Monday, April 23, 2007

Yarp


Know what you should do? I mean, all of you. Every last one of you. Man, woman and swamp monster. You should hightail it to your nearest darkened theatre and spend two hours basking in the glory that is Hot Fuzz.


Now, if you’ve seen Shaun Of The Dead, you might be aware of this movie. After all, its got the same two actors, Simon Pegg & Nick Frost.


If, however, you are a swamp monster without a passing interest in recent British comedies, here’s the skinny. Hot Fuzz is a buddy cop movie parody, much like Shaun was a zombie movie parody. Anyway, Nicholas Angel is a London supercop. He’s so good, in fact, that he gets “promoted” to sergeant and transferred to a small village in the country because he’s making the rest of the department look bad. So Sgt. Angel arrives in the village of Sanford, a town voted the best in England with a non-existent crime rate. The first half of the movie concerns itself with Nick being a by-the-book cop trying to adjust to the rural and rather lazy local force and being partnered with Police Constable Danny Butterman, the Inspector’s son. Then the “accidents” start happening.


In the interests of not getting into spoiler territory, the two do as buddy cops do. They bond, they learn from each other, and stop some crime. The first half of the movie isn’t necessarily slow. You know that foundations are being laid, red herrings being dangled, but you’re trying to piece it all together. Then it all gets put together and the swerve it takes is both brilliant and incredibly creepy. And then of course, this being a buddy cop movie, the climax is a hail of bullets, but my God is it one of the most incredible shootouts I’ve ever seen on film, and its compounded by the nature of the people involved in the shootout. I honestly can’t say any more about it without ruining it, so just trust me. Trust a faceless, random voice on the internet.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

TRUKK NOT MUNKY!*


Yeah, there’s this movie coming out this year. Some sci-fi thing about robots from space that disguise themselves as cars and planes and cassette players and big robotic tyrannosaurus rexes (GRIMLOCK AM SMAURT!). Apparently a lot of fandom is really looking forward to it.


My Transformers exposure mostly comes from the G1 cartoon (and “Transformers Generation 2” which was the same cartoon only with lame CG effects added to make it all hip and cool for the 90s). To me, the Dinobots will always be “special teams,” Bumblebee will be whiny and useless, Starscream will always be a big bitchy prima donna with a screechy voice, Megatron will always be a gun and not a tank, and Soundwave will always be the best Transformer ever, despite being a tape deck. I can't even count how many times I tried to get my voice to sound like his when I was a kid.


Let’s sum up; I’m of the mind that if it doesn’t have “You’ve got the touch, you’ve got the power” as one of the songs in it, then how can the movie possibly be enjoyed?


Personally, I think a lot of fandom is going to be royally disappointed and pissed off that its not Spielberg’s gift to nerds. Trans-fans are notoriously uppity on things like continuity and canon, despite having several series that are generally very loosely linked. Personally, I’m not really expecting too much out of it. Certainly not the “nuance” that a lot of Trans-fans who read the comics want. We’re talking nuance coming from a license that was a Saturday morning cartoon series based off of cars that turned into robots fighting robots that turn into planes. Its like taking the “drama” of Gundam seriously when the entire purpose of the Mobile Suits is to beat the holy hell out of each other in new and innovative ways. Hey, I loved G.I. Joe a lot too, but if they announced a live action movie, I wouldn’t hold my breath for an Oscar nod.

Now M.A.S.K. on the other hand…


*http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Trukk_not_munky This actually explains it pretty well