And That's My Post

Okay, wait...what?

Didn't Safe Haven come out before this year started? I could have sworn it was released in early- to mid-December, got bad reviews, and grossed an okay 100 million dollars.

Did this not happen? What's going on?

So, like, apparently it doesn't come out until Valentine's Day.

Are you telling me that I still have to deal with this movie's press tour?

Oh God.

Like Your Mother, Very Unnecessary

Some stories can be told in two hours. Actually, most stories can be told in less than that. The thing is, though, with many movies making millions and millions of dollars within a few weeks, some people are inclined to make, like, five sequels after just one (semi) successful movie.

The first Michael Bay-directed Transformers was released in 2007. Starring Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, the movie got a dismal 57% on Rotten Tomatoes. But it also grossed over 700 million dollars internationally. Soooo, you can guess what happened; Bay pushed out a sequel, and then another one, and soon to be another. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) got 20% and 36%, respectively (RT). The former grossed over 800 millions dollars while the latter hit over one billion, both internationally. I mean, does the story of the transformer robot things really take seven and a half  hours to tell? Obviously I realize that these movies were made solely for the profit, but it's just completely unnecessary, like the fourth movie, which is planned to be released in 2014.

The 2009 movie, Avatar, was both a critical (83%, RT) and economic (grossing 2.7 billion freaking dollars) hit. Before its release, director James Cameron said that, if successful, he would make sequels of the film. After the almost-three-billion-dollar success, the answer was pretty obvious: there would be a sequel. Actually, earlier, Cameron stated that he had a "trilogy-scaled arc" in mind for the movie.

Do there really need to be two more of this movie? Didn't the first one kind of wrap things all up? (This isn't rhetorical; I really have no idea. I started watching the three hour movie once but, you know, it's three hours.) It's really a gamble for Cameron to try and spread Avatar's success through two more movies, too.

Pirates of the Caribbean was actually made to have sequels. The first movie, PotC: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) was followed by PotC: Dead Man's Chest (2006), and PotC: At World's End (2007). It was all good and stuff. The story finished after the third and, while the critics' rating steadily went down (in order: 79%, 54%, 45%, RT), they grossed over 2.6 billion dollars worldwide. Then, for whatever reason, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was released in 2011. Well, it was the worst received of the franchise. Buuuut, it wasn't over then. Earlier this year, Disney announced that there would be a fifth freaking movie.

This unnecessary sequel trend is popular with animated movies, too. Like with Cars 2, Finding Nemo 2, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Toy Story Freaking 4, which is just sick. And don't even get me started on Ice Age.

So yeah, how about we just think of some new ways to make billions of dollars other than squeezing the juice out of the orange until it's just a little lump of pulp and peel even though we all know the juice in the cup has been enough for a while.

Just Call Me James Cameron

(Blogger's note: Except for please don't.)

So I had absolutely no idea what to write about today. Then, as I was lying awake in my bed last night, well I didn't think of something to write about, but I somehow got this idea into my mind and it morphed and evolved and all of a sudden I had a whole plot to what seemed like an awesome movie in my mind.

This seems to happen a lot. In a state of half-consciousness my mind goes everywhere at once and I come up with an idea for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

It's happened while I slept too. The weirdest dreams that don't even make sense when you speak them could be potentially huge blockbusters. You know, once you get past the confusing characters, huge plot holes, and copyright issues, my dreams could be the next Avatar.

After this one dream I had January 2012 (because I keep an effing log, bitches), I immediately thought, This would be a great movie. I don't know why, considering I didn't even know what was going on whilst writing it down. I'll shorten it up to save you the time and utter confusion.

Last night I had a really long dream. I was like, in my furnace room (which wasn't supposed to be the furnace room) and I had to go through this weird obstacle course thing. I skipped the first step, then finished it, but had to do it because I didn't do the first part. The first step was something really difficult that I couldn't accomplish, but somehow got past it.

Then I was finishing the rest when I ended up in the attic of some weird barn. This was at the end of the obstacle course; I couldn't leave, though, because there was air coming up from the ledge of the exit (which was a known fact, that you couldn't leave then).

Anyway, I was like, "How are we going to get out now?" And then Joseph Gordon-Levitt was kind of being a dumb ass and jumped off the thing all like, "I can go through!" Well, he couldn't go through and died. I was like, "I'll say he died a hero: trying to save us."

Bailey grabbed me and we jumped through the doorway of the barn. She told me that, since she skipped the first steps, she was able to break the barrier of the door that killed Joseph Gordon-Levitt and go through.

It all made sense in my head.

(This is where the copyright problem kicks in.) So we got out of the obstacle course and were now in this field and all the Harry Potter characters were frozen in time, but they were all hugging so I assumed it was right after the defeat of Voldemort. I then realized that that was why we had to complete the obstacle course: to save the characters from being frozen in time forever, and we failed.

My friend posted something on her Tumblr a while ago about something similar, although she referred to it as “New-York-Times Bestseller Potential”. (And that's where we stand. Me, movies. Her, books.)

“So I had a dream last night...There was mystery. There was drama. There was romance. Some guy was out killing people, and I was working with these two other guys on the case. I don’t remember anything except that last five minutes of it, where we’re in the morgue—and the tall guy, the smart one who was in charge—-is having an epiphany on who the killer is. He leans forward, savagly over the dead body and tells us the body is a fake, that the real “victim” is actually alive—because his eyes are fake or something. He’s still staring intensely at the fake eyes and he opens his mouth to tell us who the killer was, where the real victim is, how it all occured—and in the preternatural, third person [omniscient] way, I knew that it was all going to be brilliant, intelligent, thrilling—-and then my fucking alarm went off.”

Why is it when we're in lesser states of consciousness, do we weave what seem to us like the best ideas for movies/books. I mean, even Ernest Hemingway wrote his best work drunk off of his ass. And can we really believe that some crazy ass shit like Inception or Fight Club were first thought of by someone who was sober or awake or even sane?

DreamWorks the Understated

(Blogger's note: Feel free to not even read this post. But seriously. I just gave up. It's Super Bowl Sunday and I sort of put off just this one post, which I don't like very much, but now I want to go and eat delicious food whilst watching burly men pummel each other and maybe there will be another commercial with Betty White in it. Anyway, I just hit word three hundred and five so I'm done here.)

Chances are, no matter how old you are, you’ve heard of the film studio DreamWorks. One division most are familiar with’s technical name is DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (wait. Okay, so Wikipedia just informed me that it’s actually owned by independent businesses now, which totally doesn’t even make any sense, but okay), which releases only, you guessed it, animated films. It’s the one with the opening that has the little guy sitting on the moon and fishing. Yeah, that. It’s also the second highest grossing animation studio, right behind Pixar.

Anyway, I started to look into DreamWorks because I had recently watched some of their animated movies whilst babysitting and thought I saw a weird theme in a good number of them. As I started a post, though, I realized that some of the movies I was using weren’t actually DreamWorks (damn you, Universal), but still figured that I could pull a semi-decent post out of my ass, which is what this is.

Most people think that Pixar is, like, the best animation studio because of its (usually) super creative and funny and also a little bit morbid movies, because, well, it is. I think that DreamWorks has a lot of really good movies, though, smushed between its big-earning franchises, like The Road to El Dorado and The Prince of Egypt.

So yeah that's this post for you thanks for reading please don't throw those tomatoes.

You've Got Seattle

I don't make very good decisions. I mean, some of them don't cause a huge problem, but others...others do. This post, though, is just about one of those that didn't cause a big problem. Just some confusion and light swearing.

A year or so ago, I was high on the fact that my family had just gotten a DVR and decided to record just about everything that wasn't a Twilight movie. Why? Because I could. So, I was going through the list of things I could watch and stumbled upon Sleepless in Seattle (1993), about a widow (Tom Hanks), Sam, whose son is so intent on his dad finding another wife that he calls into a radio station and makes his dad talk about losing her. All these women listening to the show send Sam letters with their panties enclosed, including Annie (Meg Ryan). Some really boring stuff happens and they end up meeting at the top of the Empire State Building. That's the movie.

Now I guess watching it wouldn't have been so bad except for that, almost immediately afterward, I watched another nineties romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, You've Got Mail. (Apparently these guys starred in three romcoms together in the nineties. THREE. The other being Joe Versus the Volcano (1990).)

You've Got Mail is about these two bookstore owners, Kathleen, who owns a local one, and Joe, who owns one of many in a chain. They pretty much hate each other, especially since Joe's store takes business away from Kathleen's. Unbeknownst to them, though, they actually chat online with each other; she as “Shopgirl” and he as “NY152”. They have no idea who the other one is, but are totally into each other, which just is really creepy. Anyway, their outside hatred continues while their online love blossoms. More stuff happens and then they find out about one another and stop hating each other.

I mean, these movies both have totally different plots and character developments and stuff, but I still get them confused because of how close in time they are and also, ummm, the effing actors.

Imagine watching Nicholas Sparks movie after Nicholas Sparks movies and then being told to deferential perfectly between them all. Well, you can't, because those things are pretty much exactly the same except for the characters' names.

Let's just pretend that these are the same sort of thing.

Instill Us With Your Daddy Issues

I babysit a lot, which means that, to keep the little turds quiet for an hour and a half, I mostly just pop in a movie for them. Of course I could do something like play games with them, but that requires effort and also I'm lazy and movies are sort of educational, right?

So after watching a good amount of children's animated films, I've kind of noticed that too many of them have characters who have, like, daddy issues (or pretty much just problems with their parent(s), but let's call those problems daddy issues because I've already got it in the title). These cause the film's main characters to go to extreme lengths of rebellion.

This one boy I babysit absolutely loves Despicable Me. He watches it about every time I go there and then will make me replay it again and again. I mean, whatever. It's a cute movie. The main character, a super-villain named Gru, has these little flash-backs to when he was younger and how his mom wouldn't pay any attention to him (mommy issues?). Because of his mother's lack of affection, Gru goes takes extreme measures to try and impress her, like attempting to steal “da moooooon”, which isn't very safe at all.

In Shrek, the princess Fiona's parents literally lock her up in some far away palace for years. There's definitely something wrong with that. To get back at them, she marries an ogre. I mean, you can't possibly believe that Fiona married Shrek for love. That thing is hideous. The marriage was obviously some crazy ploy to get back at her parents.

You already know how I feel about Brave. It still fits into this category, though. As Merida's mother's reigns pull tighter around her, she lashes out and goes into a dark forest alone and then just waltzes into a witch's cave. Like, so safe.

Now to some actual daddy issues: Hiccup, a smart, lonely, wimpy guy who only wants his dad's approval. To get it, though, he has to capture an extremely dangerous dragon. Well, he ends up deciding to raise it instead (okay?). (BTW this is about How to Train Your Dragon)

In the 2008 film Kung Fu Panda, Po becomes the chosen kung fu warrior and is told to defeat this crazy ass tiger that just escaped from prison. All of this after his father, who completely doesn't understand Po, tries to get him to take over the family business of selling noodles.

And lastly, Finding Nemo. You know the story. Nemo, a clownfish set on being independent, breaks away from his father's tight hold and touches the butt, then gets kidnapped by some scuba divers.

I don't know if these filmmakers are trying to instill some privy message about how, no matter how much you hate your parents and how they treat you now, as long as you fight back and screw something up really badly, it'll all turn out okay. Maybe this is why our generation is so effed up.

A Time to Hate

My sister is a lady of irrational hatred.

Well that's actually not true. Karalee's not a lady in the slightest (her iTunes password is hughjackmanstwoballs and she once asked me if I would rather do Nick Carter or all the One Direction boys at once), but she does hate things for no reason at all. Actors especially. Sure, she doesn't like people like Kristen Stewart or Anna Kendrick, but she has reasons for those, like the fact that they star in movies she absolutely hates (that is a reason I can agree with).

Ever since I can remember her being acquainted with certain actors, though, she's really just had it out for them. Of the long list, some of the most hated are Bradley Cooper, Matthew McConaughey, Jeremy Renner, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Whenever I bring up her hatred towards one of them and ask why she has it, she usually goes for their looks. I mean, these actors are all considered attractive by the public, if not in conventional ways, but Karalee is just a judgmental bitch. It's not just the looks.

If I have to guess, I think her hatred comes from seeing some of the actors playing douchebags in movies. Mostly this just refers to Cooper (d-bag in He's Just Not That Into You, The Hangover Part I-III) and McConaughey (like every movie 2000-2009) . This sort of happens a lot. You're so used to seeing these men as different people in movies that sometimes you forget that they're not always like their characters in real life.

For Renner and Cumberbatch, however, I would have to go a little shrink on the problem, because the problem seems to be deeper than just douchebaggery. Both of them have starred in movies with another actor my sister likes. The Avengers not only starred Renner, but also Chris Evans. Cumberbatch was in War Horse with Tom Hiddleston. And when her beloved were getting side-stepped by these other actors, I'm sure my sister got defensive and fought back with a mature, “Yeah, well he's ugly!”

When asked to comment on this subject (over Tumblr, nonetheless), Karalee said, “Jeremy Renner’s voice really bugs me, like he always has some food in there or something. And Bradley Cooper always just plays jerks, so maybe I can’t differentiate between his roles and real life, and idk his face annoys me too.” So yeah.

It's possible for her to get over this, though. She used to hate Channing Tatum, then I think she saw Magic Mike and it went away (wonder how that happened...) So I guess the remedy to her hatred is just starring in a movie as a male stripper. It's only that easy.