Are you a sucker for Sucker Punch?

--reviewed by X

If you've been keeping up with movies at all for the past few months, you have undoubtedly seen the trailer for Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch. I recall the 2^nd (or 3^rd I forget… I've seen that trailer way too many times) time I was watching it before some movie, and the response of one audience member was, "okay… so hot girls, nice action… I'm down for watching it." I must admit, when I saw the trailer for the first time, the same thought entered my mind. The movie is definitely geared towards videogame/anime loving nerdy young adults, who, at one time or another, had fantasies similar to that of hot girls in fetish outfits battling samurai/dragon/airplane/whatever.

What happens when your best simply isn't good enough?

Rating: MEHHH

Two of my friends have a simple reply for the title question: "Your boss would yell at you." Either that, or you'd get fired. And then you'd be a loser and live on the street, asking people for change, and going "GOD BLESS!" whenever someone gives you that nickel (or quarter, if you're lucky).

But of course, that wouldn't make an interesting movie. Instead, the movie focuses on how you can be better than your best -- through taking a drug that lets you access all of your brain, making you an enhanced version of yourself (or to put it in nerdier terms, it makes you go Super Saiyan).

Call of Duty: Defying the Critics

--reviewed by Jay

What do Street Fighter, Tomb Raider, and the last installment of Resident Evil have in common? The answer, they are all movies based on popular video game franchises, and they are hated by nearly all critics, garnering 16%, 19% and 25% ratings respectively on Rotten Tomatoes. These three catastrophes are not the exception but part of the rule, for the reactions to big screen adaptations of video games have been so overwhelmingly bad that one can almost hear the collective groan of audiences and critics alike when the trailer for the next inevitable attempt flashes across the screen.

Sure Battle: Los Angeles is not officially based on any video game, but just from its trailer and various clips shown around the web, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine the words Call of Duty floating in front of the title. So perhaps no one should be surprised when critics united in lambasting Battle: Los Angeles (33% on Rotten Tomatoes). However, it would be a mistake to take these reviews at face value; their categorical condemnation of the film reveal more about the intellectual laziness and arrogant self-righteousness of their authors than the film’s actual merits.

How far would you go to be with the love of your life?

Three weeks ago, I saw a Chinese movie directed by Zhang Yimou by the name of Under the Hawthorn Tree about two young adults who fell in love at a time when the society looked down upon dating so early. The two lovers carried their affairs in secret, but when the girl's mother found out about affairs, she (the mother) told her that if he really loved her, he would keep his distance from her. Like a good Asian boy he complies. This compliance is meant to convey his true love for her, that despite wanting nothing else to be with her, he was willing to sacrifice it for the good of his lover.

Like Under the Hawthorn Tree, The Adjustment Bureau, written and directed by George Nolfi based on a short story by the name of "Adjustment Team" by Philip K. Dick, is also about how much one would be willing to sacrifice in the name of love. Matt Damon plays David Norris, a young, ambitious, idealistic Congressman seeking election for a seat in the Senate. However, upon a short encounter with Elise (Emily Blunt), when they share a brief but meaningful kiss, David realizes his true love lies with Elise, not at the hands of registered voters of New York City. The adjustment bureau quickly notices the spark, and was determined to separate the two lovers because according to "the plan", their love was never meant to be. Unlike the male protagonist in Under the Hawthorn Tree, David refuses to back down, and fights against his fate to be with the one he loves.

In other words, if Under the Hawthorn Tree is a Chinese version of Shakespeare's classic masterpiece Romeo and Juliet, taking place under the Cultural Revolution when Chinese people were overly naive, I believe that The Adjustment Bureau is a modern day version of Romeo and Juliet, taking place at a time when most of us believe in free will as opposed to fate.

If only everything in the world came with a hall pass...

Movie: Hall Pass
SeaOfScenes Rating: FUCK YOU!!!!

Let's face it, in today's society, there are much too many bad movies out there. But just because a movie is bad, objectively speaking, doesn't mean one can't enjoy it. In fact, I like to categorize bad movies into 3 categories. The first ones are the movies that I objectively know is bad, but enjoy anyway because I had so much fun watching it. The best examples I can think of are Transformers (the 1st one, not the sequel), G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra, and Ninja Assassin. Although critics hated those movies, I had a lot of fun watching them, and I'd watch them again when I'm bored. The second category consists of movies that are so bad to the point that they are almost good, and I end up having a good time by laughing at how bad the movie was. The best example I can think of is M. Night Shyamalan's latest joke of a movie, The Last Airbender, in which everything was done so poorly that it was almost as if Mr. Shyamalan was trying make a comedy, much likes Team America: World Police, just to point out how poorly made some movies are. Then there is the third category, which consists of movies that just shouldn't have been made in the first place. These movies just piss me off while I'm watching them, and make me feel like I have wasted a few hours of my life that I will never get back.

Hall Pass is a prime example of a movie in the third category.

9/11 heroes and love story during the Cultural Revolution

This weekend, I had the pleasure watching two great movies: United 93 and Under the Hawthorn Tree. The former is a Paul Greengrass movie about the events that took place in 9/11, with its main focus on the plane that fell in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, while the second was a Chinese movie, directed by Zhang Yimou, that tells a simple love story that unfolded during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Though each was good enough merit its own entry, I will write both in one setting for the interest of saving time and making sure both movies get reviewed. I will start with "United 93" just because I saw that movie first, so scroll down if you're only interested in "Under the Hawthorn Tree."

First a Transporter, Now a Mechanic

When I first saw the trailer for The Mechanic, the first thing that came to mind was, "great, another Transporter movie." Accordingly, I went into the theaters expecting to see another mindless action film with lots of explosion, forgettable storyline, and extremely corny dialogue.

I was actually in for quite a pleasant surprise.

14 year old girl goes on quite the adventure

Yes, it's truly been a long time since this blog has been updated. While we can always use the "not enough time" excuse, but, at least in my case, the real problem is that I've been too lazy to write stuff. Anyway, I just watched True Grit with a few friends, so I'll try to write a short review of it. Disclaimer: it's 12am and I gotta get up at 7:30 tomorrow so I apologize for the hasty writing and lack of research.

Perhaps it is good to have a beautiful mind, but an even greater gift is to discover a beautiful heart

I just saw A Beautiful Mind, and since I'll probably be going through my buddy list on AIM and telling my friends how I feel about the movie anyway, I might as well just write it here as a blog post.

First of all, I have to say, my judgment of the movie is extremely unfair, because I'm not really into biographical films, and my expectation for the movie was very high since it got 4 Oscars (all won in the important categories, might I add). And yes, the movie is very, very good, and I definitely recommend it. With that being said though, I do have a couple of complaints:

Don't mess with little girls, there could be just that one girl who'll beat the $h1+ out of you...

Kick Ass -- RECOMMENDED

"Why aren’t there any real life superheroes?" asks Dave Lizewski (played by Aaron Johnson), an average high school dork who even gets made fun of by his dorky loser friends, to which is friend replies “dude, if anyone tried that in real life they’d get their ass kicked!”

But, as we can expect, Dave tries it anyway, and the first 30 minutes of the movie or so (don’t quote me on this, I did not time it while watching the movie) is almost entirely about how Dave puts on a silly Halloween costume, calling himself "Kick Ass" and gets his ass kicked by bad guys. As Damon Macready, the soon-to-be Big Daddy, puts it, "he should himself ass kick instead!" Sure, it was pretty funny watching an idiot getting beat up, but the jokes were pretty average, and they came at all the expected places. It would’ve been a pretty average movie, if it weren’t for the dynamic duo who comes in to save the day.

Enter Hit Girl (played by Chloe Moretz) and Big Daddy (played by Nicolas Cage).

The highly disturbing father-daughter relationship between the two is one of the best things about the movie. The two are introduced with Damon showing his daughter, Mindy, the soon-to-be Hit Girl, what it feels to be hit a bullet, and he does so by shooting her with a handgun. It sounds really lame when I write it, but trust me, when you see it on the big screen, you’ll see that’s some disturbing $h1+ right there. It’s also really, really, really, really really really funny.

Mindy’s first superhero act as Hit Girl is equally as disturbing, as she violently slashes all the bad guys Kill Bill style, leaving a bloodbath after her act. "I think I’m in love with her dude!" comments one of Dave’s friends. Who can blame him? There is just something to seeing a little girl half your size beating the living crap out of you in the most brutal way possible. And you can’t really be a pedophile for loving that psychopathic 11 year old girl, because she won’t a single problem castrating you the moment you even think about laying a hand on her. Fine, maybe that makes you a masochistic pedophile.

My only complaint was that Hit Girl did not appear sooner in the movie, for it is Hit Girl, not Kick Ass, who makes the movie so enjoyable to watch and worth the $8 I spent on watching it. But fear not, the possibility of a sequel is being talked about. My only request: please make the movie be more about Hit Girl, and less about Mr. Ass, Kick. In fact, just call the sequel Hit Girl, and make her take on the leading role!

His devotion to the mission is real, but the fight scenes are not

14 Blades -- MEHHH

So.. you've got Donnie Yen, Vicky Zhao, and Sammo Hung (albeit he only has less than 5 minutes of screen time total), in ONE MOVIE!!! Okay, some of you might be asking, “who the hell are they?” If you’re one of those people, then you might not want to see this movie. This Hong Kong movie exists purely because the studio knows that these 3 big name actors together in one movie will have a huge pull at the box office.

The premise of the movie is just as original as any other martial arts movie. It goes something this:

How to Train Your Dragon... and go from Loser to Stud

How To Train Your Dragon -- RECOMMENDED
by Kevin (guest writer)

As if we didn’t have enough 3D movies already this year with Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, along comes How To Train Your Dragon. For all those expecting an awesome movie filled with unexpected laughter this is your movie. The movie takes you into the world of Hiccup a Viking child who as the name implies always finds a way to screw things up. Yet one night during a dragon attack that all changes when he manages to catch one of the dragons in his trap.

Is it worse to live as a monster, or die as a good man?

Shutter Island takes place in 1954. It tells the story of Ted Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), two Federal Marshals sent to investigate how a patient, Rachel Solando, escaped from her locked room inside Ashecliffe mental hospital for the criminally insane.

The trailer doesn’t reveal much about the story. It leads one to think Shutter Island would be “a trapped in a house with an axe murderer” type of horror movie, i.e. decidedly un-Scorsese. Indeed Scorsese dedicates much of the first act to establishing an oppressive atmosphere of fear and paranoia, essential elements of the horror genre. The drab lighting, constant rain, and cacophonous mixture of thunder and gale more than once made me think of The Wolfman. Soon enough though, Scorsese outgrows the edifice of horror and enters the terrain of classic detective-noir that we know and love, while still skillfully maintaining and enriching the moody texture. We find the mysterious disappearance of Rachel Solando is merely a pretext for Teddy’s presence on Shutter Island. Both he and the wardens of Ashecliffe, led by the opaque Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), have something to hide, and Teddy must race to uncover the truth before his secret consumes him.

A lesson in love... part deux

Valentine’s Day – MEHHH

reviewed by YanJie (guest writer), CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Valentine’s Day is a romantic comedy that follows the tradition of films such as Love Actually and He’s Just Not That Into You by splitting the narrative among several couples/relationships. All the different couples are usually linked in some way and their stories generally share a common theme. For this movie, the dominant theme is about how each character deals with Valentine’s Day. The movie follows the lives of several couples and a few single people as they traverse through the emotional highs and lows of their February 14th.

A sequel that never should've been made

District 13: Ultimatum -- AVOID AT ALL COST

Sigh. Maybe it's my mistake. After watching the original District 13, I had pretty high hopes for this movie. I was expecting another no brainer, straight up action movie with a plot that's decent enough for my brain to shut down without raising any alarms due to inconsistencies. And most of all, I was expecting to finish the movie thinking "Wow, NICE!!!! It was so dumb, yet I loved every minute of it." But now I realize that I was living in a dream. A dream where sequels are as good as the original. As Jake Sully said in Avatar, we all gotta wake up sometimes. And the reality is, most sequels suck.

A lesson in love... part un

Hey guys, I am YanJie, a friend of X and Jay’s and a guest-reviewer for When in Rome and Valentine’s Day. Not that I blame them since romantic comedies as a film genre usually fall along the line of super-sweet treats with tons of empty calories that tend to give you a sugar hangover afterwards. But as a girl who eats tons of sweets and started reading romance novels when she was in the 6th grade, I don’t really mind that much.

Even though it often doesn’t seem like it, there is a fine art to creating good romantic comedies and the secret lies in the relatability of the two main characters of the film. One of the major differences between rom-com and other genres of films is that romance HAS to be character driven whereas in action movies, fantasies or dramas, it’s the plot that propels the movie forward. After all, do you really remember any character development in Transformers or were you too distracted by Megan Fox’s boobs and the nonstop robot fighting to care?

That’s fine for Transformers since the main point of the movie is to defeat evil robots, and you only need really awesome robots, not believable characters, for that movie to work. But for a movie whose main purpose is to chronicle the relationship of two people to succeed, the audience has to either (1) like the two main characters or (2) believe that they like each other. If the romance film that you’re watching cannot accomplish either, then there is really no purpose for its existence. Ok, so let’s use that framework to judge the next two movies.

An European love affair

Hi guys, sorry I went MIA this week, but I've been thrown off my routine and struggling to be productive. Hopefully I'll stumble across my work ethic sometime next week. As X mentioned in his un-reviews (without mentioning to me), I went to see From Paris with Love and the Wolfman on Friday night. I was suffering from a sneezing spell at the beginning and missed the first ten minutes of From Paris with Love, and I wasn't feeling too well through most of the night, but I don't think it compromised my ability to enjoy (or unenjoy?) either of these films. Anyway, just to be safe and compensate for my possibly impaired judgment, I decided to be a little lenient and rated them:

From Paris with Love - MEHHH
The Wolfman - RECOMMENDED

John Travolta, blowing shit up, on cocaine!

I usually refrain from posting critics' reviews or even reading them before seeing a movie. But I was dying to find out what the Spill crew thought of From Paris with Love . Needless to say I was not disappointed. This review is absolutely hilarious! The only thing I was surprised by was finding out Michael Bay did not direct this movie. Enjoy.

Sherlock Holmes re-review

For those of who have listened to our audio review on Sherlock Holmes (thank you for listening btw!), you may recall that I promised to get a second viewing of the movie before I give my final judgment. Well... while procrastinating my communcation circuits homework yesterday, I finally gave the film a second go, this time with subtitles. And my final verdict is... *insert drum roll* the movie is RECOMMENDED.

While my point for not liking the movie, which was that I didn't feel the movie had enough element of mystery, still stands, what I got from the second viewing of the film was that the mystery elements were there, albeit subtle (I'd like it to be stronger). Because the film tries to involve action and tries to moves in a quick pace, I had a lot of trouble keeping up with the movie in my first viewing, after watching it again, I got the feelng that Director Guy Ritchie chose to make the movie so hard to understand on purpose. Therefore, in order fo fully understand the movie, we must pay attention every little detail -- from every character introduced to the little things that Sherlock Holmes do.

In other words, we must watch the movie Sherlock Holmes style.

I must take back what I said about performances in my earlier review. Robert Downy Jr. made a great Sherlock Holmes. He was serious when he solving mysteries, but goofy when he had no cases to solve. This matches the image of Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, in which Authur Conan Doyle wrote that Sherlock Holmes did went crazy and did cocaine when he had no cases to solve. Rachel McAdams also portrayed the Irene Adler as clever thief/seductress who can have quite a nasty bite if men didn't treat her with proper respect. It is as Ricky Martin (or William Hung, if you will) sings, "she looks like a flower but she stings like a bee."

So if you felt like you didn't understand something or didn't enjoy the movie as much, I highly recommend giving the movie a second viewing, preferably with subtitles. And remember to pay attention to all the little details. Who knows, maybe if you watch it enough times, you can get an apartment in 221b Baker Street.

Don't piss Mel Gibson off, he can still kick your ass

Edge of Darkness -- RECOMMENDED



I'm not a big Mel Gibson fan. Jay has told me Gibson did the Lethal Weapon series, but I haven't seen any of them, so I can't speak for that. But from what I saw this movie, I can surely say this: goddamn it, Mel Gibson is a badass mother-effer!

This movie is no Taken, and contrary to what a good friend of mine said, Edge of Darkness is not directed by same director who directed Taken. The latter was directed by Pierre Morel, whereas the former was directed by Martin Campbell, who is famous for directing Golden Eye, The Mask of Zoro, and Casino Royale (this one is one of my favorite movies).