Up

Review for the Kiddies

Up is a fantastic, exciting voyage to South America! With a magic flying house, grouchy grandpa-type Carl Fredricksen and his little buddy Russell explore the jungle, meet a funny talking dog, and save a giant bird from a crazy old man in a zepplin! Featuring lots of laughs and some surprisingly tense action, Up isn't for super-young kids, but any child over 5 will have a whole flying house full of fun!

Review for Grownups

Up spends its first 20 minutes or so grinding away at its protagonist's life so savagely that it may reduce you to tears. Carl marries his childhood sweetheart, and in short cinematic order their lives rush by. Unable to have the children they desire, Carl and his wife Ellie pin their dreams on an eventual voyage to Venezuela, one she does not live to see. Crushed and alone, Carl spends all day in his house, talking to his dead wife while a heartless and marginalizing city grows up around him. Eventually, he is committed to a home, and realizing he has nothing to lose in death, flies his house on the voyage his dead wife always wanted to take. Carl's flying house and the film's other aeronautic hijinks show more than a passing Hayao Miyazaki inspiration, which is to be expected due to his close relationship with Pixar exec John Lasseter.

Carl is accompanied on his trek by Russell, a boyscout whose enthusiasm for nature is motivated by the love of a father who has long since abandoned him. The villain of the film is Carl's boyhood hero, a man so lonely and obsessed that he seems less genuinely evil and more completely pitiable. Behind most of the film, these undertones of losing people and ideas we love can be felt in how the characters act and what they do. The whole movie is built on foundations of sorrow.

You might think this would make Up a sad movie, and it does, but it also makes its many happy moments stand out that much more clearly. The movie draws strong, heartfelt performances from all the members of its talented cast, and had, to me, no slip-ups on its way. And don't worry: if you've seen the short film The Ark, and about halfway through Up you start to worry it'll end the same way- it doesn't. You can relax. Unlike Pixar's other movies, Up probably won't have a lot of commercial visibility. There will be some product tie-ins, but many companies have already publicly shied from the film. The reason is pretty obvious; ageism is an established thing in movies and just because Pixar rose above it doesn't mean companies will.

In short: Up is a moving, sophisticated film that will appeal to adults and children on totally different levels and shines above other kids cinema on the market as a complex narrative on human feelings and behavior.

9/10

Galaxis

It's a tried and true formula for science fiction success: create an exciting sci-fi universe, show us some teasey glimpses of it, then send the characters to Earth before you run out of money. If the alien warrior heroes befriend some scrappy Earthlings when they arrive, so be it. Time Guardian did this, Spaced Invaders did it, and even the Masters of the Universe movie featured Dolph Lundgren's He-Man befriending a not-yet-scary-thin (and consequentially much prettier) Courtney Cox at prom somewhere in the Midwest. And let's not forget Jesse Ventura's Abraxis, the movie Lifetime would have made if it were staffed by Jack Kirby and Jim Starlin.

Galaxis (not to be confused with Galaxina, a z-budget space western about a sexy robot who fails at stealing Barbarella's thunder) tells a similar tale. Brigitte Nielson plays Ladera, a space gladiator who subscribes to the wear-bikinis-to-battle school of movie logic. Ladera is looking for a magic crystal, which she must find before Richard Moll does. And guess where she looks?

Squirted out in the woeful middle of the hateful 90s, Galaxis is a cheap pastiche of better movies that came before. There's a scene where bad guys rampage through a police station Terminator style, there's a steel-girder showdown that looks stolen from Darkman, and the whole "evil wizard jacks up the innocent for magic crystals" angle has been done to death, most notably in the underappreciated Dark Crystal. It goes without saying that Galaxis achieves its ripoffery with a budget that would disappoint Sam Raimi (who happens to be in the film). The result is rather like watching cosplayers act out a better film, and not succeeding very well.

I will be the first to admit that I like bad movies. I have personally watched Jean-Claude Van Damme's stunt double kick a terminally ill Raul Julia into a wall in Street Fighter over 7 times. I watched Category 7 and liked it so much that I nearly cried when my fiance wouldn't let me buy Category 6. Heck, I actually bought Magic Sword under the mistaken belief that it was The Sword and the Sorcerer. But believe this battle-hardened fan of cinema crap, there is nothing worthwhile about Galaxis. It's dull, ineffectual, and lacks the infectious charm that has saved so many awful movies.

It's just bad.

2/10

Inkheart

I just recently watched Inkheart with some friends and was surprised that behind the corniness, and sub par acting, there was actually a decent story underneath.

Inkheart stars Brendan Fraiser, the current cheeseball fantasy/adventure actor that gets all of these roles. Basically Brendan's character "Mo" is a silver tongue, which means he can read a fictional book and make the stuff in the book actually happen. This being the setting for the film, lays the ground work for a slightly different twist on the heroic save the world/girl genre.

All in all, Inkheart is definitely a movie that the kids will enjoy, and if you can get past the corniness of it then you will actually enjoy watching the film. 6/10







Inkheart

Twilight

Twilight is a movie based on a book in the "Twilight" series.  It's the first story in a four part list.  I didn't think I was going to like this movie as it seemed to appeal mainly to teenagers and romance enthusiasts from the previews and from what I've heard.  The movie surprised me.

I actually liked it and I was interested in it the whole time.  I can't say if the adoption from book to movie is any good because I never read the book but the movie was well done.  The special effects of the vampires powers were well done, and the way the vampires were portrayed was also well done.  Everyone has a different take on the vampires and I liked the approach they used.

The romance piece of the movie was definitely the center of the story but it didn't soak up every ounce of the other aspects so I respected that.  If you don't normally like romance movies (like me) then you still should give this one a chance.  7/10

Sword Master (NES)

Did you like the combat in the second Legend of Zelda? If the answer is yes, you're sick. But the good news is, there's a game for you anyhow, Sword Master.

The epic of Sword Master is pretty familiar: knight meets girl, knight loses girl to evil magician, knight follows girl while transforming into a wizard. The game has a nice low-fantasy Golden Axe vibe to it, but suffers in the gameplay department. The hero (let's just call him the Sword Master) can only walk right, Mario 1 style, and moves like a real knight in shining armor- kind of awkwardly. Fortunately, you can hack in all different directions with your sword, which is important since evil comes from everywhere to kill you. Spiders drop from trees, bats fly right at your head, and wolves go for your junk almost constantly. The game gets truly frustrating when ranged enemies show up, who can blast you to atoms before you get close enough to put them down, and on a few occasions when you have to make tough jumps (the Sword Master has no momentum or air control).

Combat can be pretty fun. You juke in and out, performing different sword swings and trying to line your shield up with enemy attacks. Some attacks are too heavy to block, and a few should be eaten for the sake of sticking in the fight. Fights with other sword-and-shield enemies play a lot like a fighting game, until the projectile enemies come out.

Worth noting: your dude can turn into a wizard. You should only do this in select boss fights, because the wizard form can dish out good ranged damage, but is weak on the offense.

Sword Master looks and sounds fantastic for an NES game. There's parallax backgrounds, decent music, and many characters have sampled grunts and yells when they attack (the hero sounds like he's swearing). But the pretty veneer can't disguise a brutal game. Everything is faster than you, most enemies have more health than you can ever manage, and any environments other than flat paths are nearly impossible to navigate without memorization. The first time you play this, you'll probably die harder than Marley the comically misbehaving dog before you even get through the first level. That said, I have beaten the game, so I know it can be done, and you feel pretty awesome once you do. A lot of it is luck- getting a random health potion drop mid-level can make all the difference.

To game dorks: I know there's an experience point mechanic that relates to the Wizard form and your HP and stuff, but it never seemed to help or hinder me much. So I didn't talk about it.

6/10 (7/10 if you are really patient)

D-War: You Didn't Miss Much

If you're anything like me, you like to spend time on the internet looking at movie trailers. These trailers are usually better than the movies they advertise. For instance, the Watchmen trailer made Watchmen look like a movie where stuff happens, and the Crash trailer made Crash look like a movie that contained acting.

One trailer that may have jumped out at you while you were trying to tune out your ex-girlfriend yelling at you was the trailer for D-War (short for Dragon War), a Korean-backed American Daikaiju movie where dead Korean ninjas reincarnate as the cast of Friends and have to help the army battle a giant snake. If you're like me, you probably thought it looked totally sweet, and years later, after the movie was released, you bought it rented it checked it out from the library had your fiancé check it out from the library.

First the good: there are fifteen solid minutes of totally sweet actual dragon war in this film. They are right in the middle. Highlights include a bunch of knights on velociraptors attacking the police and the pilot of an Apache shooting out the window at dragons with a Detective Special. Stuff explodes in a mighty, yet thoroughly PG-13 spectacle of violence and awesomeness.

Now the bad: the other 70 minutes or so consist of a bunch of nobody yuppie actors blanding their way through the same 5 scenes over and over. Magic reincarnated ninja guy saves girl from giant snake, takes her to see disposable cast member, hugs her platonically, giant snake shows up and wrecks stuff. Lather, rinse, repeat. When the good giant snake shows up (there's a good one, I guess) things become even messier because the giant snakes both basically look alike and you don't know who to root for.

What's ironic here is that the creators of this film felt the need to come to America to make a really, really Asian film. Giant monster cinema is bigger there than it is here, and the Power-Rangers bad guy villains fighting the army would have fit right into a Toho film. Even the cinematography feels more like Asian than American cinema. But the Americanization of the film, complete with a Western cast, makes this movie feel not like the Daikaiju epic it was meant to be, but like an American knockoff. It's an old tradition that Hollywood doesn't trust viewers to follow a movie with foreign heroes (see U-571) but it's sad to see foreign filmmakers come to America and make the same mistake. Combine vague Hollywood ethnocentrism with a mostly dull movie, and you'll realize it's no surprise you missed D-War actually coming out.