20141005: Fantasy Review--Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. American live action feature length film, 2013, PG13, 132 minutes, action, adventure, fantasy.  Made in Canada.  English dialog for the most part.
2. IMDB: 7.1/10.0 from 282,527 audience ratings. Estimated budget, 190 million USD.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 72% on the meter; 77% liked it from 185,401 audience ratings.
4. I saw this film on HBO.
5. Directed by: Guillermo del Toro.
6. Starring: Idris Elba as Stacker Pentecost, Charlie Hunnam as Raleigh Becket, Rinko Kikuchi as Mako Mori, Charlie Day as Dr Newton Geiszler, Burn Gorman as Gottlieb, Max Martini as Herc Hansen, Robert Kazinsky as Chuck Hansen, Ron Perlman as Hannibal Chau.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Irresponsible and poorly trained pilots fly incredibly stupid looking giant exoskeletons (Jaegers) into battle against powerful aliens (the Kaiju) from another dimension.


2. I have liked del Toro's films in the past, but this was terrible.  There was a lot of action, there was a lot of destruction, many people were killed, but this was still a bad movie.


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: The worst episode of MMPR ever made.
2. Here MMPR is the acronym for "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers."
3. One of ten.  Two black holes for screenplay and SFX.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 0/10 Absurdly bad SFX.  No parts of the film looked good.


2. Sound: 2/10 So many odd choices, plus tons of irrelevant noise.


3. Acting: 3/10 Idris Elba, Max Martini, and Ron Perlman let us know that acting is still possible even in the face was such a poor story, worse writing, and laughable action.  The Gieszler/Gottlieb pair were unfunny, unconvincing, undeserving of trust, and bloody irritating.


4. Screenplay: 0/10 Proof that modern films need neither a solid screenplay nor in-depth acting by all players to make lots of money.

20130908: Action Review--Tokyo Gore Police

Name: Tokyo Gore Police (2008)
IMDb: link to Tokyo Gore Police page

Genres: Action, Horror SFF.    Country of origin: Japan

Cast: Eihi Shiina as Ruka, Itsuji Itao as Keyman, Yukihide Benny as Tokyo Police Chief, Jiji Bû as Barabara-Man, Ikuko Sawada as Independent Bar Owner, Cay Izumi as Dog Girl, Keisuke Horibe as Ruka's Father, Shun Sugata as Tokyo Police Commissioner, Tak Sakaguchi as Koji Tanaka.

Directed by: Yoshihiro Nishimura. Written by: Yoshihiro Nishimura, Maki Mizui, Kengo Kaji

Ruka

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
An 'engineer' is a mutant/sick person who can convert wounds to weapons. The police in near future Japan are privatized, and wear armor that has some superficial resemblance to samurai armor of the past.

Ruka is an 'engineer hunter' in the police; that is, a skilled killer who can find an engineer's weak spot faster than the engineer can kill her. Ruka's self-cutting is revealed in flashbacks and just before her first fight with an engineer.  Her birthday party (plus congratulations for 50 engineer kills) was pure camp.

Those are the 'good old days' at the beginning of the film.

Delineation of conflicts:
The engineers and the police are clearly at war. The engineers raid police headquarters and kill several cops. The battle frenzy heightens.

Ruka's allegiance to the police cause is converted to zeal for revenge after the police kill her one true friend in the world, and she learns from a strong engineer (Key Man) the true fate of her father.

Resolution:
Ruka beheads the four cops who killed her friend, and the fight is on.

The ultimate fight is between Ruka and her second father, the head of the police, the man who ordered her father killed.  Unfortunately, this was also one of the most ridiculous and badly filmed stage fights I've ever seen.

One line summary: Ruka is out to avenge her father's death at the hands of crooked cops; so is her adversary, Key Man.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 2/10 Often dark with insufficient contrast and soft focus.  Framing mistakes, jumpy camera work.  Panning with blur.  Blood on the lens, too many times.  The blood here is Texas Longhorn orange; that is, not very red.  Yellow and orange filters applied for no apparent reason.

Sound: 2/10 Weak. The incidental music is often amateurish in composition, poor in quality, and hollow sounding.  At times it seems the actors are not miked properly.  There was a significant number of lines spoken in Japanese that had no related English subtitles.  This did not help following the plot.

Acting: 1/10 There are too many actors with total lack of affect: stone faced and silent without much body English.  The protagonist is the prime example.  Also, her fight movements are often out of synch by one to five seconds, as if reacting to off-camera cues after failing to execute.

Screenplay: 1/10 Gallons of blood sprayed, followed by zero landing on actors' clothes.  This repeated a dozen times or so. Acquaintance with the laws of physics and logic is out the window.  Given that, we're down to special effects and character motivation.  The SFX were really bad, so motivation would have to drive the plot. Motivation is fairly well lost as well. One segment goes to another with little or no explanation.  The plot is more of an archipelago than a road from here to there.

Special Effects: 1/10 Cheesy blood spatter. Enough blood to float small boats.  Badly done fake chopped off body parts.  Blood pipes made obvious when a limb or neck or finger is sliced off.

This is supposed to be Tokyo Shock, or live action blood-spatter anime.

As a gore-fest and gross-out fest, this was high on quantity, but low on quality.  Bloodletting, blood spray, body violations, public groping, eating insects, multiple commercials for self-cutting tools; the game 'remote control exterminate', breasts sliced in half, then stitched together with thick cords; using a freshly cut off head as a soccer ball; a golden shower, a penis cannon, pointless murder after pointless murder while the cops are on the rampage, acid spraying breasts, a flying-fist gun.  Too much, and too much of it hokey.

Final Rating: 1/10 Three black holes for cinematography, special effects, and acting.

20130902: SFF review--2 Headed Shark Attack

Name: 2 headed Shark Attack (2012)
IMDb: link to 2 Headed Shark Attack page

Genres: Creature Feature, Horror   Country of Origin: USA.

Cast: Charlie O'Connell as Professor Babish, Carmen Electra as Anne Babish, Brooke Hogan as Kate, David Gallegos as Paul.

Directed by: Christopher Ray. Written by: Edward DeRuiter (story), H. Perry Horton (screenplay).

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
A university sponsored excursion at sea runs into trouble when the undersized boat hits a shark head-on and kills it.  The captain, Professor Babish, dislodges the shark.  It flows back to the propellers and breaks them.  As a side benefit, the radio tower snaps off, and they act like this is a permanent problem.  That was a jump the shark moment; one knows the rest of the film will be nonsense at best.

There is a nearby atoll.  The students are ferried there while the boat gets put back together.  The first shark's death attracts the two-headed shark.

Delineation of conflicts:
The 2 headed shark is hungry, and apparently irritable.  The humans would like to stay alive, and return to their normal lives, but their lack of survival skills hampers this.

The atoll is unstable, and falls apart toward the end of the video. The death toll rises as the humans attempt to fix things in a very non-coordinated fashion.

Resolution:
This is a creature feature elimination derby, where the shark does the eliminating. Resolution here is about how many humans survive, and who they are.

One line summary: Jumps the shark times two.

Statistics: 

Cinematography: 7/10 Usually well done: sufficient light, good colour palettes, reasonable framing.

Sound: 7/10 With few exceptions, well done.

Acting: 2/10 The actors, other than the four named above, serve only as eye candy.

Screenplay: 0/10 The video was another elimination derby, rather like a reality show.  Just about everyone gets killed by the real star of the show, the two-headed shark.  Most of the lines in the film are irrelevant.  The character development was next to none, and very few of the lines are about interactions or development of motivations.

I saw this on the SyFy channel, which is noted for substituting commercials for footage in the film.  On SyFy, the film is PG.

Special Effects: 5/10  The two-headed shark was sort of interesting from a technical standpoint.  The two heads would switch off who was holding the person, and who was chewing.  Alternately, the shark would eat two people at once.

Final Rating: 1/10 Two black holes for screenplay and acting.