::A Geek in Korea::

More from Mst3k Haiku on Tumblr

Some friends of mine bought tickets to the 3D version of Pocahontas, who Dances with Wolves in Ferngully and is also the Last Samurai Avatar that was showing at a theater in town. They made the reservations a few days in advance, guaranteeing a good ticket for us. I’m too lazy to get to a theater to see a movie about blue cat people, but if someone else does the work I was willing to go see it with them. That being said, I’m glad I went. That movie in particular was only really worth seeing projected in 3D in a theater. It was beautiful, well made, and stylistically cool, despite starring giant furries. If I was a kid today, this is the movie that would make me a fanboy for science fiction.

The story was a well done take on something you’ve seen half a dozen times. How they packaged the story, the scenery of the world was presented in a novel manner thanks to the special effects and 3d. You weren’t there for the story, but the spectacle of it all. The bomb dropping left and right in the battles were heavy handed metaphors, but they blew up and looked so pretty! I had a hard time remembering that some it CGI some of the time, which is  rare. In 20 years time, when all movies look like this and are in 3D, people will laugh at how bad this movie is, but this is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and that’s worth seeing in the theater.

I felt that the most interesting part of the entire premise was the technology they absolutely skipped right past. There was a vat grown creature linked to another that could somehow connect via a giant body coffin, allowing one wheelchair bound marine to become a capable furry cat guy. That was the entire premise of it being called “Avatar”. They don’t explain why this is possible, but the entire story builds off the idea that people infiltrate another society by wearing their bodies, learn their culture, then exploit their sympathies to gain their resources. Sometimes I feel that I am training people to do exactly that as a teacher. Not only that, but the entire planet had a symbiotic relationship, and creatures could control each other by linking minds. That was a fascinating concept.

The whole “got to get the resources that happen to be in a inconvenient place” aspect was only there to create the conflict. Any society with the level of technology the humans displayed would have been able to extract the resources without disrupting or alerting the alien culture to their presence. I have to give credit to having the balls to call a plot device “unobtainium”. Why didn’t they just call it “MacGuffinaium” instead.

The idea of wearing someone else, being able to replace your body with another, the idea of leaving yourself and acting remotely? All of that has been done, and better, by Dollhouse. While I was coming home on the subway, I watched the third to last episode of that stellar program (Title: Getting Closer). Avatar was gorgeous, with lots of spectacle, but the only thing that floored me, or made me say, “OH MY GOD!” in public today was the mind blowing twists on Dollhouse this episode. It doesn’t take 3D or blue cats to make me happy. All it takes is a well written and executed story with a good twist or two.

Holy shit, Dollhouse is being cancelled. There are only two episodes left, but it’s going out on top! I haven’t seen a show that has warped my mind as much as this one has for a long time. The twists in Dollhouse make Battlestar Galactica’s lame ending all that more infuriating. BSG had a stronger, longer run, but absolutely fell apart at the end. The poor ending made me think the less of the entire show for all the broken promises. You can’t have “…and they have a plan” in the credits for 4 seasons and not pay it off! The more you learn about “The Plan”, the more you want to punch all the Cylons in the face for being idiots. The mythology of BSG gets lessened the more you find out about the motivations of the characters. Up until the end of the show, this wasn’t true.

Dollhouse might have taken a few episodes to find its legs, but damn it kicks like a mule. Joss Whedon blew me away this past episode. Damn I’m going to miss it when it is gone, but at least it will go out telling a good story.

Part 1

This is a comedic, through, and well made video review of the atrocious Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Watch the other six parts too. Even this 70 minute review isn’t enough to purge my hatred of that movie. George Lucas might have had some laughs on The Daily Show saying, “It is a work of fiction. Like it or dislike it. It doesn’t matter,” which is true, but his movie is still shitty.

Welcome to the insanity of “The Room”. I heard about this movie MONTHS ago from the guys at Stop Podcasting Yourself. First in October , then again later in December, they discussed this legendary bad movie in passing. I had no idea what I was missing by not following up on this tip. I wish I had seen this terribad movie earlier. The Room is a new cult film that’s legend is spreading virally through the Internet. It’s terrible, but strangely entertaining. It’s the Manos: The Hands of Fate for the Internet age.

IFC says of Tommy Wiseau, who financed, wrote, directed, produced, and starred in of The Room in their primer: “When Wiseau speaks in “The Room,” he sounds like Borat trying to do an impression of Christopher Walken playing a mental patient.”

It’s true! Tommy Wiseau’s accent is as inscrutable as it is indecipherable. If it was a better actor doing a character, you’d laugh at how absurd it sounds. Watching Tommy Wiseau, his creepy laugh, his weird greetings, his terrible acting, you know he is giving it everything he’s got, which makes it all the more tragic and enjoyable to see when it comes crashing down into a total cinematic disaster.

You simply become mesmerized by everything being so bad, but so hilariously good at the same time.  The movie is never actually good, but it’s never bad enough to make you look away. It’s poorly made in every possible way, but you know it’s made with a naive passion that makes it watchable despite its flaws.

While I heard about this movie months ago, I only took the dive to finally watch it after the Rifftrax guys did their take on it. They grew obsessed with this B-movie disaster and decided to do their commentary despite the nudity and frequent *awful* sex love scenes. This is a change of pace for Rifftrax, as they have been doing bad big budget movies for so long, watching them tackle a B-movie cult classic seems like a new beginning.

I chuckled quite a few times, but the movie is already laugh out loud bad already. I kept greeting everyone like “Johnny” in the film for a few hours afterwards. I think this is a movie bad enough to require a few more times, and it’s rare that any movie I’ve seen with a Rifftrax holds up to repeat viewings. I’m usually “laughed out” for a while. There is a deep grain of comedy here.

This sort of niche humor gets under my skin and I’d love to be able to share it with someone else “in the know” but my wife wouldn’t sit through a movie that bad without Korean subtitles. For anyone else that wants to get started, here is a comprehensive guide to the movie.

Amazingly though, The Room does have a Korean connection. Tommy Wiseau stated that he got the rumored $6 million it cost to make this movie by importing leather jackets from Korea. Outstanding.

I haven’t been able to watch as many movies as I’d like for the past few weeks, with my computer being out of commission, making Rifftrax inaccessible for the movie I had in mind. I made up for it with a vengence this weekend, watching “Twilight” and getting the accompanying Rifftrax synced up. The only jokes I had heard about Twilight was about glitter paint and pale dudes, so I had no idea what I was in for when I started.

What the hell America? Why was this popular? This movie has made $379,912,947 in worldwide box office releases according to Wikipedia! There is a limit to the number of times this lady saw the movie, so it couldn’t be all her cash propping up that total. I know that there was a rough time where everyone was frazzled about the 2008 election campaign, but that still doesn’t excuse this movie from making money. The Rifftrax was good to listen to, as it soothed the pain somewhat, but I think the movie left me so shellshocked that I was numb to all laughter and goodness. For me, the scene where the PTSD set in was the scene with the vampires (who glitter, and are “deer eating vegetarians”) play baseball and growl at each other. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

As bad as Twilight is, the sequel sounds around twenty times worse.

I was left so disturbed by how poor the entire movie was that I woke my wife up and helped her get ready to go out. We had plans to visit the Daejeon Art Museum in the afternoon. It was both for exercise and to see something different for a change. We walked across town in the cold/rain waiting for it to start coming down. The art museum was pretty interesting. It wasn’t nearly as big as the European art museums, or the museum we visited in Seoul, but it was a nice walk, and it was cheap to get in.

We decided to see “Monsters vs. Aliens” at a theater on the way back to kill some time. My wife and I haven’t been to a movie for a while, and it was the only thing of any interest to the both of us. I thought it was going to be projected in 3D, but we saw a standard version of the film. The movie’s voice cast was excellent and hilarious. The animation was good, but all the characters seemed perfectly created to sell toys.

“It was good, but not Wall-E good,” my wife said. The story was a standard kid friendly trope with a few clever jokes now and again. I particularly liked Stephen Colbert and Seth Rogan’s performances. The Close Encounters of the Third kind gag had me laughing. There are worse things you could see, like Twilight. Don’t see Twilight unless you have a thing for glitter paint and pale dudes. It’s terrible.

Dr. Tobias Funkë as Dr. Manhattan

I went to see Watchmen on its opening night. I was a big fan of the comic book, so seeing it rendered so well on the screen was a real treat. I think it might have the best credit sequence I’ve ever seen put to film. It set the tone so well for the alternate history presented. The changes they made were for the best. The ending was much more cohesive compared to the graphic novel. I also thought that the “Tales of the Black Freighter” was best moved to a DVD extra anyway, so I didn’t miss it being excluded from the film at all.

I don’t know if I would have been able to follow the movie the entire way though if I hadn’t been familiar with the comic. It is brutal to watch, but I think it did the material justice. If it gets more people reading graphic novels, adaptations like this are welcome. It’s not suitable for children, or people that can’t handle full male nudity, so I’d avoid seeing it with a group of teens.

My wife and I are polar opposites when it comes to media spoilers. I avoid spoiler materials for nearly everything I can. When I read a review I get annoyed if there was something given away.  If I watch a television, I’d rather approach it fresh and watch it attentively, then follow up on anything I am unclear about by reviewing the material while reading Televisionwithoutpity reviews. I’m also past the age where I need to find out details of all the things I watch before they come out. I’ll wait for it to be delivered to me and see what is there.

Watching something for the first time should be a new, uninterrupted experience. The most interesting part of media is the thrill of self-discovery, and when something is spoiled, you are robbed of that.  Something spoiled is always something “less than” the reward of finding out something on your own. You can rewatch something and get something out of materials, but you’ll never have that first time satisfaction of getting through materials on your own. Rewatching is never better than going in fresh in my opnion.

My wife, on the other hand, hates surprises. She’ll ask me to tell me the entire plot of any movie I watch, regardless of when she starts watching it. I was always told it was bad manners growing up to tell people what was happening next in a movie.  She’ll ask me, “What happens next?” while we’re watching a movie all the time. This isn’t a speculative question as if she was trying to see how I was thinking the story would turn out. She really wants me to tell her everything so she doesn’t get surprised. This is occasionally impossible, because I won’t know, having kept myself free from spoilers.

It’s not just movies and television ruined by spoilers. I had the big twist in one of the Harry Potter books spoiled. Video games are also subject to being ruined. I think spoilers were one of the reasons why Super Smash Brothers Brawl didn’t wow me as much as I thought it would. The game is great, but it didn’t live up to my expectations due to all the massive spoilers I had read.

The hype for that game included a website that detailed, day by day, all the features of the game. When the game was pushed back repeatedly, they got into the minutea of characters and revealed nearly every secret possible. At the time, the hype was unavoidable, and it was a very new thing to see a game’s development being so upfront about what they were attempting to do. It was also fun to speculate one what else might be locked away to find. When all the secrets and spoilers were finally uncovered, well before I got the game, I didn’t have anything else left to find. One of the best parts of Melee was unlocking a new character and thinking it was amazing there could still be things left to discover. When I got the last character in Brawl, I kind of just felt “finished”. I play it every once in a while, but it’s not the same.

Don’t spoil me, okay?

Rifftrax available to ease the pain.

I had time today to do whatever I wanted in the house. I was still running errands and filling requests for my wife, who got the urge to eat steamed mandoo and required me to run off to the supermarket to get some for her, but other than that, I was free to do whatever I wanted. I saw that the newest Rifftrax happened to be The Dark Knight, and that the same movie had been added to our IPTV service to watch.  I called in my favor for being “on call” all day for her and used her credit card to purchase the track.

A few minutes later, we got a call from the card company, who assumed that the purchase was fraud because it was international and locked down her card. She explained that it was indeed a purchase on the Internet and that it was intentional. However, due to the exchange rate, we got hosed. 6,000 won for one humorous audio commentary? I had no idea it was going to cost almost the same as a movie ticket for the commentary. That’s on top of renting it for the IPTV service. All told it was the same as going to the movie theater and paying for a ticket to a movie I had already seen. Ouch. The weak Korean won really sucks.

Anyway, most of the day was spent on watching that rather long movie. I’ve seen it before, so it wasn’t like it was a surprise that they made fun of Batman’s ridiculous voice or how Gordon was silent during the entire chase scene to keep that reveal a secret. They slammed Maggie Gyllenhaal a few times, but it wasn’t anything new. My coworker did the same thing after he saw the movie.

While I really like Rifftrax, and will watch a movie I’d never ever think about viewing if they are on board, I was more interested in the movie than their comments about the movie. That is not a very good sign. While I was entertained by both the movie and their comments, they didn’t make me laugh out loud.  I haven’t watched The Dark Knight compulsively. I’ve seen it twice. I didn’t walk out of the theater screaming “This deserves riffing,”  like I did with 300, at any rate.  I enjoyed the movie a lot on both screenings, Rifftrax or no. It’s not the greatest movie, and they fine in mocking the high praise it gets on the Internet, but it’s a good comic book movie, and those are in short supply.

If you’ve seen The Dark Knight a few times and would like to hear some smartasses making fun of it, give it a listen.

My wife and I met up with some friends to see the latest 007 film, Quantum of Solice. I’m lucky to have seen the remake of Casino Royale with Daniel Craig Rifftrax’d in the past few months. Lucky because without seeing it I wouldn’t have remembered the lead up to most of this movie. I remembered some woman stealing something, a lot of really boring poker, and some parkour. Oh, and Bond’s blonde now.

Bond movies usually stand alone pretty well, but this one was much more of a sequel than the previous incarnations of the series. He’s still talking about his love interest from the last film in this one, trying to get revenge for her death…I think. She must have died, because she wasn’t in this movie. I sort of fell asleep the last time I watched Casino Royale. I liked it any everything, but extended gambling scenes in movies bore me.

The movie starts off like a Bourne movie, with brutal fights, a few chases in European locales, and lots of shakey-cam fighting. I like Daniel Craig’s Bond fighting style. It’s rough, tough, inspired, and somewhat bullheaded. The jumping around on rooftops was back, but it wasn’t nearly as ridiculous as the construction site parkour stuff in Casino Royale.

This Bond movie is trying to break from tradition, using an overarching story that spans multiple movies to expand the franchise. However, when you don’t see the resolution of the whole story, running through the tropes of a Bond film just feels like an exercise. Each story still contains has a bad guy that he stops along the way, has an evil lair that explodes, and has multiple women for him to hook up with along the way. The overarching plot line of the movie was much more interesting than the details of this particular movie’s villain however.

I liked this movie’s action, and I liked him trying to uncover the villain’s plot. The fights had style. The villain himself, the goal of his organization, and the ridiculous conspiracy involved in covering it up was underwhelming. You expected something a little bigger than what they delivered. The final third of the movie was more centered on a secondary character’s drive for revenge than Bond himself. There were parallels, but it didn’t work that well for me.

While it’s okay for a movie to develop other characters, the ONLY resonance the ending had was for a Bond girl to get revenge, then immediately to go back to a whimpering side kick in the VERY NEXT SCENE. The final scene taking place at some remote villain’s lair and the entire ending fell flat for me. It just didn’t make a lot of sense, and didn’t seem as grounded as the rest of the movie did. If anything, the ending of this movie was TOO Bond cliche, and not all that satisfying for the middle of a trilogy.

I’d recommend seeing this movie, but it’s not really a complete stand-alone film in any sense. It doesn’t push any boundary set by Casino Royale, and doesn’t complete the story it started without a sequel. It’s still better than anything Pierce Brosnan did as Bond post-Goldeneye. If you watched this movie back-to-back-to-back with it’s eventual sequel on some cable night marathon, it would stand up much better. It’s not nearly as good as it could have been.