Here I am, as promised. So, here goes

I, Robot - watched it last night. As I said, it's clearly a love story between one man and his Converse. Seriously, he loves those things.

Gigi, the wedding's next March

In the first five minutes of the film, you have him opening the packet and staring at his new babies lovingly. Then a close up of him putting them on, after which he walks to his grandma's, with plenty of full body shots from the side. Then, at his dear old gran's, he starts giving her a product pitch. Even his boss says "nice shoes". It's like they took the script of the film, then squeezed in as many references to footwear as possible. The only movie I've ever seen that has more blatant product placement is Transporter 2, where the first five minutes are basically a car ad for Audi.

Having said that though, I really do like I, Robot. It's a solid storyline that doesn't have tooo many clichés (which is really rare for Hollywood. Really, really rare). It's well-acted and has genuinely funny moments ("look, I understand you've experienced a loss, but this relationship just can't work. I mean, you're a cat. I'm black. I'm not going to be hurt again. " comes to mind, as does his response to being asked if he ever had a normal day: "Yeah. Once. It was a thursday"). Some of it does seem a little too... unlikely, mainly that Detective Del Spooner seems to be the only Robo-phobe in the world (you just know there'd be people preaching on street corners) and the mob being extremely un-armed against the robots (I wouldn't go up against something that was stronger, and smarter than me with a baseball bat. If you do that, you deserve the beating you get). Despite these though, it's a good film. I recommend.

So, Eclipse. Premièred on Thursday, general pre-release thingy yesterday. I'm hazy on the details, because I don't actually care that much (I like to be honest with things like this). After all my ardous research (five minutes on google) I was still unable to turn up figures for how well it did financially or stuff like that. What I did find however was an amusing little story about the preview. Apparently, for whatever reason (I like to think they were just screwing with the Twitards) the main names - RPatz, KrisStew and TayLau (possibly the daftest nicknames in movie history) - didn't come to the première of it. As you can imagine, the Twitards were incandescent (and not in the sparklepire sense that Meyer uses) and showed up wearing t-shirts saying that they'd been "Rob-bed" and suchlike. One of the things I found funniest about this was a comment on a video showing them that simply pointed out that despite knowing about this in enough time to get the shirts printed, they obviously weren't angry enough not to show up...

That's all for now. See you tomorrow. Or whenever.

MusicalCynic

Another day, another post. This is going to be a short one, and I'm just going to put things to cover more fully tomorrow.

I decided to go through some of my old DVD's and post reviews/comments and I've started with I, Robot, the story of one man's love affair with a pair of converse. And there's some stuff about robots as well, but that's just filler.

I spent yesterday in the Houses of Parliaments, our seat of government. Was pretty cool. Chilled on the roof with an MP for a bit. As you do, y'know.

Still reading Shame, so no news on that - other than it's a pretty weird book, which is pretty par for the course with Rushdie. More on that later.

Eclipse comes out tonight in England. Probably going to have the same result over here as in the US ($30 MILLION!!!!). So again, more will be mentioned tomorrow.

Anyway. I'm off. Enjoy yourselves and I'll see you here tomorrow (Well. Not actually see, but you know what I me - sod it, I'm off)

MusicalCynic

So. New day, new post. Having got all that annoying "introduction" stuff out of the way, I can now talk about stuff. So, here goes.

Eclipse came out today, 'bout midnight-ish and made something like $30 million in it's first screening. I'll repeat - $30 million, first screening. My brain basically just shut down from the sheer enormity of that number. Some #1 films don't make that much in their first WEEKEND and Eclipse did it in ONE SCREENING. I'll give you a minute to work out the sort of royalties Meyer is making from this thing. Seriously, go ahead. I'll wait.

Back again? If you're anything like me, you'll have come up with the figure of $ashitload. Much as I dislike Meyer's actual writing, she certainly knows how to sell her stuff. I think her plans for the future probably involve buying Hawaii and a whole load of Edward look-alikes and just going nuts.

Anyway, enough of me going mad with jealousy over Eclipse ticket sales ($30,000,000 zomg). Still on the subject of movies though, The Last Airbender was recently released and has had almost universally dismal reviews. And when I say dismal, I really, really mean it. By the sounds of it it's pretty much the final nail in M. Night Shamalyan's coffin. Selected comments from Rotten Tomatoes:

"The addition of the 3-D is obviously an afterthought, and in most scenes it's pretty bad. Almost as bad as the writing and the acting. Almost."

"A soul-crushing disaster made worse by unnecessary, counterproductive 3-D, The Last Airbender fails to immediately qualify as the worst film of the summer only by virtue of the year's abundance of other candidates."

In case you were wondering, Rotten Tomatoes currently has it at a score of 5%, although it has fluctuated between 0% and 5%. Not quite the tour de force some people (including presumably M. Night himself) were hoping for.

Another major criticism, along with the leaden dialogue, acting, visual effects, 3D and probably costume design (because why the hell not, really) is the seemingly casual racism in the casting, as seemingly all of the good guys are white. It's not even that this is how it was originally written, as in the original series they were Asian. But M. Night Shamalyan (I CANNOT GET OVER THE COOLNESS OF HIS NAME) has decided that the good guys should be white, dammit and has cast them as such. Of course, the bad guys all seem to be Asian (the main antagonist is Dev Patel, who starred in Slumdog Millionaire. Kind of a step down, huh?). So to recap, crap film, borderline racist casting and so many faults that it's almost hard to know where to begin. Unless you're this guy, that is who gave it a delightfully scathing review. BURRNNNNNNNNN.

I think that's pretty much me done for the day. I would post about a book, but I'm a bit behind on my reading and I've got nothing literary for ya. I am just about to start Shame, by Salman Rushdie (he of the Fatwa of Dooooooom), so I should have something to say about that in a day or two.

Until next time then.

MusicalCynic.