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stevencvgarcia
Reviews
Happy Death Day (2017)
This movie knew exactly what it was
I think people going to see this movie are expecting wayyyy to much from a slasher movie. I'm rating it based on what I expected, and I was certainly impressed. This movie wasn't trying to be anything more than another murder movie, but what made me want to see it was the idea of taking Groundhog Day (which it fully admitted to ripping the idea from) and turning it into a slasher film. I was actually surprised it held back on gore and blood. I was fully expecting it to be all the tropes of gross-out killings, but it was instead focused more on character development and the story. I admit the characters are a bit one-dimensional, but again, it's a slasher movie. It's trying to win any academy awards here. In many ways I think it's parodying those one-dimensional characters of college trope characters and the "last girl" in horror movies because it goes all-in on establishing the main characters as somebody you're meant to hate at first. The ending genuinely took me in a direction I didn't anticipate, and then it took me back to what I was expecting, but did it in a way that I felt fresh. All in all, I had fun watching this movie, which I think what this movie was meant to be: Fun.
The Dark Tower (2017)
This movie deserves wayyyy more than people are giving it
First off, I love Dark Tower. I've read all the books (currently listening to them now as a re-read), read all the graphic novels, read almost all of the connecting books, and even played the boring game they made for it (Discordia). This movie was the best way to adapt an otherwise slow story. Not that "slow" is bad, but if the director was going to do a straight adaptation, everyone would be asleep halfway through.
People are missing how subtle the adaptations are I think. Roland is poisoned in the second novel like he is in the movie, Jake is lured by a demon like he is in the movie, all the psychic kids are pulled straight from the last book, and the first book is about Roland, The Man in Black, and Jake. While I'm a bit confused as to why they gave Jake a friend who added nothing to the story (unless it's supposed to be Eddy!? Hmmmmm), and why they made him live in a rundown apartment instead of a rich house (I guess to make him more relatable), those are minor complaints compared to the rest of the movie.
Idris Elba IS Roland. I don't care what people say about Roland not being black, Elba captures Roland as a character brilliantly. Matthew McConaughey is FANTASTIC as the man in black. Didn't have faith in him honestly, but I was pleasantly surprised.
As for the spoiler part (and this is a big one if you've never read the books so STOP if you haven't read them), this is a sequel and it feels like a sequel ought to. Roland has the horn of Eld that he left behind in the series and now will bring to the Tower (hopefully in the next movies that DESERVE TO BE MADE) and The Man in Black mentions this is the "last time around." This added so much to the movie and I loved every second of it. This movie was made for those who read the series and honestly the opinions of those who haven't read the books mean nothing to me because they simply do not get what this movie means to those have read the books.
If people are too stupid to hate this movie because they never read the books or just didn't pick up on how clever the adaptation really is, then they need to not bring the rating of this movie down for their lack of perception.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
This movie was called "The Hobbit" right? Not "The Wood Elf"
I made the sad mistake of seeing the midnight showing for this movie,expecting to see another faithful installment of a Tolkien book. I understand movies take liberties that sometimes have well-received results, but when you take away the main characters for a chunk of the movie, add pointless, cheesy action-comedy, and a BEAR HUMPING A ROCK for a minute, these liberties become insulting.
Before I continue hating on the film, I will admit the movie holds some fantastic scenes. The scenes with the giant spiders were engrossing, well-paced, and completely rewarding, expounding on all the key elements of the book. Mainly, all the scenes that actually had Bilbo in them were spot-on.
Then we get a bear, the animal part of Beorn the "skin-changer," which I honestly could not tell you what it was doing, but all I saw was a silhouette of a bear mounting a boulder and humping it into submission. From there that's when the movie started going down hill for me (I suppose I should have taken that scene as a metaphor for how Jackson is going to treat all of us with this movie). Later we get a dragged out scene of the dwarfs and Bilbo in the barrels, and this is where Legolas pretty much takes up the rest of the movie until Bilbo sees Smaug. It's him stepping on the dwarfs' heads while shooting his apparently infinite supply of arrows and getting perfect shots every time. It gets old very quickly. I actually got up to use the bathroom at the beginning of this scene, thinking I wasn't going to miss anything important and that it would be over by the time I got back. When I did get back, it was still Legolas jumping on dwarf heads, and I asked my friend if I missed anything, and he just pointed to the screen and said, "Just more of this." If nothing else it was a nice intermission. It felt like Jackson saw some charts showing the popularity of Legolas and decided to throw away any art of adaptation and focus on crowd pleasing. Not only does Legolas get too much unneeded screen time, Jackson doesn't even expound on his character. It's more of him being even more perfect than he was in The Return of the King, and the one time he starts to lose a fight, he gets a bear-hug from an orc and a little nose-bleed.
Later another great scene comes with Bilbo talking to Smaug. I won't go into detail, but the conversation is well scripted and the actors do a superb job of giving all the tension of the riddle scene with Bilbo and Gollum from the first movie. Sadly, this perfectly good scene goes into another scene where Smaug suddenly becomes incompetent, failing to catch any of the dwarfs or Bilbo in its own home (where it's lived for over a hundred years) and becoming embarrassingly easy to out-smart.
I think if this movie was edited down by about an hour it would have been much better. I like the idea of adding Gandalf's story where the Hobbit only hinted at, but they get bogged down with tedious conversations and poorly done CGI. It was painful to watch how much it ruined what might have been an epic scene between Gandalf and The "Necromancer."
Mostly, all the parts Jackson did that followed the book (more or less) were very well done, but all the parts he added were either poorly presented or just tedious and unnecessary.