Today's movies, and other such things...

There's a few things to talk about today, first, Melissa and I went to see The Strangers, then came home to watch The Orphanage. Also, I reset the Peek-a-Boo post code so that my blog works correctly in Internet Explorer.


The Strangers

Melissa and I went to see The Strangers tonight. It's really sad when you walk into a movie with low expectation and still find yourself deeply disappointed.

Bryan Bertino's first film (both as a writer and as a director) shows he has potential, but this movie seems to be trying too hard. First, this movie is built on the premise that it's "based on a true story," but it's not, and that becomes clear when at the beginning of the movie, an announcer reads that the film is "Based on a true story," and then proceeds to tell us what those events were. If you really need to explain the event you've based your movie on, it probably didn't happen.

After we're told about these 'real events', we're treated to a series of very poor establishing shots, and we're shown that they didn't really feel it was necessary to invest in steadycam, I assume because they're too good for it.

Once we finally get ourselves established, we're treated to a long series of fairly predictable events, and finally the movie ends, and we're re-shown footage we saw at the beginning, which told us how it would end.

On that note, I'm not sure I understand why this has become so common, this trend that we're given the ending at the beginning of the movie. In a few situations, it makes sense, it can be pulled off, but in this case, all they managed to do was ruin the ending. It doesn't help that they seem to do this in an attempt to try and cement this 'true events' thing into your head at the outset.

Overall, I feel this one was really unfortunate, and I'm glad I didn't have to pay to see it. (Ahh, Fandango Codes!)


El Orfanato

The Orphanage (El Orfanato) is a Spanish language film from Spain, which has already taken a slew of awards. It's produced by the great Guiellermo del Toro, who's virtues I've extolled previously for films like Pan's Labyrinth, however, I will be talking about something that makes me very sad involving Mr. del Toro.

What we're talking about is a brilliant horror / thriller. The story is fairly well written, and acting is brilliant. There's really no reason not to see this movie. You might not be a big fan of reading subtitles, but this film is worth it.

Because I need to find fault with everything, thus enabling me to feel vastly superior to everyone and everything, there are a few minor nitpicks that I had with this.

Nitpick the first: The 'twist' in this movie is a little predictable. It's the sort of thing that you see and think, duh, and then it takes the rest of the movie for them to finally confirm it.

Nitpick the second: There is a good deal of assumption made by the main character at the end, when she's following clues around. This one is hard to explain without spoiling the film, which I'm trying hard not to do these days when reviewing them on the fly like this. Basically, there is a point at the end where you wonder how she's drawing the conclusion that she is, as if the decision the character has made seems like the most natural and basic of options possible, and in a film that has a good deal of basis in the supernatural, it seems a bit naive to take so much for granted.

However, I do not want this to steer you away from this movie. It's a great movie, and one that I'd really call a must see.


The Hobbit 2

Penny Arcade does a decent job explaining how I feel on this one.

The Hobbit 2. I was thrilled when I heard about the Lord of the Rings series, and when they announced The Hobbit, I was tickled, as it were, and when they yanked Peter Jackson from it and put Guillermo del Toro on the project, I thought for sure it would be an overall winner for sure.

Then I heard that they wanted to release a second "The Hobbit" movie in the hopes of 'bridging the gap' between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. While there is a lot of explanation about the things that happened between the two, there is no story that was actually written, and when you start inventing tales of the Middle Eearth, you're going too far. We're talking about over-priced fan-fiction (read that as greedy greedy greedy greedy!).


Finally...

I've decided to pull the peek-a-boo post code so that it would work properly in Internet Explorer.

I checked out WordPress, and while there are some freaking amazing features over there, there's enough things that I can do (mobile / email / photo / video blogging) that I can't bring myself to switch. I'll be watching though.... there might come a time when it would make sense to head that way, but I still have a lot of faith that blogger will pull through.


Good night... I'm exhausted!