"I felt I’ve enjoyed it more than the highly budgeted Godzilla movie. I really regretted not watching this movie in the cinema as I would have been awed by the disaster scenes if I had seen it on a big cinema screen or a wide-screen TV. Damn it!"
Sigh... I'm still reeling from the major disappointment that was Indiana Jones 4. What's even sadder is that it wouldn't take much for Prince Caspian to be better than that flick. It may have magic cupboard portals and talking animals, but at least that was clearly set up in the first movie to be the kind of world it belonged to. The "fridge" and "Tarzan" segments in Crystal Skull is FAR beyond and beneath the Indy universe, voodoo dolls be damned! Sigh, at least we've still got Batman: The Dark Knight...
Alas, the dreaded review nobody wants to read about... the Big Movie Freak's negative review of the latest Indiana Jones flick.
"Iron Man is a movie that I did not have much idea about because I never really followed any of its comic or cartoons. However, I was expecting some metal vs. metal bashing and smashing, and I wasn't disappointed! The best part about it: I’m pretty sure it's better than Transformers! The movie is nothing short of amazing. Detailed, superbly designed, marvelous engineering and very creative technology... impressive stuff! If this movie had been released when I was young, I would have bought the suit from the supermarket and a few of the 6-inch figurines!"
"After seeing everybody’s reviews and comments and the poor box office results for Speed Racer, I’m more convinced than ever that for many people, including critics themselves, summer movies are all about action and special effects than they care to admit. Good stories, acting and direction are all but secondary, and act as mere leverages for critics to justify liking junk-food cinema. Speed Racer happens to be that rare movie to prove this hypocrisy, with a story and performances that are better than what you would expect from its ilk, delivering what critics often claimed to have wanted in their popcorn movies. Yet action and aesthetics were their foremost complaints when it comes to reviewing this movie, and somehow the plot, acting and direction (which were far from bad) got unfairly skewered in the process..."
Directed by Ong Bak's Prachya Pinkaew but sans Tony Jaa, Chocolate seems to embody more of the same martial arts action and stunts these two are famous for. The bare-knuckled hero this time around is actually a girl, played by newcomer Yanin "Jeeja" Vismistananda. Through the power of observation, TV and M&Ms, she learns the art of ass-kicking, and found it very useful when accumulating funds for her mum's cancer treatment. I just hope this is not another one of Pinkaew's desperate attempt to make a drama rather than an all-out beat-'em-up (Tom Yum Goong being the big offender), though admittedly the trailer looks sweet.
Immediately after the rousing success and huge weekend opening of Iron Man, Marvel Comics' first fully self-financed movie, the comic book giant announced the release date for its sequel (30 April 2010), as well as a few other titles including Thor (4 June 2010), The Avengers (July 2011) and most interesting of all, Captain America (6 May 2011).
Just noticed today that a rating interface has appeared on the blog's posts without warning. Do you guys see it too (it's very obvious at the bottom of every post), or is it just me? Anyway, the interface is a five-star rating system that allows you to rate the posts, I dunno, for literary competence or something. I checked the settings to see if it was one of the Freaks tampering with the blog, but no one has been authorised for administrative duties but me. Furthermore, there isn't a rating interface option at all in the settings. Could this be some kind of reward from Blogger.com? You know, either for using their services after a period of time, or just being a plain awesome blog. Yeah, probably the latter.
To me, there's no topic drier than a technical one (although the Tech Freak might disagree), but if you're planning to set up a home theatre system, there is really no escape from it. You might have heard about this whole high-definition (HD for short) craze that's going on, with people hoarding bargain-priced HD televisions (HDTV for short) at tech fairs as much as they do with rice (well, maybe just in Singapore). Then, there was this format "war" going on between the two HD formats, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. HD who, you say? To many people, they probably thought that Blu-Ray just burst into the scene recently and were oblivious to whatever "war" that was going on. Probably nobody cared too, because some of us are still transitioning from VCDs to DVDs! (Note: DVDs only came into prominence here in the first half of this decade.)Having never watched a single Speed Racer episode, I'm going into this one not as an anime fan but as a Wachowskis supporter giving the directors their second chance after flubbing the Matrix sequels. Though they redeemed themselves a little with V for Vendetta, but they only did the screenplay adaptation, while Speed Racer would be their true directorial comeback after The Matrix Revolutions. Looking at the promo materials, you'd be an idiot if you're expecting anything more than a silly kid flick. But I still hope that it's a good kid's flick, or if we're lucky, maybe some unexpected intelligence, Wachowski-style, in the script. (Though, based on early reviews on the web, its seems that our luck has ran out.)Looks like it's a slam dunk after all. According to Box Office Mojo, Iron Man easily took the number one spot for this week's top earners with a three-day weekend gross of over US$100 million. It also scored very well with the critics, with Rottentomatoes.com registering a 94% fresh rating from U.S. online film critics. Notably absent were reviews from Roger Ebert and Film Freak Central. Good luck next week, Speed Racer.
The great thing about blogs like Alvin Lim's, the authors don't post pictures and videos as much as I do. With Alvin, he writes and draws about office life quite regularly, and generated a lot of feedback and comments from them. So far, the most I've done was to bitch about money and suggest some ways to save them. It's not that I hardly write anything, just that I tend to write reviews more, and they're all located on the main site. The blog is a tool more suited for occasional, random thoughts or important news that needs to be posted up quickly, and recently I didn't have much to share aside from my opinions about the movies I saw. Furthermore, the original plan was to have the Freaks regularly contributing their literary geniuses here, but they have opted to plant their roots on a more liberating and irreverent blogsite. Still, it's not like the BMF Blog is experiencing a dearth of material. I'm still making sure that there's at least one blog update daily, but I'll try to write more and will promise to post less LOLcats pictures.
Another silly comedy from Adam Sandler? True, but like Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, this one seems to have a bit of political angle to it. Sandler's Zohan character is a retired Israeli counter-terrorist operative who has taken up a job as a hairstylist in America. When a bunch of dormant Middle Eastern terrorists (one of them played by Rob Schneider) realised who he is, all hell breaks loose. It could be a wee bit clever if we're ever so lucky, but it's more likely to be condescending and pointlessly offensive. Still, the trailer was pretty funny. Expect it to be banned in Malaysia. 
