OK.....
I'll just skip the excuses of why I don't update this anymore, and just get right to my review of the most anticipated movies for me in a long time...
I became a 9 year old again today, beaming from ear to ear looking forward to everything that this movie had in store for me, then the trailers began.
Trailer 1: Jack The Giant Killer
It's the 1st I've heard of this movie, so I'll look up more before getting to deep, but my first thought was that Hollywood has no more stories of their own until......
Trailer 2: Die Hard whatever
I'm worn out of Die Hard movies. I don't hate any of them, even the last one, but this amount of sequels is feeling more like Friday The 13th style of "punch it out, make some money" format that I am beginning to loath.
Trailer 3: Man Of Steel
This was one of the 4 reasons I went to see the movie. once it was over, I was so disapointed. I believed that I was seeing a new trailer, what I saw was the same trailer I had seen just a week earlier on YouTube. The trailer itself was ok, nothing mind blowing. It left a few questions unanswered, like who was the villain (I knew before the trailer but if I knew little, I was told nothing). It didn't want me to kick the door in to see the movie.
Special preview: Star Trek
Another reason for this viewing. The opening 9 minutes of the next Star Trek Movie. I will say that in 3D Faux-IMAX (I call it that because they sell the movie as IMAX, while the screen is more mini-IMAX) everything popped just right. I thought it was funny to go see a movie with Martin Freeman (Watson), and a trailer has Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock). The preview did peek my interest even more, which is what a good trailer is supposed to do!
The Main Event!
The past few days, I have heard people just flat out bitch about everything they could about this movie. Granted I may be biased, as I was REALLY looking forward to viewing, but from a logical standpoint, many of the people screaming for murder of Peter Jackson, I feel, are just attention whores.
I read the book when I was young, and The Hobbit, Lord Of The Rings, Lion/Witch/Wardrobe, & Lord Of The Flies were my favorite books before the teenage years (or as I called them "The Dark Decade"). Earlier this Summer, I bought an extremely nice hardcover of The Hobbit, and was reminded how awesome this single book is. I saw the Rankin/Bass animation, and it helped with much of the visual that I did not do myself while reading, or helped refine how some things would look.
Let's address some of the things with the story while trying not to spoil anything, which is not that easy.
-Each of the dwarfs had a colored hood in the book, this was missing, but in hindsight, I can agree with the move as the different colors would had made it look too comic-book-ish. This is just one of a few minor changes I noticed.
-There was no Beorn. When I saw the trailer, there was an image of a man hunched over a curled up hedgehog. "That must be Beorn the woodsman" I thought. To my surprise it was The 7th Doctor himself, Sylvester McCoy, playing the part of The Brown Wizard, Radagast. A character who was only mentioned in the book. Radagast, and Beorn are very similar in several ways with their love of animals, and plants, but where Beorn is a Man/Bear hybrid, Radagast has an hint of crazy to him. This was the biggest change to the story, and I don't know if they will use Beorn later, out of place, and/or increase Radagast's roll even more, but from what I saw, it was handled very well.
That's it for the story portion, but one thing that I was shocked by was during the credits, I saw the name of Benedict Cumberbatch! So we have Sherlock in both a preview before, and in the movie itself! Very cool.
Now my take on the High Frame Rate issue. I've read how some people hate it, or how it looks like everything is moving at normal plus half speed. This was something I was very curious about, and after seeing it, it's hard to say which way I lean. In the night scenes, it looked beautiful. But you will notice it in the daylight scenes. And it will be hard to shake at the beginning of the movie with lots of action going on.
When you have watched 24fps all your life, it is difficult to adjust to how smoothly everything looks, and moves. I only noticed it a handful of times, and to be honest, it never bothered me once. People in general love to moan, and in this day, few give things a chance before writing it off forever. I don't think this big budget, hotly anticipated movie should had been the launching ground.
In the parking lot, I overheard 3 teenaged girls say "That was a disgrace to the original" I rolled my eyes, and just before leaving ear-shot I heard "The first Red Dawn was way better"
wtf?
