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[Cross-posted from 4:12.]
Comic book hero movies and summer blockbusters haven't necessarily been good. Ever. Of course there are a few gems out there. That's only natural. I mean, last summer the only movie we had to look forward to that fit that profile - based on a comic book, huge budget summer blockbuster, lots of explosions - was the infamous Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. So I understand why anyone might be wary when it comes to 2010's The A-Team.
But it was really good.
That's right. I liked it a lot.
First of all, the cast was amazing. Obviously, the original team was built perfectly - you've got the brains, brawn, charm, and the wild card. None of them would be particularly amazing alone, but when you bring their very specific talents together, the team is basically unstoppable. The team in the movie specifically was all that and more. Liam Neeson does wonderfully as the no-nonsense, intelligent, plan-it guy slash killing machine. No question there. A part towards the end I found myself thinking, "Of course he's not dead, didn't you see Taken?" Bradley Cooper, of Hangover fame had me nervous for a little while. Before I saw the film, I was thinking, "How could this charmer from The Hangover POSSIBLY fit in with Liam Neeson the BAMF in an action hero movie?," but he worked so well as Face. Of course, I don't know the original A-Team, but his character was charming, silly, and excellently executed. Then, of course, there was Sharlto Copley, better known as Wikus from District 9. Initially, I was worried he was just going to be a stereotype of a crazy guy, because that's definitely how he came off in the beginning, but he was pretty amazing. He had me laughing much of the movie through, and when things got rough, he pulled something crazy out of his bum and saved entire operations. For instance [spoiler], he and B.A. are trying to clear customs and he was supposed to be the rabbi and B.A. was supposed to be from an African country but their passports get switched, so to keep his cover, Murdock ends up improvising Swahili, and it worked. Then there was B.A., played by Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson, an actor I have never seen or heard of before, though apparently he was in one of Jesson's favourites, The Midnight Meat Train. He was also very good - he never tried to be Mr. T., which I think was very appropriate, and he filled out the character quite nicely, bringing him a human side and a charm that one might not expect from a comic book depiction of "the muscle". Overall, the acting was exceptional and the characters all worked together wonderfully.
The plot was fairly decent too - it wasn't about taking down bad guys or saving the world so much as clearing their own names. But for that reason [spoiler], the ending was unsatisfactory. They clear their names but "breaking out of prison is still illegal," so they have to go back in. Face got his ex back, too, which at first bugged me a lot - she doesn't deserve him - but [spoiler] she actually slips him the key to the handcuffs through an overly-passionate kiss, leaving the ending wide open. Though if the cast is the same and the plot is as good, I would definitely not mind seeing a sequel in a couple years.
The effects were great but the CGI was never overwhelming, which is typically a problem that's been bothering me a lot in more recent movies.
There were also times where the dialogue was a little... cheesey... bordering on awful. But the chemistry of the actors and the light-hearted feel of the whole movie more than make up for any faults. I would be lying if I said anything short of "I loved it". I highly recommend this movie - and face it, if you want to see a movie this summer, your other options are kids' movies [though Toy Story 3 was amazing and I've heard good things about Despicable Me, they're simply not for everybody], Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Twilight Saga: Eclipse. So weigh your options carefully : I think you'll find that, besides Toy Story 3 if you're into it, The A-Team will be the best movie you see all summer.
Unless Inception turns out to be really good.
On the train home from college, today, I finished A Study In Scarlet, the first of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The book reads like 'one of those old books', but I loved it all the same.
The narrative is from Watson's point of view, following him home from Afghanistan, through the adventure of finding a roommate, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, learning about what sort of person he is, and then watching him solve a mystery. Part II takes on a strikingly different tone, as it is told from an omniscient third-person point of view. This is the story of victims of the Mormon community, of the murderers, turned victims themselves in London, and of the vengeful man Holmes arrests in his own apartment. After that tale, Watson's narrative resumes and the case is brought to a close.
I really liked this book. It is not necessarily a book you can analyse AP-English style, like A Brave New World was; or perhaps it is, but the reader does not feel the distinct need to do so. The part in the desert reads like a historical fan-fic, bringing in familiar characters like the Salt Lake Mormons, and, more specifically, an appearance by Brigham Young, but that does not mean it is bad. It reads not only well but beautifully, with vivid descriptions and a captivating storyline. Furthermore, as the first of the Holmes stories, the reader needs no background knowledge to understand the characters; Doyle introduces them for the first time here. This book is a wonderful read and I would highly recommend it. It's a great place to start for any aspiring Sherlock Holmes fan [like me], or for anybody looking for a fun story into which one can escape.
On a side note: I'd known that the character, House, was loosely based on Holmes, and after reading the first descriptions of him, I could definitely see it, right down to being a wonderful musician. You'll have to read it and see for yourself!
Fringe - Season 2, Episode 7: "Of Human Action". Original Air Date: 12 Nov 09.
The episode opens with cops pulling in to save a kidnap victim, but one walks himself off a roof and one shoots all the other cops and then herself. When the team arrives, Walter guesses hypnosis, but Peter says it can't be that because hypnosis won't make you do anything you wouldn't do yourself. After more thought, Walter considers mind control as a completely viable option. Studying the body of a corpse, Walter tries to figure out a way to combat the mind control, and they stage a way to get the kid back. Except it turns out the kid, Tyler, is really the kidnapper, and he kidnaps Peter! Walter has trouble letting go of Peter, and he can't work without him. Meanwhile, Peter is trying desperately to fight Tyler's control, but can't. Eventually, he brings him to a strip club. He keeps trying to dissuade Tyler, but the kid is set in his course. He tells Peter that his father has lied to him all of his life, telling him that his mother was dead when in fact she was alive and well in Maryland, and that's why he's doing this. Walter figures out another way to block the mind control, with an EMT like in The Matrix I guess, and so they use it on the kid. Peter purposefully crashes his father's car in Tyler's moments of disempowerment. They wean the kid off of the drugs he'd been on and his powers go away. In the end, Walter and Peter share a sweet scene: Walter makes Peter crêpes and talks to him about when he was little and his mother. But then, we see Nina writing an email to Mr. Bell, of all people. She says that "one of the Tylers" showed mind control ability but that it had unintended consequences, and he went looking for his "surrogate mother" and so she is discontinuing the research completely, and there's a shot of Tyler's father wheeling Tyler into a room filled with Tylers!
This episode leaves a lot more questions than answers: surrogate mother? ONE of the Tylers? WHAT?! And what IS Nina up to? What are they planning?! Aaaah! I liked it! But I was also incredibly worried when I watched this episode. The bonds the watcher has 'created' with the characters are really put to the test watching this, which is somewhat embarrassing to admit.... :D
TV right now is killing me. I hate baseball and Teen Jeopardy.
Stupid baseball. Fox is 'hosting' the World Series. Baseball is what made me watch House forty-five minutes late. Now it's the reason that Fringe, House, and Glee are all post-poned until the series is over. UGH. I'm sorry, sports fans. I really am. But isn't this what we have ESPN for?
Stupid Teen Jeopardy! Oh my gosh. I get really frustrated watching them. I don't think I'm really smart enough to be on the show, but I'd like to be, and I'm the same age as the kids on the teen tournament, but I'm answering the regular questions. I wish I had watched way back when Meryl was on it. I don't even remember why I didn't. But these kids... they played a clip of a bassoon, which has a very specific timbre, and the only person to ring it said 'violin'. No one else knew. There are always plenty of stupid little things like that. As an adult, I'll probably forgive them, like how I can forgive the little middle schoolers for not answering certain very simple questions. But I am the same age as these people, so I get very upset. And the simpleness of the questions is almost insulting! If I were on that show, especially tonight's episode, I would have been genuinely insulted if the questions were as easy as they were. And tonight's final! "There's a statue of him at the Baker street subway station." Girl answered Shakespeare. SERIOUSLY?
So I'm very excited for the next few weeks of television. Teen Jeopardy will be over after another week, and my regular daily trivia show can resume; the World Series will finally end, and we can go back to what's really important, House, Fringe, and Glee!
Heroes - Season 4, Episode 6: "Strange Attractors". Original Air Date: 26 Oct 09.
This was a fun, sad, and scary episode. It starts with sex - Sylar and Mrs. Parkman? Oh wait. That's Matt. Or.... What? Apparently Sylar has been taking over Matt's body little by little and it's driving Matt insane. His storyline quickly heats up, and eventually, he realises that the only way to protect his family from Sylar's control is to leave, and he tries to explain this to Janice. She insists that he stays in the house and she'll go. After she leaves, Matt starts drinking and he realises it's making Sylar hurt. He drinks and drinks until Sylar disappears, but then he blacks out. Janice comes back with the policeman who'd been helping Matt through therapy, and they wait until he wakes up. But now it's Sylar in control of the body and Matt is just the premonition; he has no control whatsoever. Scary!
There's also a Claire and Gretchen storyline. They get kidnapped and taken to some faraway location, which turns out to be a slaughterhouse, to do some initiation thing for the sorority. During the scavenger hunt there, Invisibitch tries to kill Gretchen twice; eventually there's a fight, and Claire ends up slightly impaled. Of course, that's no problem for her or Gretchen, but for the other two pledges, well let's just say they were more than a little freaked out. And this might mean uprooting Claire all over again. Sad!
And then there's Jeremy. He's being kept in the town jail and Noah can't get him out. He calls in a favour with Tracy Strauss, and he forges some paper work that makes her Jeremy's 'aunt' so that she can sign him out of jail. A brief meeting between Tracy and Samuel leaves Tracy wondering whether she should bring Jeremy to the carnival where he'll be at "home" or give him a new life where he can be invisible. When they finally get him out, half the town is lined up outside in protestation, and one man breaks through the police line and starts threatening him. Jeremy uses his power and kills the man and walks back into the jail. That night, a few cops decide to take the law into their own hands; they chain him to a pick-up truck and they drive away, leaving him dead. Noah is, of course, very upset, knowing that he failed him, and Tracy is equally as upset. Then Samuel comes in and destroys the police station with his brainnn.
And some little comments: I don't like the way they shoot Matt in close-ups, and Gretchen has the same IKEA comforter as I have at home! ♥ A fun quote from Gretchen: "Sounds like some crazy-ass conspiracy theory. Which... pretty much describes your entire life."
It was a good episode. It was gripping, to use the traditional review language. I wanted to keep watching, and I was genuinely upset when it was over because I wanted to keep watching. I'm a little tired and way behind on watching, so that's about all the opinion you'll get. Have fun watching this one!
House - Season 4, Episode 5: "Tabula Rasa". Original Air Date: 19 Oct 09.
This episode was called "Tabula Rasa" - because every show out there needs an episode called "Tabula Rasa". If you don't know, it means "Clean Slate", so it's symbolic.
So we left off with Hiro and Peter: Hiro appears in Peter's apartment and passes out. In the beginning of this installment, we see Hiro lying in a hospital bed with Peter at his side. Hiro thinks he's there to save Peter, but Peter thinks it's up to him to save Hiro. Oh you boys and your silly Jesus complexes... Peter takes Hiro's ability and uses it to go save Hiro's life, but not before telling Emma [the deaf woman] to talk to Hiro about her ability. She does, but all she wants is an 'off switch', even though Hiro's all for the embracing yourself as you are point of view.
Okay, now it's time for my interjection: HIRO IS SO CUTE!! ♥ :3 Yup.
Hiro's trying to prove to Emma that her powers are good, and he does a magic show for some hospital patients and staff, including making Emma 'disappear'. I think it worked :D
After the show, Hiro's back in bed and Emma tells him he needs to stay there. He tells her about his friend, Charlie, and how you have to stay strong and happy in the face of death. But then he realised he left Charlie off of his list [of wrongs to right and people to save]!!
By the end of the episode, Hiro spontaneously disappears again, which freaks Emma and Peter out, a lot.
So Peter ends up in Noah's bathroom because he hasn't teleported in a while. He explains his predicament to HRG, and Claire says that she should just give Hiro some of her blood; Noah negates this solution, saying that a brain tumour is living tissue, and Claire's regenerative power would only make the tumour grow. But he does remember a boy they 'bagged and tagged' a few years ago, named Jeremy, who had healing power [like Linderman!], so he and Peter go to pay him a visit.
They find the house that Jeremy lives in, but all the plants in the yard and the bird on the porch are dead, and the place reeks of death. When they go inside, they find the parents, dead, in their armchairs [it's pretty disturbing, lol]. Noah explains that the kid possesses not only the power to give life, but also to take it away. A very frightened Jeremy starts shooting at them with a shotgun: he wants to scare them away. When Noah finally gets close enough to talk to him, Jeremy makes a terribly conffesion: "Everything I touch... dies."
As Noah tries to convince Jeremy that this can't be true, Peter appears beside them and Jeremy shoots him from an extremely close range! NOOOO PETER WTF NOOOOO!!! Noah pleads with Jeremy to save Peter's life, and after much convincing, he finally does. Yay! :D
In the end, Peter absorbs Jeremy's power so he can bring it back to heal Hiro. Noah is very sweet with Jeremy because he feels he let him down way back when, so he fixes the house to make it look like the parents died of Carbon Monoxide poisoning.
But, when Peter gets back, Hiro's already vanished!
While all of this is happening, Nathlar is still in the hands of the carnies. Samuel Sullivan, the guy I've been calling King Carnie [at least to myself, lol], calls Nathlar 'Sylar', but he doesn't respond. He says that according to the police, his name is Gabriel. When Samuel asks him to take a deep breath and tell him the first name that comes to mind, Nathlar says, "Call me Nathan." Samuel is confused. But, for all his niceness, Samuel obviously has plans for Nathlar, and he's using Lydia to pull him in to the community.
But here's a question: if we really do get the 'real' Sylar back, won't the whole carnival be screwed?
Samuel Sullivan wants Sylar's memories to come back to him; memories are coming back to Nathlar, but they're not his. They're Nathan's. He remembers flying planes, shaking a lot of hands, and things like that. So a carnie named Damien takes Nathlar into the house of mirrors to 'show him who he really is' or something. Tripppyyyyy. I love mirror house scenes [in anything] because they're so... weird.. haha. Well, Damien's eyes do that Isaac Mendez painting thing and he passes it on to Nathlar... And now, all his horrible memories are being played out before him in the mirrors. He sort of flips out. I would too. I mean, can you imagine? Watching yourself kill your mother and then several other innocent people? So Nathlar's still flipping out, and we get to remember all the worst, and it's not fun. Charlie is the last one we see before he runs out of the house and vomits in a trash can - foreshadowing for the Hiro story arch?
So Samuel is a jerk: he invited the cop who was chasing Nathlar to the carnival with a pair of free tickets, and when he talks to the cop, he says no he's never seen that man before. But then he finds Nathlar and tells him that something must be done. So Nathlar goes back in to the house of mirrors to 'take care of' the cop; the cop pulls his gun on him, but Nathlar doesn't want to hurt him, he just can't control his Sith Lightning! He zaps him, but he wasn't going to kill him [didn't look like it, any way; he might have], so Edgar, the knives guy, comes in and ...saves the day? Well he kills the cop, anyway. That night, everyone welcomes Nathlar into the carnie family with hugs and dinner.
For the last bit, we see Hiro, in his hospital robe, peering into the diner window at Charlie! [I was a big fan of that character, and now I'm super excited!]
I liked how we understand the relationship between Edgar and Lydia. They are frequently in the same shot, and sometimes Edgar's face frames a shot of Lydia flirting with Sylar.
I did not like Samuel's line "Boys will be boys". UGH. Nathlar and Edgar spar, and Lydia asks Samuel if he's going to stop this, and that's his reply. And it's a stupid, sexist reply. Sorry. But it is.
Hiro The Magnificent!
