypical "stupid villains", who speak with throaty voice and can never aim nor shoot their guns properly. Jackie helps Diana escape, and it turns out that Jackie is actually a famous TV chef. The crooks recognized him and thus he gets involved with the mess.

The mafia boss Giancarlo (Richard Norton) wants to get his hands on the tape, because otherwise it would reveal his drug businesses. Ofcourse after being chased, Diana is stupid enough to go straight to her home, where she learns that the videotape has been changed with one of Jackies cooking tapes. Meanwhile the villains had interrogated Dianas captured colleague, and so they get to know where she lives. Diana ends up getting caught by the criminal mob.

"I'm the bad guy and you should know that by now!"

Another chasing scene follows as Diana escapes the crooks, again, but now they know Jackie has got the tape, so they try to ambush him while he's doing his TV show. What a surprise, this attempt fails once again and we see yet another fast paced chasing+fighting scene, filled with low-fps slowmotions. This time spiced with horse wagons.

The mafia boss isn't pleased to hear about the failures, after a sequence of some serious over acting and yelling, he punishes his underlings by slapping them to the face with a tie. A F*king TIE, now this guy must be serious! We did see him shooting and punching people before, but now he's using a tie! whew.

Jackie's girlfriend Miki (Miki Lee) gets kidnapped in the previous hassle, so Jackie agrees to make a trade. The trade fails, surprise, and we see a chasing scene once again, with an inexcusable amount of low fps slowmos! This time Jackie chasing the crooks. The kidnappers escape with Miki, but another group returns to pick up Jackie aswell. Jackie beats up the group in an awkward van grappling scene, also causing severe car accidents.

Jackie finds out that Miki is being held in a construction yard. Jackie immediately appears to the right location, it's never explained how he got there, my guess is teleporting. Again Jackie beats up all the gang members in a flashy and actually quite well performed fighting scene. Jackie gets into a tight situation and is forced to surrender.

Mafia boss brings Jackie to his mansion (why?) and beats him up a bit. After Jackie appears unconcious, he orders his men to "take him to the guest house" also known as "execute him by leaving him in an open car and crush it with a giant truck". How convenient. Who would have guessed that this plan isn't Jackie-proof? Jackie hijacks the giant truck and crushes Giancarlos' mansion along with all his sports cars and limousines. Ofcourse Giancarlo also kept the drugs in the mansion, so the police could have evidence to arrest him.

"Who the hell hid explosives inside the ceiling lamp??"

And that was it. It was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be. A silly Hollywood comedy action flick, and nothing more. It does have a few good moments, Jackie Chan doing amazing stunts and fighting, as he usually does in this kind of movies. The rest of the movie is just so poorly put together. Add together the stereotypical and uninteresting villains, mediocre acting, annoying slowmos and jokes that just aren't funny, unless you're heavily drunk. Overall, there are many better and more entertaining Jackie Chan movies to watch.

Lyrics and music

A few days ago I had an interesting conversation with one friend of mine. We mostly talked about some bands we like to listen to, the lyrics of their songs and what kind of live shows they do.

At some point one of my friend's other friend joined us while we were discussing about some band's lyrics. He soon declares that in his opinion the melodies and talented playing are far more important than the lyrics of the songs. Kind of an interesting point of view I must say, but also a bit funny. Atleast we had a nice discussion about it, and he did have a few good points to back up his opinion.

I think it is understandable, kind of, since we were talking about metal music, where you often have to look up the lyrics yourself from the album booklet or from the internet. Because, tbh, most of the time your ears/mind can't extract the words from the vocalist's performance.

Anyways, the funny thing was, that the person I was talking with only knew the names of the songs of a certain artist, but had no idea what the songs were about. I was a bit amazed of this, because I've usually kept the lyrics as one of the main reasons to like or dislike a band/song. I mean, if the lyrics were really something close to utter bs, it immediately decreases my interest towards the band. Ofcourse this is a rather extreme example and it doesn't apply in all cases, but you get the idea. Atleast I would find it a little strange to cheer for a band that praises something in its songs I fully disagree with.

In the end, I think we managed to convince him to take a closer look to the lyrics of the bands. I hope so. Not necessarily memorize all the lyrics, but atleast to get a faint idea what the songs are about.