ChristopherBarot

This movie kind of terrified me. I don't know if this counts as a correction, but through the entire first like 3/4 of the movie I was waiting for all the supporting characters to turn on Luis Guzman. Like some kinda of Truman Show style secret aliens or something. There were all these signs that the whole town was secretly organized around Luis. The obvious ones are things like the choreographed "We Like Boys" dance number and how her parents just don't react to her 180 wardrobe change or the brothers serious mental issues. But then there were this host of small things. At the dances, all the background characters seem to be doing synchronized repetitive dance moves like some kind of less fluid version of Peanuts. The English teacher reads Luis Guzman's essay all about how she has a stalker style obsession with Brad, and she runs out of the room, but no one ever mentions it again. Brad himself later approaches her to help him with work and has no concern about her feeling for him or about hanging out in her bedroom alone with her. Randa seems to have become her friend once Luis is the most popular girl, but Randa has no issue with the Brad stalking and then disappears completely at the end of the movie despite us seeing her dancing with Brad before Luis appears. The theater teacher also seems manic in her scenes. Timing was also really crazy. Luis has that day at school where she is embarrassed and spys on Brad at football practice; then it cuts to her riding her bike home in what is clearly the middle of the night. Same thing happens with her birthday party where it cuts from bright school day to middle of the night. Her weather manipulation scenes have her hanging out in a park in the dark. Why aren't her parents questioning where she is? Does her school just not let out til 10 p.m.? I just felt very uncomfortable and kept expecting the whole town to reveal they were all in on some plot that explained why they were all acting like robots. Edit: Oh, and that Condom chanting scene. That was messed up. A few additional points What was up with the white guy rapping crew? Were they supposed to be cool or losers? Because Hats seems to like one of them, but Top That starts with the 3 guys standing in the street with no other people just singing to each other about how hot they are. Excuse me, but 3 guys singing and dancing alone in a street with no girls is not cool. At least it can't be in this movie world where everyone needs a relationship and is just as likely as not to sing explicitly about that very fact. The whole water angle was really inconsistent. Were none of these people showering? What about the fake money that gets water spilled on it? If Luis Guzman didn't know about the water thing when she turned her brother into a dog, then why was she taking him to the tub? Was she going to drown him to hide what she had done? Did anyone else feel like her popularity spell was really underwhelming? She says she wants to be beautiful. She's told she just needs to wait and grow into herself, and she insists that she wants to look like that singer. Then she goes through all this stuff with spells and a trip to a concert venue that she can't possibly have explained, and the end result is a new hair style and clothes. Except she already had clothes at the first dance, so what did the spell actually do? Then, at the end, she decides she doesn't want to use magic, but she still looks the same. So I guess the spell didn't do her hair either. Was it all just about the jean jacket?

1) The Octagon (1980) A personal favorite of mine starring Chuck Norris. Chuck is a former martial arts prize fighter of some sort who retired because he was too awesome and accidentally killed a guy. He stumbles into a plot lead by his brother (who is Japanese) to train the henchman of French terrorists to become ninjas. The real selling point of this movie has to be their artistic choice to, every now and then, provide Chuck's inner monologue; thing is, apparently Chuck's head is literally empty because every word of his monologue echoes to the point you can barely understand it. 2) DOA: Dead or Alive (2006) They've done Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. This will continue the trends of crazy movies based on plotless 1 on 1 fight games. This one even has a cameo appearance by Lui Kang from Mortal Kombat. It starts out crazy right off the bat, is full of girls in underwear/swimwear grunting and fighting, and has an insane evil plot involving sunglasses. One thing that makes this game series special is that, in addition to the series of fighting games, the DOA series included a beach volley ball game with the same characters, and the movie stays true to this. It's stars include Jaime Presley and Holly Valance. 3) Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009) This one is just awful. I may be biased by having seen the JCVD Street Fighter when I was a child, but even as stupid as it was, I enjoyed it. This one though has none of the campy fun. It could act as a sort of comparison piece to make you really appreciate the first. Things that give the film HDTGM merit include a seemingly random choice of accents and ethnicities for the actors and characters (Bison is played by a short blonde white guy with an irish accent despite the movie telling us he was born and raised in Thailand, the main character has a growing up montage where she starts as a young chinese girl and grows into a pretty white looking mixed race actress) and a strange plot that I don't think relates to the game in any way but does fail to make any sense and includes random unexplained super natural elements. 4) TMNT III (1993) This is another follow up to a previous episode. This one somehow goes way off the rails by deciding not to include any of the usual villains. Instead, the turtles get sent back in time to beat up random Japanese people. Technically, they exchange places with 4 ancient japanese soldiers, so we will sporadically get shots of 4 barely dressed japanese guys fighting each other in the present. If my memory serves, I think there is even a strange love story between one of the turtles and a woman related to the soldier he replaced a la Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. 5) Swordfish (2001) This is, I think, a fairly well known one. Hugh Jackman is a former world's greatest hacker who has been legally outlawed from touching a computer but is lured into a plot by John Travolta and Halle Barrey to get money for anti?-terrosim terrorists? It's a movie with a twist ending that explicitly criticizes other better movies for how unrealistic they are. It's got the usual ridiculous hacking montage and famously is the movie that got Halle Barrey to go topless.

I couldn't disagree more. There's so much insanity to talk about. Like what's with the blonde girl that joins them before the bus? She says some stuff about being a struggling song writer, and I thought for sure she would sing eventually or write a song for Ellen to sing, but then she just excuses herself away at the hotel and walks outta the movie. What was the point of that character? Or how about Macoy? I swear like 80% of the dialog she says or is said to her is just exposition. She walks into a scene and just reads off a bunch of background information for the audience. Then there's the main actor, Pare. He reads every line in the exact same tone of voice and with the same attitude. Dude's a freaking robot. I just watched this movie, and I honestly have no idea what happened. They drive to the battery in a single cut, but getting back from it takes like 2 days. Pare is just hitting random bikers with the but of his gun in the middle of the street, and no one reacts to it. Then, Dafoe comes up and they exchange names for some reason, and Pare just drives off. Why did any of that happen? Why not just drive off to begin with? How is it that the cops do nothing about Ellen's kidnapping, but they're putting up roadblocks to stop them from returning, but then he blows up like 5 cop cars and holds a dozen of em at gun point only to walk straight into the local police stations and have them do nothing. Are these places in different countries? And I still have no idea what Ellen and Cody's big problem was. He says shes going places, and he can't carry her guitar. Who asked him to? He's fine with moving, since he's doing that at the end. Why can't he just move along with her tour? Characters are constantly having big realizations and emotional shifts off screen. Rick Morranis goes from insulting Cody to saying he wont stand in the way of Cody taking his girlfriend back between scenes. And I can't get over how huge of an asshole Morannis' cahracter is. he's supposed to be dating this woman, but we never see him show any sort of emotion towards her with the one exception of putting his arm around her when she sits next to him on the bus. I get it's hyper reality. I get that it's not pinning itself to a specific time or place, that Dafoe can wear all rubber and be squeaking as he walks but still be considered the big bad threat, that the audience is supposed to just fill in background for a bunch of characters based on the clear archetypes they are playing. Still, it's a crazy movie.

Ok, so I had to make an accoount for this movie. There was just so much, but I have to bring up a certain trend about The Rock's character. So he seems to be some kind of law enforcement officer. He's introduced in 5, where we see him end things by shooting a drug dealer in the head and then letting Vin Deisel and Paul Walker go free even though he has them caught. Then, in 6, he has Shaw caught and allows him to walk out. In that scene, it seems as though he is allowing Shaw to leave so as to save Mia, however he and the rest of the fast group immediately chase after and proceed to kill Shaw as well as his entire team in that miles long airplane chase. Finally, in 7, we see The Rock encouraging Vin Deisel to go after Jason Statham and strongly suggesting that Vin kill Statham rather than capture him. The final scene has The Rock, as well as numerous nameless armed gaurds, escorting Statham to a prison cell. All along the way The Rock is telling Statham how he wishes Statham would escape so that The Rock could meet him in the feild and kill him. It seems to me as though a pattern has been set where The Rock doesn't actually want to capture criminals. Instead, he wants to be sent after criminals whom he can pretend to be attempting to bring to justice only to end up killing them in combat in order to sate his bloodlust. This suggests that, in fast 5, when he allowed Walker and Deisel to go free, it may have been less so a matter of feeling indebted to them for saving his life and more a desire to avoid the neat, bloodless resolution that bringing them in would be and instead allow them to go free so that The Rock might encounter them in a firefight/unreasonable-chase-sequence and kill them in the future.