Moonage Webdream

In the history of movies, very few follow-ups have improved on the original.  Most have been let-downs.  Some of epic scale that left people wondering what the heck they were even thinking.

Transformers II is along the lines of epic.  The original Transformers was witty all the way through.  It didn’t have anything offensive other than a robot peeing on someone.  OK, you ask, a robot peeing?  You get the drift of how logical the original was.  The follow-up took the peeing scene and ran wild with it.  Nothing makes sense in this follow-up.  It is bloated with too-long fight scenes.  Most of the time, I couldn’t tell who the bad bots were or who the good bots were.  It just got that muddled.  Once again they toss out one fleeting piece of eye-candy:

However, in the first movie, you felt like you were seeing something you really shouldn’t be enjoying as much as you were.  In the follow-up, it’s all over the place.  It’s in your face the entire time.  The bad angel is now a Centerfold.  It lost its appeal pretty quick for me.  And, just as quickly, the entire movie lost its appeal to me.  The movie gets off to a semi-fun start.  The part where Shia freaks out is funny.  But, from there, it’s just boring.  It’s one fight scene after another and nothing entertaining in between.  I never expect a logical plot with a Transformers movie, but this one was too hard to follow. The bots looked too similar so that when they fought, there was no way for an adult to get involved.  I just sat there and watched metal on metal.  Bots dieing just doesn’t yank at my heart strings.  Once it was over, I was glad the sensory assault was over.  In the ultimate judgment, the boy did not ask to come and see it again.  He does want to see Star Trek for a sixth time.  Not wanting a second showing is pretty harsh.  Only Knowing got that treatment this year.

No thumbs.  They just didn’t think this thing through too well.

Actually, there were two scenes worth remembering:

Ya think “Introduction to Astronomy” was a give-away?  I tried to figure out what the reference for aeromental.com was, but apparently they can’t handle the load from the movie.  However, the textbook appears to be completely fake.  So, it appears to me that what could have been a very cool puzzle within a movie has turned out to be, well, nothing.

This movie was a sleeper for me. Not to a lot of folks tho. But, watching the trailer for months, I figured I had it all figured out before I even saw the movie. I was totally wrong. This isn’t one of those movies where you see all the best parts in the trailer. You see some of the chuckles, but the best part is totally omitted. The character development in this movie is possibly the best I have ever seen. You really understand what’s going on. It really gets under your skin pretty much right off the bat. The events of the movie itself almost seem irrelevant to me. You just want him to get to the silly waterfall.

Bottom line, all thumbs up. I liked it, the young boy liked it, and the wife loved it. That doesn’t happen too often. Definite must-see for any family with young kids, I would imagine older folks who are feeling the same things as the main character, and people who appreciate a great movie that doesn’t rely on pratfalls, car chases, or excessive violence. It’s a cerebral tug out your heart kind of movie along the lines of Wall-E. A movie buff friend of mine claims it’s one of the all-time greatest movies ever made. He’s seen thousands. That’s a pretty lofty claim. Not sure I would disagree with him now that a little time has passed and I can think back about it.

The family and I went to see Star Trek last night.  I can’t say too much about it because I’ll immediately jump into spoiler mode and I don’t want to do that yet.  So, the only thing I’m going to say about it is it is the must-see motion-picture event of the year!  All thumbs up, take the entire family.  Although, I will add, if you have sixish year old kids, you’ll have to do some pretty impossible explaining after it’s over.

Quickie update: Have seen Star Trek four times so far.  Still enjoying it!

Foxnews runs all these very silly headlines that usually are so fluffy that I just roll my eyes and move on. Today, one caught my eye tho. It promised to appeal to every single aspect of my blogging here. It was pavlov, it was sci-fi, it was movies, it was entertainment, it was everything combined that defines the Webdream experience.

Gorgeous Geek Goddesses

MAXIM EXCLUSIVE: Nerds’ fantasy starlets are all out of this world | 50 YEARS OF SCI-FI FATALES

Sounds like a smorgasboard of smokin babes it wild outfits showing lots of flesh, huh? So, I clicked it. This is what I got:

That’s it.

Five pics, one from each decade. Now, right off hand I could think of a couple that I would think could have topped their idea. For starters, I think the Geek Goddess of all time has to be Raquel Welch in One Million BC.

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Only a true geek could ever enjoy that movie. Those that sat through the entire movie just to see Raquel qualify as the ultimate geek. I never made it.

Honorable mention had to be Jane Fonda’s Barbarella:

Once again, it was a movie only a geek could sit through just to see lots and lots and lots of Jane Fonda flesh. Sure, she went on to greater fame doing very non-geek things, but in 1968, for about ninety-minutes, she was a true Geek Goddess. Again, I never made it.

Through the years, there have been all kinds of Geek Goddesses. That one special moment when ludicrous sci-fi meets perfect flesh. I could literally print a tome on these special genre. However, there is one way to sum it all up. And, given the special event occurring this Friday, make it topical. Now, Dr. No, Wonder Woman, Weird Science, Species, Transformers, One Million BC, Barbarella, and most every Geek Goddess vehicle you can think of boasted a Geek Goddess. The key word here being “a”, as in singular. Only one series has cranked them out regularly for forty years. Well, two have, James Bond’s been pretty good at that too. But, James Bond’s not a geek moment. I’m not sure how that made Maxim’s list, but it’s not on mine. The only one that truly defines geekdom, and tosses in goddesses on a regular basis, is of course, Star Trek. Rather than doing their puny little list covering the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s, they could have just done a line-up from Star Trek. I was originally going to do a survey to see who people thought was the Goddessiest of the Geeks. However, no survey I know will allow a list that big. Just check this out:

Looks like the newest installment isn’t going to disappoint the geeks either!

Shoutouts to some great Star Trek Goddesses sites:

• Memory Alpha
• TrekCore ( Lots of rare Star Trek pics )
• The Restraining Order

In order to have a family event, Mrs. Moon decided we needed to go see a movie. Given the fact me and the boy had already seen the other two or three kids’ movies, we were pretty much compelled to watch Hannah Montana: The Movie. Now, the first thing I noticed was my boy and my two nieces sat all the way through this pretty much enraptured. With the two older kids, no fidgeting at all. The youngest girl always fidgets, so she didn’t count. Obviously, the little kids love it. That’s all that really matters. That was the upside.

The downside? A forty-six year old male with very normal entertainment values sitting in a movie about teen girls surrounded by little kids. Again.

Therefore, that’s all I have to say about that.

Me and Mrs. Moon went to see Watchmen yesterday.  It was kinda neat in some ways, very annoying in others.  It really seemed hung up on violence moreso than anything else.  Although the movie had some inexplicable plot changes throughout the movie, and some soap opera elements, the one thing you could count on in each scene was the sound of bones breaking.  That just got tiresome after the first hour, annoying by the second hour.  It is that long.  The upside is the movie seems well put together, you understand the characters even if you don’t really understand their motivations completely.  The biggest downside, outside of the violence, was the plot becomes inane at the end with a bunch of irrelevant asides going on the entire time.  For me, it’s somewhat irrelevant, and distracting, worrying about who’s doing who when the future of mankind is on the line.  And, it’s pretty annoying that a being who can simply think himself a glass castle on Mars and be there in a second can’t destroy fairly slow moving missiles.  It’s just one of those movies where the entire point of the movie seems contrived in order to make the movie a lot longer than fifteen minutes.  There’s plenty of nudity, which is usually an upside for me.  However, most of it is a glowing blue penis.  That’s a downer. 

Bottom line, no thumbs for me.

Yesterday I told you of a movie you definitely don’t want to take your small kid to see.  Today we saw Monsters vs Aliens.  This is definitely a kid flick.  It’s got friendly monsters, funny aliens, and lots of things that go boom! The boy sat fixated on the entire movie. That’s a four dollar value alone to me. Kids obviously love it.

For an adult, I was a little let down. It just didn’t seem to click. The jokes were sometimes a little too adult for me to be comfortable with my six year old. He didn’t get it at all I’m sure. The stuff that was definitely kid material just seemed flat. Some movies entertain the adult as much as the kid, this isn’t one of those. Dreamworks has been getting some flack lately, I can see why. It had great actors, a fun plot, great animation, and interesting characters. It just didn’t seem to live up to all the production. We’ll go see it again I’m sure, based totally on the fact it’s fun and kid-friendly. But, I won’t be as anxious to go back as I was with Wall-E or Meet The Robinsons.

Fun movie.  One warning tho:

DO NOT TAKE SMALL KIDS TO THIS MOVIE!

There are very needless incredibly graphic scenes that will disturb them.  I read the previews, they were fairly lame.  Sure, it has an apocalyptic theme, but so does a lot of movies.  What the other movies don’t do is go into great detail to show you the gore.  That was completely needless in this movie and greatly disturbed me since I had brought my six year old son totally unwarned about what he was to see.  It bothered him, that bothered me.

What bothered me the most was it was totally unnecessary and added nothing to the movie.

You get the plot very quickly.  What this movie does is tie together about a half dozen conspiracy theories that have spanned the length of written word.  You’ve got Adam and Eve, you’ve got Ezekiel, and you’ve got solar flares, angels, aliens, prophecies, and numerology.  If you haven’t researched any of them, you’ll enjoy the movie a lot more.  If you’re familiar with any of them, you’ll enjoy it less since most have been pretty well debunked.  The only thing they missed out on was they should have had a gamma ray burst instead of the dated solar flare theory.

Bottom line, I really give this movie no thumbs up.  I don’t really want to be a spoiler at this time, but it just doesn’t come together in any logical fashion for me to enjoy it to any degree at all.  And, given the impact it had on my child, I am rather unforgiving for them not letting me know I’d be dealing with burning bodies flaying around needlessly.

Once again, don’t take your kid.  And, if you miss it entirely, don’t fret it.

I knew there something kinda familiar about The Joker:

Had to see Inkheart this weekend.  Not so much because it’s yet another in a strange line of “telling stories that suddenly come true” genre over the last few months, but because I’ve always enjoyed Brendan Fraser. Think about it:

Now, that being said, this ain’t no Blast from the Past or George of the Jungle. Fraser’s gone from the enjoyable goofball of the past to the serious-lead-action-man type. I don’t like serious-lead-action-man types. Brendan had a nature about him that made for an easy laugh. I do like easy laughs. Bottom line, this movie had a lot of room for a lot of easy laughs. None are provided tho. It’s droll. It’s a void. It’s just more or less a waste of time. It’s got a lot of visual stimuli, and it does have some chuckles. But, I kept waiting for that Brendan Fraser smirk to set things in motion, and it just never seemed to arrive. For me, that is becoming a trend. Journey to the Center of the Earth had tons of opportunities and failed as well. I’m really getting kinda bummed with Brendan in general. Up to this point, if he was in it, I was there. Now, I guess I’ll have to actually check the movie out first.

Just smile and smirk a little more Brendan, we’ll love you for it.

Other than that, Inkheart is an enjoyable watch that kept Moonlet occupied for a couple of hours and he does want to go back and see it. So, I guess it’s an OK movie. One thumb is about all I can muster tho.