Years ago back when I was in high school there was this book that my sister had to read for school (in Dutch, might I add) and she hated it. Because of that I automatically assumed it sucked and refused to read it. Not long after that it became a world wide hit, yet I remained saying it was an awful book (while never having read a word of it). Until I saw the movie and decided to give it a go anyway. Well, that book was the first Harry Potter (to be very fair I have actually read the Dutch translation now and compared to the original, it does really really suck).

I kind of had the same reaction to Twilight from Stephanie Meyers. I had read a bit of it, a couple of chapters, but my opinion was mainly formed by the many book review blogs out there. In my eyes, it seemed like a weak hyped-up rip-off from many other great vampire books. Now I haven’t read the book yet, but after seeing the movie I might actually give it a go (ah, history repeats itself).

Twilight is about Bella Swan, a teenager that moves to the small gloomy town of Forks to live with her father. As she starts her junior year in high school she becomes fascinated by Edward Cullen, a mysterious and captivating student. Bella soon discovers that Edward is hiding a secret, after he impossibly saves her life from a van with his super-human strength and speed. She is determined to unravel his secret, but the truth is more terrifying than she realizes. Edward is a vampire. Any normal person would just keep away from him, but Edward and Bella fall passionately in love with each other. And so begins the forbidden relationship between a human and a vampire.

Is Twilight a great movie? No. Not by far. It seems much more like a made-for-TV film or a regular TV show. The special effects are horrendously bad, the acting is bland, the editing seems choppy at times and the pacing is pretty slow. And yet, it’s turned out better than I expected. True, my expectations were very very low, but there’s something about this movie that makes me like it. It’s one of those guilty-pleasures type of movies, that I know will end up on the list of movies I can watch when I’m sick to my stomach lying on the couch from fever or flu.

Story-wise it isn’t original at all. Girl falls in love with a good vampire boy. Vampire boy is tempted by her blood and refuses to see her. Bad vampire boy finds out about girl and hunts her down. Good vampire boy saves her and realizes he cant live without her. Been there, done that. If the book is anything like the movie, I still remain convinced that there are way better vampire stories out there, with much more complex and interesting mythologies.

If you want a cheesy easy romantic flick for a summer afternoon, try Twilight. I liked it much more than I expected, and I’m even considering seeing it’s sequel New Moon in the cinema (not completely sure yet, depends if anyone else is interested in coming along).

Twilight is out now on DVD.

I’m a bit late with posting my review on Tranformers 2, but seeing how opinions on this sequel are so diverse, I thought I’d add my thoughts to the big melting pot that is the blogosphere. As a small side note first though: I booked my tickets a month in advance on the BFI IMAX site; the film was only being released in IMAX a full week after normal cinemas received it, but I thought it would be worth it to wait for the IMAX. Imagine my surprise when I later found out that somehow they had managed to get the movie earlier anyway, on the same date as normal cinemas. I’m just a bit pissed off that they failed to inform people about it. It would have been great to hear about it, and maybe re-allocate my tickets or something like that.

Transformers 2 reunites us with Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), who are preparing themselves for a long distance relationship as Sam is moving away to college. But of course they get caught up again into the war between the Decepticons and the Autobots, as Sam gets affected by the final sliver of the AllSpark.

Transformers is a big stupid summer action movie franchise, and you shouldn’t be expecting anything more than that. Transformers 2 continues on with more gigantic robots, bigger explosions and  more battles between gigantic robots. It’s far from being a “great” movie, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie. It’s a typical Michael Bay movie, and sometimes that’s exactly the type of mindless entertainment we need.

The CGI is gorgeous, and unlike the prequel we get to see a bit more zoomed-out shots of the robot battles. We also get to see some new types of robots, including a robot jaguar, a set of female motorcycles, a mini radio-controlled monster truck and a duo of “gangsta” Chevrolets (there has been a lot of debate about this characters online. My thoughts: it’s a Michael Bay movie, do we really have to overanalyze everything?). The sequences are superb, although with so many different robots on screen it sometimes difficult to follow who is who (also I was never that much of a Transformers fan growing up, so I don’t recognize many of the minor characters or which side they’re on).

Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is a fun summer action movie, full of robot battles and explosions. If you liked any previous Michael Bay movies, go ahead and see this one; there’s no doubt you’ll like it. If you hated the previous Transformers, there’s no chance in hell you’ll like this one.

Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is out now in cinemas.

I’m not exactly a Martin Scorsese fan; I still have to see a lot of his older films and I fell asleep during both The Aviator and The Departed. This trailer of Shutter Island seems great though and much more my type of movie than what he has previously made. 

Shutter Island is based on the like-wise named book by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote the books Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River. It features Leonardo DiCaprio as a federal marshall investigating the mysterious disappearance of a murderess who escaped from the island’s hospital for the criminally insane. Also stars Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Jackie Earle Haley.

[Watch on MissGeeky]

I really like the look of this movie, even though most of the time I can’t stand Leonardo DiCaprio. But it looks like there’s more to the story than just a “find the bad guy” plot, and my mind is already coming up with possible explanations, twists and theories.

Shutter Island - Release Date: October 2009

I should have blogged about this two weeks ago when it came out, but I was in the Netherlands then and since I’ve been back it just slipped my mind completely. Maybe you’ve seen it already, but if you haven’t it’s a lot of fun (especially if you’re into movies). Empire has created this wicked Cryptic Canvas, a painting that contains references to 50 movies.

My brother showed the game to me, challenging me to find as many movies as I could. He and a friend of his had solved all the clues, so of course I had to try and do that too. Some of them are pretty easy to figure out. Just mentioning the object alone already gives you the answer. Some are slightly trickier; it helps saying out loud what you see. And some are just plain evil. 

I think I got to about 30 when I started struggling, so my brother started giving little tips. Not so much tips as in clues about the movies, but more where in the canvas you had to look and what belongs together. For instance, the bird and the flower in the top right corner? Two separate movies. The family with kids (in front of the huge baby)? Also two separate movies (the three mini kids are 1 movie, the rest another). And did you see there are four movies in the bottom right hand corner?

I really struggled with a couple of the obvious ones, especially “CCC”; I am truly kicking myself over that one (also because in the end I didn’t figure that one out, my mum did). There are a couple that I love though: the gravestone with the little flag, the two musical instruments, the towers with the hanging guy, and the guy near the train.

In the end I had to give up at 45, the final 5 I just couldn’t figure out (the family with kids, the flower in the top right, the man on the red line, the fighting cheerleaders, and the book destroyer). Looking at those though, I should have at least figured two of them out; one I hadn’t heard of and the other two were just a bit too difficult.

So how many movie references can you figure out?

I can get pretty addicted to online flash games, and this latest one promoting Ice Age 3 is pretty cute:

I just suck at it horribly though! The highest score I got was 6100

From AddictingGames.com

I wouldn’t actually buy these myself, but they do look pretty:

They are part of a series of paintings from Christian Waggoner, featuring close-ups of famous helmets in the Star Wars universe. Don’t you just love the reflections?

The paintings are all available in limited edition paper and canvas prints on the Acme Archives website.

Via /Film

I adore the first two Terminator movies. I was born in the year the first one came out and was only 7 when the second one came out, but I do feel as if I’ve grown up with these stories. These are the movies that made me think and dream about time travel and timelines, and I still enjoy theorizing about these type of plots. I was really looking forward to this latest installment of the Terminator series, and while it’s not everything I hoped it would be, it’s still a great action flick.

Terminator Salvation focuses on Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a man who wakes up in 2018 with no recollection of how he got there. Judgment Day has come and passed, and the human survivors are struggling in their war against the machines. John Connor (Christian Bale) is part of the resistance and knows he has to find his “father” Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), still a civilian trying to survive.

The main problem with Terminator Salvation is that this isn’t the movie every Terminator fan has been waiting for. Anybody who has seen the other movies wants to see one thing: the final battle between the machines and the resistance. What happens after they’ve sent back Kyle Reese and the terminators? Does John Connor and the resistance finally win the war? When does everything finally come full circle? This isn’t that movie. This movie is but a chapter in the whole saga, where Kyle Reese and John Connor meet. And that would have been fine, if they were the main two characters. If this movie was truly about the birth of their friendship. But it isn’t. Instead Terminator Salvation revolves around Marcus Wright, a new mysterious character, whose story line you see coming from a mile away. 

It kind of works. I mean I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and I came out of the theatre thinking it was awesome. But reflecting on it, I just think it could have been better. I mean, you’ve got these characters that the fans love and whose stories they want to hear, but instead we get a movie about this Marcus Wright. I don’t see why they needed this new character; why couldn’t they have focused more on Kyle Reese and John Connor? Or Connor and his wife? Or the rise of Connor in the resistance? It just didn’t feel necessary to have this movie revolving around this character whose story we’re not really interested in.

Sam Worthington is okay as Marcus Wright, and by the end of the movie you are rooting for him. There’s nothing wrong with his acting (although at times his Australian accent slips through), it’s just you’re not as invested in his character as some of the others. Christian Bale is a bit of a disappointment as John Connor. When I heard he was cast, it just seemed perfect; who else could play the fierce, yet tortured resistance leader? And yet, it didn’t really work. There’s just something in him that doesn’t make you truly believe that this is a continuation of the same John Connor, although that may be due more to the way his character was written than Bale’s performance. The highlight of this movie for me had to be Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese. After seeing him in Star Trek as Chekov, I didn’t think he could pull this character off (he just looks too baby faced there and not at all like Reese). But you get the feeling he must have watched and studied Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese in The Terminator for hours, cause he’s spot on with his performance. 

The other characters don’t add much to the movie. Bryce Dallas Howard is fine as Kate Connor, but she doesn’t get that much to work with. She has this whole back story and history with John Connor and she’s pregnant with his child, but all she gets to do is stand on the sidelines and be a sounding board to his worries. Moon Bloodgood is introduced as a love interest for Marcus Wright, but it feels rushed and very unbelievable. 

I did really like the look of Terminator Salvation. After Judgment Day, the world is practically a bleak, deserted wasteland and visually they’ve managed to capture that. It’s gritty and barren, and exactly what you’d expect the world to look like after a nuclear winter. The action and special effects in this movie are also superb, with enough explosions and fights to do justice to the previous films. I loved the design of some of the new robots, even though some seemed a bit more advance than what you’d expect at this point in time.

Terminator Salvation is a great summer action flick. Story wise it’s not fantastic, but for most people I guess it doesn’t have to be. Unlike some, I didn’t hate this movie, and I think McG managed to deliver a fun enjoyable film. I’m just disappointed it’s not the Terminator movie I was hoping for, but if it does well at the box office, we might see one in the near future.

I had seen the trailer of Gran Torino a while back and remembered thinking “Oscar Movie. Pass.”. But then my brother went to see it and said it would be a film our entire family would enjoy. I didn’t really believe him, but it seemed like the right movie to see when my parents were in town.

Gran Torino stars Clint Eastwood as Walt Kowalski, a Korean War vet who has just lost his wife. He’s grumpy, tough, and can’t get along with his kids or his neighbours. All he cares about is his dog, Daisy, and his prized car, a 1972 Gran Torino. When his teenage Hmong neighbours, Thao and Sue, get into trouble with the local gang, Walt steps in to help them out. Before he knows it, that gets Walt deeper embroiled into the life of his neighbours.

‘Everybody’s a little bit racist sometimes, Doesn’t mean we’re all out committing hate crimes’ (from one of the songs of Avenue Q, but more about that in a later post). Gran Torino’s main character  Walt seems to fit that bill exactly; his remarks about his neighbours are cringeworthy at times, but you know that he doesn’t really mean it. I don’t think anybody but Clint Eastwood could have pulled that character off; Walt is tough and scary, not two attributes you’d associate with a 78-year old. Eastwood delivers lines that could have turned out silly, but hearing him say them you know he means it. Even that old, Eastwood is still believable as a tough no-nonsense guy.

The story takes a bit slow to unravel, but halfway through it speeds up. Don’t come into this movie expecting a lot of action; it isn’t an action movie. There are a couple of “action”-y scenes (Clint being tough), but nothing too spectacular. Gran Torino also isn’t really a drama; most of the movie is pretty upbeat and I found myself laughing during a couple of scenes. 

Gran Torino is an interesting movie, and I’m surprised it wasn’t nominated for more Oscars this year. Having seen most of the contenders, I truly think Gran Torino was better than most of those and Clint Eastwood deserved at least to be nominated for Best Actor.

I’m not sure how I managed to miss these videos. The Cars Toons are a animated short series by Pixar featuring the characters Mater and Lightning McQueen from the 2006 animation Cars. The first three all aired last October on the Disney Channel and ABC Family, while the fourth one was shown before the theatrical release of Bolt.

All the toons follow the same formule: Mater tells some tall story about something he did in the past. The fourth is the funniest (and also the one with the largest budget), so I’ll start with that one:

Tokyo Mater

[Watch the videos on MissGeeky.com]

Rescue Squad Mater

El Materdor

There’s also a third toon called Mater the Greater, but the embedding of that video was disabled. In my opinion it’s the least funniest of the four, check it out on YouTube to see it for yourself.

I love the Tokyo video; the setting is just spot on! (while I liked Tokyo Drift, it’s fun to see a parody of it) The appearance of the Cars characters are great too; Mia and Tia are adorable in their outfits, and the pit crew cars remain hilarious. You can see that the other three videos have less of a budget (and effort) behind it; while kind of funny, they aren’t as rememberable as the Tokyo one. I do hope we see more of sequels to these though; can you imagine what other stuff they might put Mater in?

I’m a sucker for the old musical Disney movies, so I’ve been looking forward to The Princess and The Frog ever since I heard about it two years ago. And now we finally have a trailer!

Like most of the other Disney movies, this movie is based on a fairy tale, with one key difference. Here the setting has been uprooted and moved to another location and time: The Princess and The Frog is set in New Orleans’ French Quarter during the Jazz age (1920s). Take a look at the trailer:

[Watch the trailer on MissGeeky.com]

I’m not too sure about the change of setting, but with both main characters as frog and the New Orleans swamp as a backdrop, I can see what the writers were thinking. I’m really curious to see/hear a bit of the music; in my eyes, it’s always been the songs that have made me love/hate a Disney movie.

The Princess and The Frog - Release Date: December 2009 (US), February 2010 (UK)