The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition

There are many great film franchises that one can watch in a marathon setting but for me after re-watching The Lord of The Rings Extended Edition trilogy on Blu-Ray I can with certainty say that this is my favorite film franchise to watch. I will go further and say that this extended edition Blu-Ray box set is the bet Blu-Ray set of films that you can possibly own. The extended edition far from being mindless filler actually adds some great depth to the story. Most notably the character of Boromir played be Sean Bean is explored in far greater depth as is his father Lord Denethor. Boromir becomes a tragic figure rather then a man who simply lost his mind. In many ways Lord Theodon becomes the main character of The Two Towers and is extended scenes also add some great new emotional depth to the story. These films have looked outstandingly great in every format that they have been released on  but on Blu-Ray they shine even better then they have in the past. The Ents simply look astonishing in this version. I am already a massive fan of this franchise and this is a rare case when the books and the movies in my opinion are both fantastic. Although there are still significant changes between the book and the film. One big difference being how Saruman dies and what happens when the hobbits return to the Shire. Despite that Peter Jackson kept true enough to the source material and yet was smart enough to change certain things to make the movies more cinematically friendly and it worked great. Arguably nothing can touch the novels but when you watch these sets of films together as a opposed to separate films the epic scope is almost unreal and very few films or films erie shave ever told such a complete story on film. They are just fantastic and I must admit that as films they are better then the original Star Wars trilogy! There I said it and will probably now lose my membership to several Star Wars fan clubs in the process and of course without Star Wars this film would not have happened but they are more emotionally compelling, have much better acting (Viggo Mortensen is just outstanding and he was not even originally cast as Aragorn), and arguably tell a more complete story form start to finish though Star Wars did a better job at creating a new type of mythology! I wound up watching the films over two days and I watched Fellowship of the Ring and the first half of The Two Towers and then I watched the second half of the Two Towers and The Return of the King the next day. If you ever find yourself bored and have a few days or nights to spare I highly recommend watching the films this ways and if you have never seen them then this would be a great way to enjoy them but look at it as trying to watch a mini-series rather then a collection of films because the total length of time from start to finish is almost 12 hours. Another way to mentally prepare to watch this is to think of it as an entire season of a televisions ho and break it up into hour segments. You could also watch one disc at a time over six days as each film is on two discs.  I cannot recommend this box set enough. Simply wonderful!

Why James Woods is Awesome!

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/25005/james-woods-the-tragedy-of-current-film-preservation-efforts

The website DenofGeek.com ran an article about James Woods earlier this week and he responded to it with some very interesting comments about the idea of film preservation.

Top 100 Monsters Den of Geek

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/24899/the-top-100-tv-and-movie-monsters/page/0/3

Best Movie Presidents?

http://screenrant.com/best-movie-tv-presidents/

The Descendants

The Descendants is a wonderful film that puts an interesting twist on a tragic event. Most films that involve a spouse being involved in a terrible accident or being stricken with a disease show how the loving family rushes to be by their side and we have endless stories of how wonderful of a person they were. The Descendants does not do this and instead forces us to examine how one family handles just this sort of issue. We have a family that has realistic problems, we have dysfunction, sadness, anger and love. George Clooney does a remarkable job in this film allowing us to forget just how suave and debonair he can be as he peels back our image of him as a person and connects with deep feelings that hit us all. As a recent newlywed this film at times made me want to hug my wife and never let her go and at other times it just made me want to cry with how sometimes "life" takes people in different directions and it just sort of happens. The film's antagonist if you can call him that is not treated as you might expect and quite honestly Matthew Lillard gives the best performance of his career in my opinion. Understated and played to perfection. Judy Greer also has a small but extremely pivotal role in this film and she is just sensational. In many ways her character undergoes the most drastic change and suffers the most emotional damage in the film. Great directors and I would argue that Alexander Payne is quickly becoming that (he also made the brilliant Sideways) allow for their actors and actresses to have moments to shine and rather then just show up there time on screen matters and Judy Greer plays the role to perfection and gets a chance to show some amazing acting chops proving that 13 Going On 30 did not show her true range. Beau Bridges has a great role in this film as well and so does Robert Forster. Again great directors and a great screenplay allows for each character to matter and the characters in this film certainly matter. George Clooney's character Matt King has two daughters in this film. They are simply outstanding. Shailene Woodley plays Matt King's older and more troubled daughter who reveals her own secrets and winds up becoming her fathers biggest ally and it is her character who really is the catalyst who saves her family. Her younger sibling played by Amara Miller also does a great job and you can see how well she represents a "real" person as she is not the perfect child but she perfectly represents how a child her age acts and behaves and really she is the perfect daughter that a father could ask for. So many films about families try to define them in traditional ways or try to explore some horrible abuse that happened within the family. The Descendants presents a realistic family who are faced with a terrible problem and it realistically shows how they react to the situation. In the end the family is damaged and yet also somehow complete. This is a very powerful film that has moved more than most other films that I have seen in recent times. i imagine when I have children that I will be unable to watch this film at all due to it's subject matter. Check out The Descendants.

Great Thoughts By A Great Filmmaker About His Top Five!

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/olympus_has_fallen_2013/news/1927065/five_favorite_films_with_antoine_fuqua/

http://tv.ign.com/top-100-animated-tv-series/1.html

Lord of The Rings

Any suggestions on the best way to re-watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy? On Successive nights? Back to Back to Back and start real early? Watch one and a half and then watch the next one and a half?

Professor Giordano

Monster Mania Con is a really really cool place!

Life of PI

Finally watched the highly anticipated Life of PI. It is certainly a good movie. There are times when the visuals are pretty stunning, the Blu-Ray transfer is exceptionally sharp, and there are times when the story is very compelling. However, I think Life of PI falls very short of being a great film predominately because the story as a film is simply not that engaging. It is another great example of how novels truly are a different medium and one that proves that not every book can be properly transferred into a film without major changes. Roger Ebert in his review discussed how many people believed the book to be un-filmable and after watching the movie I can now see why. First and foremost Hollywood films need to have an engaging script and the narrative must be engaging more often then not and after a very lengthy set up the real brilliance of the movie is the shipwreck scene which got all of it's visual clues from Titanic. After that watching PI on the boat for over an hour felt like an eternity which is an accurate representation of what a real person would go through in such a terrible situation, however for a narrative film it gets quite boring and the visuals although impressive were not constant enough or dazzling enough to keep the pace of the film at the speed it needed to be. There was no urgency in this film and yes Ang Lee at times tends to slow down the pacing in his films. Yet In Brokeback Mountain that worked to his advantage where in my opinion it was not as successful here. Another thing I admired about the film was that there were many visual references to other Hollywood films. it is hard not to recognize references to Titanic, Castaway and Forrest Gump. In fact this is one of the few films that directly uses visual iconography from the movie Titanic. As far as the tiger goes at times it was done exceptionally well but since it was mixed with CGI it looked a little off at times. Gladiator is a movie that I thought meshed a CGI tiger with a real one slightly better then they did here but keep in mind the tiger is a central character in this film and hence they had a much harder task. I did not see this film in a 3D or IMAX format so I must say I thin the experience would have been much more immersive in that format. Lastly, many people have said that is a great spiritual movie and in the beginning I thought they were doing a great job with that. It was one of the rare mainstream Hollywood films to not demonize Muslims in the film. It also does a pretty good job of explaining the Hindu religion as well as explaining the basic tenants of Catholicism and it was nice to see this all done in a positive light. However, I do not think the film delivers a powerful spiritual message with it's narrative after that. Yes if something like this really happened no other word other then miraculous can be used to describe how PI survived simply because fate or luck had to be involved along with his will to live and his smart use of resources. However, movies lie The Shawshank Redemption, The Passion of The Christ, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Slumdog Millionaire, The Exorcist, Schindler's List, all in my opinion do a much better job at making the audience feel a strong emotional connection to religious ideals. There certainly is a lot to comment on with this film and Ang Lee at the very least has created a great film for academic discussion which I respect. As much as it seems like I am picking the movie apart let me remind you that it was a good film. I just think that it was not one of the best films that I have ever seen. My two favorite films of last year remain The Perks of Being A Wallflower and Flight.

Willow

If you are a fan of the fantasy genre then Willow is a must see. Though not as massive of a blockbuster hit as it was initially expected to be this Ron Howard directed film in my opinion is simply a wonderful fantasy film.  Before he was part of the HBO show Life's Too Short and before he was scaring children as the Leprechaun this is arguably the role that Warwick Davis is most known for. In a way the character that he portrays is similar to Bilbo Baggins in many ways. Clearly the story of Willow was at least in some small way inspired by The Hobbit. Val Kilmer gives one of his best on screen performances to date and the production design in this movie holds up for the most part really well. It has just been released on Blu-Ray and is well worth watching for the first time or for the twentieth!

Class News

I want to remind everyone that posting on the blog is a class requirement so please make sure that you are checking the blog and making posts. I will disucss this in class the next time we meet.

Bill and Ted

There was a time when almost any popular movie that even remotely appealed to children on any level was made into  a cartoon. That time was called the 1980s. Side note Bill and Ted are personal heroes of mine!

Film Lists

Check out these lists!

Very interesting list of underrated films of the 2000s.
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/24649/top-50-underrated-films-of-the-2000s

Some "Kids" movies are more disturbing then most of the films in the Saw franchise.
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/articles/10-kids-movies-are-actually-extremely-disturbing

Top Ten

http://screenrant.com/top-parody-movies-films/?utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_41545

Check out these top ten lists!

http://whatculture.com/film/10-most-ambitious-movies-ever-made.php/10

Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2

Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2 has one brilliant battle sequence that is actually extremely impressive and hints at where this franchise could have gone if it was handled with more care and went in a different direction. It is not the worse movie that I have ever seen not even close to it. However, that is the last good thing I will say about this exceptionally lackluster ending to one of the worse movie franchises of all time. I will not waste time discussing the acting in the series because it has never been good. Any charm that this franchise might of had when the first movie came out and in it's own way works pretty decently as a B movie is long gone. The purely financial decision to stretch out Breaking Dawn into two parts really hurts the film's pacing as much of what happens in Breaking Dawn Part 2 is simply there to waste the audiences time. After we get this brilliant battle sequence that practically comes out of nowhere and when we get a hint that Edward and Bella might actually have to suffer consequences for their actions and when we get to see Bella for the first time ever show the potential that she can be independent and make a decision for the good of her child rather then for her own petty selfish needs we get the realization that this was all a possible scenario in the head of the character of Alice who can predict the future. As such although the bad vampires go away there really is no conclusion to this story except that their daughter is going to grow up fast and hang out with Jacob. So the movie fails to deliver a proper conclusion to the Edward, Bella and Jacob love triangle which in my opinion was handled in a simply awful way from the start. Just my opinion. I have seen all of the Twilight movies and I am not a fan of them however I respect the fact that they are made very well and that they deserve respect for creating a blockbuster franchise from essentially a B movie. However, even I thought that this conclusion would lead to some sort of satisfying conclusion to wrap this franchise up and you almost got one but alas the filmmakers could not push too far because then a potential for more sequels could not happen. One of the most lackluster endings to a movie franchise that you will ever see. With that begin said it is still better then Star Wars Episode 1 The Phantom Menace and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is far from a perfect movie. It has a great premise and the film uses it's low budget to it's advantage and creates some remarkably powerful imagery. The movie received most of it's notoriety because the film's star Quvenzhane Wallis was the youngest actress ever at age 9 to be nominated for the best actress academy award. She has a great personality, she has all of the potential to be a Hollywood star if she chooses to go down that path. She is also very good in the film but it is the film not her acting in my opinion that carries the story. Almost all of her dialogue is done with a voice over narration and despite one really remarkable scene on her part her acting although good is not one of the greatest screen performances of all time. Again granted at her age she has already accomplished more then most people and she deserves her credit but the actual acting that she does in the film is more intuitive and not particularly challenging from a  dialogue standpoint. The film's real star in the acting department is Dwight Henry's portrayal as Wink. His raw emotion and ability to portray a severely flawed and sick person who in his own crazy way embraces the madness of the world around him is remarkable. He was simply outstanding and their father, daughter chemistry is really quite special. With that being sad the end of the movie is quite emotional and works incredibly well however the film suffers from shaky camera work and parts of the film that just seem to linger for too long. You will be bored at times watching this movie but the emotional payoff between father and daughter at the end is something quite special. This is a film that needs to be watched more then once and may begin to become a truly special cult film.

Taken 2

I think it is safe to say that Liam Neeson's family should never leave America ever again for any reason. Taken 2 is certainly not Gone With The Wind but at times it is effective as an action movie. It is no better and it is no worse then pretty much any generic action movie that you will see this year. The film takes place mostly in Istanbul Turkey which ironically enough featured heavily in the movie Argo where it was used to duplicate Iran. It was also a bit part of the latest James Bond film Skyfall. It is one of the most beautifully historic cities in the world and they have spent lots of money on increasing American tourism as well as in trying to lure Hollywood productions to their country. Both have worked extremely well. Quite honestly Turkey, especially Istanbul is probably the safest Middle Eastern and Islamic country that an American can visit in that particular geographic region despite the unfortunate and terrible events that happened in the country to a tourist from Staten Island who was murdered there. The film clocks in at just over 90 minutes and the action is efficient and well choreographed. Liam Neeson is making an excellent transition to being the go to Hollywood player as an action star. The plot of the film is pretty simplistic, the acting not exactly great and the amount of people that Liam Neeson's character kills and the ways in which he kills them is so outrageously over the top at times that the film's credibility is severely damaged at times. Still this was not the worse movie sequel that I have ever seen and there are far worse movies that you could watch.