spoilers ahead.

Toronto – Needing something to do on nice spring Wednesday night, me and some friends decided to venture indoors and watch this movie called ‘300’ thats all the rage right now. In case you have been in North Korea or a cave, you will know this is the latest adaption of Frank Miller’s story and is loosely based on Battle of Thermopylae , where 300 Spartans fought off about thousands of Persians (or as they are now known..Terrorists) in an effort to slow down their advances. I will leave the rest of the battle details for you to wiki up, just like i did.

obviously the movie was very stylized. lots of slow mo scenes, saturated colors, cgi stuff. it was a more colorful version of sin city in that regard, i thought it was all a pretty nice touch. there were a lot of titties in this movie, and my friend pointed out the people who made the movies put in a bunch of female titties to counter the fact that we will be spending a better part of 90 minutes watching a bunch of men fighting while wearing speedos. anyways, yeah story starts out with an introduction to our hero, king leonsis or something. we learn that spartans are bred to fight and it shows a bit of his training, which involves killing a wolf and wearing it as a fur coat. that actually made him the king. i feel pity for the crappy spartans who could only kill a squirrel or a fish, they’d probably be made fun of a lot.

we fast forward a bit to see that the persians were offering some kind of plea bargain to the spartans, only for the king to utter what is probably the best movie line of the year “THIS IS SPARTA!!!” , and then he kicked the Persians into the well, which as a friend pointed out..would only contaminate their water system, so they were doomed from the beginning. the king then climbs a mountain to go see the oracles, who ask some drugged up naked chick (NOT played by lindsay lohan, surprisingly) for advice. some stuff happens, and the they go to fight. about an hour later, they all die, the movie ends.

this was a pretty enjoyable movie, its probably not one you can watch more then once. most of the movie was quite predictable, but chances are you only went to see it to see fighting in slow mo, and special effects. if u went to see it for that, you are probably satisfied. the dialog isn’t that strong, and all the best lines were already shown in the trailers. the persian king wasn’t really that intimidating an enemy either, as he looked like a cross between kareem abdul jabbar, goro from mortal kombat, and mr. t with piercings.

3.5 / 5

Finally watched Rocky Balboa on Friday. This was the first Stallone movie I have seen since Demolition Man, so it has been awhile since I have seen Stallone in action. Man this dude old. but he built. I always thought boxing was a big money making business, but obviously I was wrong, as Rocky seems to be just doing okay, living in what appears to be a ghetto and running some not so nice restaurant. He must of spent all his earnings on coke. I am guessing he really misses Adrian, and thus he picks up some chick working at bar who has tupac for a kid. Don’t really understand that subplot. He also has a not so good relationship with his son, who doesn’t want to live in his dad’s shadow. Obviously this son doesn’t know he can absorb other peoples super powers and will blow up new york in a matter of months.

so rockys watching some simulated fight on ESPN and decides he wants to box again. first of all, i don’t think boxing is relevant enough so that a simulated fight would actually appear on the news, second of all, if i was to poll 1000 senior citizens, i think fighting a bad ass black man would be the last thing on their mind. bingo ..yes. boxing..no. unbelievability aside, rocky starts training, and we hit a classic montage. montages are awesome, so points for this section. somehow, because he is about to box, his son decides to quit his job as a corporate lackey and become a cheerleader for his dad. no real reasoning behind this action.

after what appeared to be about four hours of buildup, we get to the fight, which was a fairly well done. and then after the fight ends, that was pretty much the ending. i guess this movie was okay. i almost fell asleep a few times during the buildup about how miserable rocky’s life has become. but really, what kind of message is this? rocky is sending a message that fighting will solve all your problems, and that isn’t a message we want to send to the youth of america.

so..

+1 for montage and constantly playing the rocky theme
-1 for long buildup
+1 for well shot fight scene
-1 for unbelievable fight (seriously..ten rounds?)
-1 for weird subplots that go nowhere
+1 for unintentional comedy
so

2.5/5 i guess

Hard to sum up this year in movies. I have yet to see Casino Royale, but I heard it is quite good. Overall, I saw 13 movies this year, which included one I downloaded and 2 I saw on the airplane. So basically, I have no legs to stand on when reviewing the entire year in movies. But this is my blog. HAHAHA.

I have listed the movies I liked in reverese chronological order, from the movie I disliked the most to the movie I liked the most.

13. Pirates of the Caribbean 2 – I don’t care how much money this movie made. It was a piece of crap. I wanted to leave the theatre halfway thru, I have never sat thru a movie that long where nothing really happens. Sure Johnny Depp is pretty good as captain whatever, but really, aside from a big krakon, this movie brought nothing to new to the table and the movie felt stale after about 25 minutes. Huge disappointment.

12. X3 – Seeing how Brett Ratner directed, I was predispose to this movie sucking, which it kinda did. While it wasn’t a complete Joel Schumacher Batman butcher job, Ratner pretty much destroyed all of Bryan Singers work. Where was nightcrawler? Granted there was a couple cool scenes, but for a semi conclusion to what was a set of movies, this was highly disappointing. Was it me, or did that asian porcupine dude have the worse power ever? what was with the tranny prince lookalike and the clapping thing, and why did all the ‘bad’ mutants look like they just came out of an industrial goth club?

11. The Sentinel – lets see..Michael Douglas has an affair, and gets in trouble. Keifer Sutherland hunts someone down and takes no shit from anyone. Where oh where have we seen these before. Despite much nostalgia watching Michael Douglas squirm after doing something bad, this movie was somewhat generic and predictable. I mean, its not a horrible movie, but its a movie you’d watch and tv and be like..that ain’t too bad. Eva Longoria is in it too, but she doesn’t really do much, either in acting or eye candy.

10. Cars – Pixars’s ode to Americana and the Midwest. This movie was pleasant, and I guess it can’t hurt to cater to the Nascar crowd, since thats about half of America. The movie seems to want to return to the good ole days of Americana in the 60s where life was simple, people went to diners, drive-ins and did not know terms like racism or sexism because those things were okay back then. Probably the worse Pixar movie yet.

9. 16 Blocks – Bruce Willis plays a grizzled veteran cop who has seen too much in his day. Sounds like every Bruce Willis movie. This movie gets bonus points for being filmed in Toronto. Its always fun to try and figure out what street they were filming it on. Mos Def did a good job in this movie, and is probably one of the top rapper-actors out there. LL Cool J is an okay rapper actor too, but he plays the same role in every movie, as does that guy who owns the rottweilers. I guess ice cube was in Three Kings, and that was good. Worse rapper-actor out there is probably Shaq.

8. Borat – Most people will probably have it higher, but I have seen both the UK and US series of Ali-G, so the Borat character is pretty familiar to me. There are a lot of laugh out loud scenes, but the movie loses so much steam after the hotel scene, and its more or less the same schtick over and over again. The movie is based on shock value, so I don’t think this movie will age well, specially since most of the stuff is only funny the first time around.

7. Nacho Libre – Obviously, this is a Jack Black movie, but I thought it was hilarious.

6. Superman Returns – The 3D scenes were kinda lame, but this was a pretty well constructed movie. Kevin Spacey overacts some scenes, but he pretty much tries to chew up any movie he has been in since American Beauty. Kate Bosworth looks a hell of a lot like the girl from Prison Break. The airplane scene was spectacular, and I thought the movie was pretty solid.

5. V for Vendetta – I actually don’t really remember much of this movie, but I enjoyed it. Anything with sai’s is pretty damn cool. I didn’t really think knife-time was that cool, but this movie reminded me a lot of equilibrium, actually. That was a decent movie too.

4. She’s The Man – Saw this on a flight to Edmonton (or back). I thought it was pretty funny, I think it is loosely based on Shakespeare. It seems pretty lame to put a teeny bopper movie this high, but I laughed pretty hard at several scenes.

3. Mission Impossible III – Despite the fact that he is a crazy midget and married Katie Holmes (who I thought was hot in Dawsons Creek..and really, how many people saw the gift cos they heard she had a topless scene?….i err…didnt) …. tom cruise can make an okay movie occasionally. I liked collateral and last samurai. i didnt watch war of the worlds and can’t really watch spielberg movies ever since someone pointed out that spielberg always films close up shots where the actor looks away from the camera…its just too distracting now and could pretty much be turned into a drinking game. Anyways, this was a good movie, Phillip Seymour Hoffman was a great bad guy.

2. Brick – Had no idea what this movie was about going in, but man was this an awesome movie. Turns out its a film noir that takes place in the high school world. Hard to explain. go watch.

1. The Departed – Fantastic movie, I am sure everyone who has seen it enjoyed it and should win many awards come Oscar time. The Chinese version still had a better ending and death scenes though.