The Avengers

Well, I finally watched The Avengers, the latest installment of Marvel’s super heroes movies. It’s the long awaited movie, bringing several previously standalone super heroes together: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk. Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr, and Chris Hemsworth reprised their roles respectively, with Robert Downey Jr pretty much stole the show, or probably because Iron Man had the longest gap between his last movie and this one, and thus it felt more exciting seeing him again vs the other heroes. Anyway, here’s my quick impression, and yes, I will spoil the movie.

The story itself is a continuation of the setup from Captain America and Thor movies. Loki made a deal with some alien to use the energon cube, I mean that blue-cube-source-of-energy-thingy, to open a portal so the aliens can invade earth. Pretty straight forward, and the motive were already set for Loki, for revenge against Thor. Thing is, the last time we saw Loki, he fell from Asgard to the abyss. So how did he survive? I guess the “abyss” is space? Anyway, Selvig, the scientist from Thor movie is now investigating the energon cube from Captain America movie, and Loki used the situation to transport himself to earth. At the same time, he brainwashed Selvig and Hawkeye to work for him. Nick Fury then decided to assemble the heroes to get the energon cube back.

It started with Black Widow getting Bruce Banner. With the Hulk having 3 actors now with 2 non-related movies a long while back, it’s hard to relate to the character in this movie. By the way, at the end of Thor movie, Thor destroyed the bridge and thus stuck in Asgard. So how did he manage to go to earth again? And if he could, why didn’t he visit his girlfriend already? Yeah. Oh well, Iron Man is cool as always. As usual, Tony Stark arrived with the eye candy, showing how his landing pad automatically removed his Iron Man armor while he’s walking. Total geek fest. Captain America is pretty much a direct scene continuation from the end of his movie.

What’s great about this movie is the interaction between the heroes, especially Downey Jr as Tony Stark. The other heroes seemed stiff, but Tony Stark is just being Tony, making jokes and insulting everybody. It works great, and thus imo Downey stole the show. They also did a good job in balancing the heroes’ screen time. In movies with multiple main heroes, there’s a threat of having certain heroes taking a back seat. It didn’t feel this way in this movie. Even Hawkeye and Black Widow took quite big parts instead of standing by over the sideline.

How about fan service? This is something that many western movies sometime missed completely. Well, they are in the movies, enough to make fans happy, yet not too much that it makes the movie a bit corny. The best one I remember was when Iron Man and Captain America were fighting the aliens side by side, and Iron Man fired his repulser beam to Captain America’s shield and have the beams deflected to the surrounding aliens. That’s so awesome that the audience was cheering and clapping. Another hilarious part was when Hulk confronted Loki. Loki boasted how he’s a God, and the Hulk simply smashed Loki around like a toy. Again, the audience cracked up. It’s too funny. They did a really good job slipping these things in the movie. Another fan service is the Iron Man mark VII suit, which can fly on its own, matching itself to Stark’s bracelet and armored Stark on the fly, literally. It’s no extremis, but I’ll take it.

Any downside of the movie? Well, Shield is pretty much useless, i.e. they had the energon cube stolen under their nose, and their flying fortress were wrecked and did nothing during the invasion itself. The after credit scene can be hilarious and a huge eye roller at the same time.

Future storyline? It’s clear that Stark is going to use his tower as the Avengers Tower, and Thanos is going to be the next villain. My wishes? To have the X-Men and Spiderman franchise tied together with the Avengers. I want to see the live-action version of the Stark-designed Spiderman suit. Alas, Spiderman is pretty much Sony’s.

In short, The Avengers is a quick and fun action movie with enough toppings to please fans. It’s a great movie to distract me. Thumbs up, recommended. But enough distraction, back to making Accel World AMV now. 😉

 

Ponyo, Kamen Rider W/Decade Movie War 2010 Movies Impressions

I’ll start with Ponyo.
I finally got the chance to watch Ponyo on DVD, an anime by Hayao Miyazaki. Looking at the DVD released by Disney, I see Japanese audio being available, so that’s good. Now, this is Disney, which if you realize, changes a lot of the dialogs in Miyazaki’s movies for the English dub, and even add dialogs not in the original Japanese version. Sure, some of them are subtle, but I think many of the changes make the scenes and characters have different feel and mood than the original. Same thing with Ponyo. When I first watching it, I picked Japanese audio, but the subtitle chosen was for the English dub. I immediately noticed how the subtitle said different things than the audio. I mean one example in one scene, Sousuke says how Ponyo likes ham, and Lisa, Sousuke’s mom said “Just like me” in Japanese, but the English dub said “So she thinks she’s human?” WTF? Another scene, Sousuke said “Yokatta,” but the dub said “It’s my fault.” Again, WTF? Yeah, that’s Disney changing stuff around. More proof that US localization have close to zero respect to the original sources.

Now, switching to the real subtitle for the Japanese audio, it actually is pretty good. I’m biased towards fansub a lot of times because official licensors usually “localize” the subtitle too much, but this one is very good and accurate, other than missing honorifics.

As a movie, Ponyo is the typical cutesy and the innocence of kids. There’s no good guys vs bad guys. All you feel is how cute Sousuke and Ponyo from start to finish. Some say there’s an environmental message. Sure, but it’s not really played out in a significant way (unlike Avatar). The focus remains on how cute the kids are.

So, I’m enjoying the movie. Cute movie, good subtitle, all is great, until the credits roll. Instead of the cutesy Japanese song, I’m listening to the English dub of the song. WTF? I thought I push a button that changed the audio to the English dub. But no, it’s still on the Japanese audio track. Yeah, Disney CUT the Japanese song out, replacing it with the English dub song, coupled with the horrible remix version in the end. WTF? This is a big FAIL! So legally, there’s no way for you to enjoy a complete Japanese Ponyo movie per the original. This is like Disney saying, hey, go pirate the movie instead. Finding Ponyo on bittorrent is not that hard at all, and there are HD uploads too!

Buying Disney’s Ponyo on DVD:
Pros:
-Very good subtitle quality for the Japanese audio
Cons:
-You’re paying for an incomplete movie, with the Japanese song cut out completely
-It costs you money
-The subtitle placement is a bit obnoxious. Too high up and the fonts take quite a bit of screen space.

Downloading Ponyo from Bittorrent:
Pros:
-Cost you nothing
-You get a complete movie. Japanese song intact.
-Subtitle font and placement are ideal, just like most fansub.
Cons:
-The subtitle quality may vary, but still doesn’t stray far from the original dialogue.

Yeah, there you go. You can pay for an incomplete version of the movie, or download a complete one for free. Which one would you choose? Disney, you suck. What’s wrong with the Japanese song? Are you afraid that people will find it to be superior than your lame remix? Ponyo is an awesomely cute movie, but huge FAIL on Disney.

Next is Kamen Rider W/Decade Movie War 2010.
LOL. Yeah, a stark contrast to Ponyo. I literally watched this right after Ponyo. Kamen Rider W/Decade Movie War 2010 is a double movie featuring the latest Kamen Rider W and the conclusion of Kamen Rider Douchebag… I mean Decade.

Anyway, this movie is set up to be the conclusion for Kamen Rider Decade after the cliff-hanger ending on the series, and the movie starts off with Decade kicking SkyRider, Super 1, and Kabuto’s ass. Wait, WTF? Yeah, that’s not how the series ended. In the series, it ended with Decade fighting the original universe’s (sans the original Kuuga) Riders. So, were SkyRider, Super 1, and Kabuto original or alternate versions? It doesn’t make sense, and throughout the movie, it seems that they were alternate versions as Seto Koji (original Kiva) appeared after Decade destroyed all the alternate Riders (so presumably the original Riders were not destroyed by Decade). If you’re not confused enough, none of the teased scenes shown on the last episode of the series (Tsukasa drowning, Natsumi with a machine gun, etc) were actually in the movie itself. LOL.

So, wait, what happened then between the series end and this movie? Who knows. My speculation is that when Decade was fighting with the original Riders, he was probably told again by Seto Koji that in order to revive everybody and restore all the universes, he needs to destroy all those alternate Riders (creation cannot come without destruction), with the consequences of Decade himself cease to exist once everything turned back to normal. And Tsukasa decided to take that risk, and then pretended to be the “bad” guy as the destroyer so Natsumi would hate him and finish him off.

Sounds kinda deep huh, for a franchise targeted towards kids. Alas, this is the weakness of the movie itself as there are too many holes in the plot. How did Tsukasa befriended the Yuriko/Tackle? How did Yuusuke (alternate Kuuga) regained his consciousness after being bitten by Kivala at the end of the series? Oh, and no cameos from the original Riders other than Seto Koji. Yeah, poor fanservice imo, and certainly doesn’t help the Swiss cheese plots and story.

Mid-way through the movie, they switched to W. On W, it gave us a background on the events before the first episode of Kamen Rider W, and a super cool fedora-wearing-Rider called Skull, which is actually Shotaro’s mentor himself. W’s segment in this movie is well done. It offers quite a bit of backstory to W (eg. the origin of Shotaro’s one liner “Count your sins”). I’m liking W more and more, as it doesn’t seem to leave as many holes in their plot/story as previous Kamen Rider series.

The last part of the movie, where W went to the middle of Decade’s battle and teamed up, is obviously just a last attempt for fanservice. Decade separated W into 2 individual form (Cyclone-Cyclone and Joker-Joker), and did a triple Rider kick. Not that satisfying really.

In short, just a so so attempt to finish Decade, but a great backstory for W.

 

Iron Man 2

Just got out from watching Iron Man 2, IMAX lite. In short, pretty good movie, and stay for after-the-credits scene.

*Warning* May contain spoiler.

One thing Iron Man 2 is better than the first one, the action scenes. It’s upped a notch or two for obvious reason, Tony Stark is already Iron Man, while in the first movie, it’s the origin story. The progression of the movie felt a bit rushed though since the studios are trying to push in SHIELD and The Avengers into the movie. Robert Downey Jr’s performance is great, as usual. He just nailed Tony Stark’s character. Now in Iron Man 2, Rhodey is a different dude, Don Cheadle instead of Terrence Howard. For whatever reason, I always felt the character Rhodes in both Iron Man movies to be a bit off, despite him being War Machine in Iron Man 2. There’s no back story, not much characterization, not much story, other than being Tony’s friend, and voila, next thing you know he’s War Machine. I just don’t feel the connection between Rhodes and Stark, and the change in the actor didn’t help.

Samuel L. Jackson has more screen time now as Nick Fury, since SHIELD is obviously taking a significant part of the story. Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts is, well, is fine. They did cut one scene that was in the trailer, where Potts kissed Iron Man’s helm and throwing it overboard with Tony jumping and flying to get it while saying “You complete me.” Yup, that scene was completely gone, which is kinda disappointing as that scene seems to give a better mood to the relationship of Tony and Pepper. Oh well, obviously a DVD extra.

Now, many reviewers online are not too happy with Iron Man 2 having “multiple villains.” Well, to me there’s only one villain, Whiplash (Mickey Rourke). Sure, there’s the obviously corrupt senator (which didn’t seem to get any repercussion in the movie, obviously portraying real life situation), and the “evil” competing company CEO (Hammer), but I don’t count them as villains. In a super hero movie, the villain should be a super hero too, thus Whiplash. I actually like Whiplash’s part in Iron Man 2. He went through pretty much the same turn of events as Tony Stark, starting with a self-made reactor with limited resources, tricking his captor’s resources for his own purpose, and upgrade his weapon to make a comeback. Very focused single villain, unlike Spider Man 3. The climax fight, however, is both refreshing and disappointing. I made my case that I wasn’t too happy with the climax fight in Iron Man 1, where the girl saved the powerless hero. In Iron Man 2, Tony is still fully functional as Iron Man, and saved Pepper, but the fight with Whiplash is very short and not too exciting. Oh well, at least this time Tony used an upgraded reactor for the final fight (I guess it explains why Iron Man’s reactor chest is a triangle instead of a circle. Seeing that in comics and cartoons, I always thought it was just cosmetic), unlike the first movie where he relied on the 1st gen reactor.

Now, let’s talk about the gadgets. Other than Tony’s home computer, in Iron Man 1, Tony used a stupid Verizon LG phone, which magically worked in the middle east (come on, at least use a GSM phone). Iron Man 2 did a better job by giving Tony a small transparent tablet thingy with touch interface. Pretty awesome. Speaking of touch, that’s the main meme in Iron Man 2. They showed Tony doing a search on Black Widow on his table with multi-touch to boot. Then there’s the whole room virtual reality that Tony used to discover a new element. Steve Jobs is right, touch is the next step.

All of those are nice and futuristic, but then there’s a step back. Tony Stark uses Dell XPS. Yeah, Dell. A billionaire uses Dell, while a hacker working at a convenience store (Falcon) has an iMac and a Mac Pro. LOL. Yeah, I’m comparing the techs of Iron Man 2 with Bloody Monday 2. Sure it’s nice seeing the futuristic stuff, but we know those things don’t exist for consumers. It’s more appetizing to see today’s real products. Oh, and don’t even compare the US government vs the Japanese government. In Bloody Monday 2, the Japanese government are all Apple. 🙂 Then there’s a scene of Tony “hacked” the court’s computer using his transparent tablet, but the “hacking” process is just some lame ASCII of his name. They should do it like Bloody Monday 2, where Falcon uses his USB key to boot any PC into Linux, doing command lines. Now that’s more geeky.

As for spoilers, Captain America and Thor. Nuff said. My wish list for the next Iron Man movie? Extremis, which allows Tony to call up the Iron Man suit on command (it will be ultra cool if he yelled “Henshin!” LOL).

Overall, Iron Man 2 is a good action super hero movie. It doesn’t disappoint nor exceed expectations. It’s what it is, a fun movie to begin the summer season.

 

Avatar and Sherlock Holmes

2 new movies that I watched. My review, and the obvious precaution of spoiler alert.

1. Avatar
I watched this movie in 3D (alas, the IMAX 3D tickets were quickly sold out, so the standard 3D would have to do). Pretty impressive visuals. This movie is a showcase of how far CGI technology in cinema has become. It’s just amazing the way they portrayed Pandora’s colorful and lush jungle environment. The 3D effects are not being overdone either (although there are few obvious scenes that are there simply for the 3D effects). It’s definitely a visual treat.

As for the story, well, if you saw the trailer, you already know the story. It’s the typical “soldier went undercover to gain information on the opposing party, fell in love with a girl of the opposing party, and decided to defend them” story with a scifi background. It’s also portrayed the action of invading another culture/country (or in this case, planet) to gain their resources for profit (sounds familiar?). It’s a very interesting portrayal of current world issues with a sci-fi twist. Other than that, nothing special. Guy falls in love with the girl, girl falls in love with the guy, girl thinks guy betrayed her, guy makes a com-back, war, the good guys won, the end. The movie itself is pretty long, a bit more than 2 and 1/2 hour. It pays though, as the pacing of the movie seems pretty good, not overly rushed.

The sci-fi part itself is, unfortunately, not well explored. Pandora planet is apparently a giant mesh network, where information can be transferred to and from, this includes brain signals. Heck, how did they make the avatars to begin with? What happened to earth? (Jake said that the “sky people’s” home were no longer green or something). When Jake found out that Na’vi can transfer a mind into another body, why didn’t he do it right away, thus not having to worry the enemy getting into his real body? And wasn’t that chick turned into a zombie in Resident Evil? LOL.

Anyway, impressive visuals, pretty cool watching it in 3D, so so story and acting, surprised to see Sigourney Weaver in it. Pretty entertaining, but nothing to write about the story. To be honest, I’m tired of sci-fi movies that portrays the future and/or technology as bad. This is why I like Star Trek, which seems to be the only sci-fi franchise that portrays us, humans on earth, turning for the better in the future (watch any Start Trek episode/movie, and you won’t see a muscly jock military soldier gungho with machine guns).

2. Sherlock Holmes
This movie was a quite a surprise for me. I like detective stories. When I saw the trailer, I was prepared to be disappointed as the trailer seems to show this new Sherlock Holmes as an action movie filled with Holmes fighting, not the image I have with Sherlock Holmes the great detective. In short, I’m afraid for a too dumbed down “Sherlock Holmes” movie. Well, the movie turned out to be very good. Sure, the fightings are in there, but Sherlock Holmes is still Sherlock Holmes, paying attention to details and deducing things from observations. Also, during his fights, he fought using his brain, planning his attacks from a science/medical point of view. Not too shabby. I’m sure the action and jokes are there to appease the mainstream audience, but they don’t dumb down Holmes’ detective skills. However, they also seems to hope the audience already know about Sherlock Holmes stories/characters (I have no idea who Irene Adler was), which may be a good thing so no time is wasted in the movie explaining the back story or whatnot.

In short, an extremely entertaining movie. This movie also setup for sequels as it introduces Professor Moriarty in the end, Holmes’ well-known nemesis. My only gripe with this movie is that the person sitting next to me in the theater smelled awful.

 

Rewatching Iron Man movie

Just finished watching Iron Man movie on blu-ray. It is still a great movie, fun to watch again. Iron Man is one of the few American super heroes that I like, mainly because unlike most other super heroes, Tony Stark becomes Iron Man due to his intelligence and technology. None of those gamma ray/radioactive spider/mutation crap. Also, unlike the comic, the movie follows a more robotic Iron Man instead of the corny muscly suit.

Unlike some other super hero movies, what I like about Iron Man is that they show plenty of Iron Man himself. A lot of Hollywood adaptations used to not giving enough fan service (no “super moves,” not enough of the main hero screen time, etc). Luckily they’re getting better at recent franchises. Iron Man did a pretty good job in keeping fans happy, by simply showing how cool Iron Man is. It also helps that there are plenty of gadgets and funny scenes.

I still find the final fight scene with Iron Monger is a bit anti-climatic, and somewhat disappointing. This is one of the many typical Hollywood disappointing formula. They built up excitement during like 80% of the movie, and then brought everything down at the end. Iron Man followed the same formula. The problem started when the bad guy stole Tony’s new and upgraded power source, and Tony had to resort to his first generation version of the miniature arc reactor. And then Iron Man got beat up, and the girl came to the rescue. If this was a Japanese tokusatsu, the enemy might have stolen the new power source, but Tony Stark would’ve already created a more powerful/better/3rd gen arc reactor, ideally prepared for such situation. And when Iron Man gotten beat up by Iron Monger, instead of almost dying and relying on the girl, Tony would’ve actually used an upgraded Iron Man suit, and maybe transformed into “Hyper/Rising” Iron Man or something with extra weapons or shoot higher output energy from the newer arc reactor and blow up Iron Monger to pieces. Or Tony would’ve made one of his robots as an independent AI robot, and combined with Iron Man to deliver an ultimate blast to defeat Iron Monger. LOL. That would be more fun, and maintain the excitement of the good guy kicking ass.

As for the blu-ray, Iron Man uses plenty of CGI, so watching it in HD is really nice with a lot of the sharpness and details of the gadgets and CG. The extras are okay, plenty of behind the scenes on both discs. The BD-Live feature is a joke, just a quiz of trivia questions, something they could’ve included on the disc in the first place.

Iron Man is still one of the better recent super hero movies. Hopefully they keep things up throughout the sequels (unlike X-Men and Spiderman).

 

V6 – Light in Your Heart

The MV for V6’s upcoming new single, the theme song of the new Ultraman movie (obviously Hiroshi Nagano is in the movie, as Daigo/Ultraman Tiga).

Watch V6-Light in your Heart PV in Entertainment Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
Here’s the trailer of the movie:

TIGA!!! LOL

 

Tropic Thunder Viral Video Promo

Everybody seems to like Tropic Thunder. I’ve seen the regular trailer, but this one is funnier, although it got “urrgh” in the end. So warning, the first half or so is pretty funny, but beware of the end.

 

Momotaros-tachi funny scene

The 4 hilarious imajins from Kamen Rider Den-O will be coming back in the summer crossover movie between Kamen Rider Kiva and Den-O. For the last couple episodes of Kamen Rider Kiva, they are showing Momotaros-tachi promoting the new movie. The funny part is that they also did a crossover with Go-Onger. this time, from Kamen Rider Kiva Ep27, Momotaros-tachi are copying Go-Onger poses. Hilarious!

 

Speed Racer 2008

When I found out they’re going to make a Speed Racer movie, I know it’s going to suck. Why? It’s a movie based on a cartoon that was a localized version of an old Japanese anime. The least they could do was to use the original material, but nope, it has to be the US version. Oh well, at least there’s a reference for Mach Go Go Go (the original Japanese title) in the hip-hop Speed Racer theme song for the movie.

In any case, many girls are looking forward for the movie, not because of Speed Racer, but because of Rain, as shown in the poster:

LOL Yeah, I don’t think I see this poster around here. Different targeted demographic.

 

Iron Man Movie

Very fun movie with tons of gadgets and technology. Stark’s basement itself is a geek’s dream. Robert Downey Jr seems to be a perfect fit for Tony Stark. One great thing about the movie is that the director didn’t waste the time introducing the story/characters. The movie started right at the moment Stark being ambushed in Afghanistan. No time wasted in introducing Iron Man either. The mark 2 only had a brief appearance before the final red/gold suit is out. Very fast paced as Tony juggles his time between business and developing the suit. My favorite scenes are when Tony is recording his tests of the suit’s flight components. Those scenes were hilarious.

The final fight with Iron Monger was not that great though. Not enough oomph. It’s the usual hero-almost-got-beaten-girl-saves-hero kind of fight. I wanted Iron Man to totally kick ass from the start to the finish. Maybe on the 2nd or 3rd movie.

The CG is simply awesome, especially Tony’s garage/basement. Alas, the high tech stuff is frequently contrasted with today’s “meh” techs like Tony’s LG cellphone and the Dell XPS M2010 “laptop.” Still, there is plenty of CG showcase, like the scene where Tony is putting on the mark 3 suit.

On another topic, the theater I went to sucked. The movie was out of focus! Terrible! Plus there was a bunch of asshole teenagers on the side that were yapping all the time. Another reason why I prefer watching movies at home. Can’t wait for the blu-ray release of the movie.