jeweled platypus

 

tuesday, january 13, 2004
robots aliens fantasy-humanoids rainforests vampires

i watched a bunch of movies recently.

the rundown (2003)
in the rainforest, the rock has to find this guy, who knows where this gold thing is, and the locals want the gold thing so they don’t have to be slaves for the evil white dude. standard scenery, flat characters. the fiery fight scene near the end is rather amusing…there are some mildly funny parts too. good if you’re bored, i guess.
the phantom (1996)
evil guys try to steal treasure from thie rainforested island, but a guy in a purple suit protects it and saves the girlie too. the comic-book-ness makes it pretty fun…his weirdo suit, too.
short circuit (1986)
a robot escapes, becomes self-aware, and makes friends with a girl, while the nerds who made the robot attempt to retrieve it. cute, amusing…the archetypal ethnic-minority girl-starved nerd has some funny lines. quite eighties-saturated.
terminator 2 (1991)
a guy in the future sends a cyborg to protect his young rebellious self, because the bad guys sent another cyborg to destroy him, and the boy’s mother is weird. kind of silly, but entertaining.
starship troopers (1997)
three friends enlist in this army and do different jobs fighting alien bugs, inter-friend conflict ensues. fairly lame, even as satire.
independence day (1996)
aliens in really big ships threaten the united states and kill bunches of people, until the nerd guy writes a virus and they die. relatively entertaining, despite the lack of plot. the really big ships looked neat.
return of the king (2003)
a couple of guys have to destroy a ring, and a bunch of people have to fight wars to help them. lots of spectacle, and the characters had more depth than usual. too much hype, though.
blade (1998)
this guy kills vampires with weirdo weapns made by his friend, and a woman gets bitten, but she creates a cure, and they avert the arrival of the vampire god. parts look cool and the whole thing ends up being fairly entertaining. the evil dudes are silly.
willow (1988)
a baby is important and this guy has to save her from the evil queen, discovering his true worth in the process. the “people of different sizes are equally super-awesome” moral was somewhat tired. the morphing effects were cool, especially after watching the dvd’s extra featurette about how they developed them. they said interesting stuff about the morphing stuff in terminator 2 too. i think i fell asleep during the middle of the movie, though.
vampires (1998)
people kill vampires, but the master vampire shows up and kills a bunch of them, and this hooker is bait for him (other stuff might happen, since i only saw half of it). fairly generic dramatic vampire stuff.
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I’m Britta Gustafson.


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