Catching Up

It's been a while since I stopped in here to talk about what I think of what I've been watching. Let's catch up.

Battleship - I honestly don't know why this movie didn't do better at the box office. I suppose maybe it came out too close to Avengers which was a better movie and which most people chose to see 3, 4 or 10 times instead of seeing anything else. But Battleship is a really decent summer blockbuster movie.

Taylor Kitsch is believable as a fuck-up-turned-hero and while the supporting cast is a mixed bag (yay Jesse Plemons, John Tui, Liam Neeson, Tadanobu Asano; boo Brookly Decker and Rihanna but mostly Rihanna), for a movie based on a board game, they pulled the connection off pretty brilliantly. They found a way to incorporate the grid from the game as well as to keep the fight between a small number of ships and the aliens instead of a full-scale war.

My one problem with the movie is that it's too long by at least 30 minutes. The movie begins with a fairly long sequence of events designed to inform the viewer that Taylor Kitsch is a fuck-up who is so persistent and charming that he manages to win over the daughter of an Admiral and is forced to join the Navy by his brother who's sick of supporting his (hot) loser ass. But if they'd cut out the entire chicken burrito business and started with the soccer game we would have known all of the same things and saved ourselves 15 minutes. Later in the movie there is a long sequence where these spinning alien destructo thingies are fired out of the giant ship and proceed to make a fucking mess out of Hawaii as they take out a Naval base, highways, buildings and generally anything that isn't people. The entire thing was unnecessary as we'd be treated to the spinning destructos doing the exact same business to the USS John Paul Jones toward the end of the movie anyway. With those two cuts alone the movie would have been 20 minutes shorter, lost nothing and played a little crisper.

Length aside, I recommend this as a fun, pretty, explosion-heavy way to spend a couple hours of your life.

Prometheus - Judging this as a singular movie I would say it's well put-together, well acted and decent. But judging it in comparison to its predecessors in the Alien franchise (of which I have only seen Alien and Aliens) it doesn't fare as well.

Ridley Scott's original Alien is a great movie but, in my opinion, it was vastly improved upon by James Cameron when he made Aliens which was compelling, claustrophobic, exciting, scary and loaded to the gills with a "fuck yeah, Ripley!" intensity that kept me on the edge of my seat start to finish. Prometheus is quieter, slower, more build-up, less fight and the result is a movie that looks amazing but didn't stick with me at all. Michael Fassbender was outstanding as David but very few of the other characters got any sort of development and I didn't care about any of them, except maybe the pilot but that's just because Idris Elba can get it.

After watching this movie, all I wanted to do was go home and watch Aliens again to get that "FUCK YEAH, RIPLEY!" feeling that I'd been hoping for going into Prometheus.

This Means War - Why this movie didn't get better reviews is beyond me. It's fun and silly and the chemistry between all three leads is great. In particular I thought Chris Pine and Tom Hardy had AMAZING chemistry with each other. So much chemistry in fact that I think they should be required by law to do 10 movies a year together. And to show how reasonable I can be, they would only have to make out with each other in 1/2 of them.

Since first watching this on demand a couple of weeks ago, I have purchased this movie on DVD and watched if 4 more times. I love it to bits and think you should all watch it immediately.

Saving Hope - Would I be watching this series if Daniel Gillies wasn't on it? No, I would not. Is Daniel Gillies a good enough reason to watch this series? Yes, he is. I don't really care about the ghost in the halls, Erica Durance's relationship or grief issues, the constant lens flares, and the medical cases of the week. But Daniel Gillies looks like he looks and talks like he talks and last week he took off his shirt and had sex in an empty exam room so this show can be as boring as it wants to be and I'll still watch.

Bunheads - Amy Sherman-Palladino has a very distinct style and Gilmore Girls was a perfect representation of that style. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Lauren Graham was what made ASP's dialogue brilliant or that Sutton Foster can't pull it off because neither is true. Lauren Graham is amazing but she wasn't the only thing that made Gilmore Girls a great show. Sutton Foster is a terrific actress and I believe she can handle dialogue written by anyone. The problem is that everything everyone in Bunheads says sounds like something ASP wrote for Lorelai Gilmore but Lorelai Gilmore is nowhere to be found. Bunheads sounds and feels like Gilmore Girls rebooted into Bizzaroland.

I loved Gilmore Girls and I miss it but I don't want to watch another thing that sounds like or tries to be Gilmore Girls. I want to watch another show that has the same wit and heart and feeling that Gilmore Girls had but is a different thing entirely. Bunheads isn't a terrible show but it isn't Gilmore Girls.

It also isn't Dance Academy which is a whole other problem. I've watched a show about ballet students that ended up being perfect and watching this show where the bitchy girl is no Abigail, the free-spirit is no Kat, there's no Sammy at all, and the neurotic girl is no Tara (how disappointing must the situation be if "she's no Tara" is a BAD thing?), just makes me wish that I could Eternally Sunshine myself and rewatch Dance Academy for the first time.

The show is about the dance TEACHER here so I get that it's different but the differentness doesn't negate the inferiority of it. Bunheads isn't a bad show but it's not a great show and as long as it's so similar to shows that were great, I will compare it and it will not measure up.