Chatter Of The Squirrel

Movie: X Men 3 - The Last Stand

Watched the movie last night. Was free. Quality wasn’t good.

But got the gist of the story.

The wikipedia entry has all the spoilers.

It’s an OK watch, I guess. Prof X got atomised, Wolverine and Storm got their time in the limelight. Nightcrawler was cut cos his role just wasn’t worth the make-up time.

And that’s the end of the X trilogy.

But at least the movie got me in the mood for X-Men stories again. I last left off somewhere around House of M, where the Scarlet Witch (Magneto’s daughter) was so distraught with grief that she’s losing it, and was recreating reality. Eventually, she overcame Xavier’s attempts to block it, and recreated the Marvel universe.

Into a world where H.Sapiens are the second class citizens. And millions of mutants have lost their powers, leaving only a few hundred, who has taken over important roles in government. Magneto lost his powers. Xavier is missing. Wolverine remembers his past. And Peter Parker is successful, until his secret was outed, that he did not come to his powers through evolution.

Right now, I’m ‘getting’ Deadly Genesis. Xavier will finally be found. And Scott fights his brother. Again. It suddenly appears that Scott has a SECOND brother, that’s even more of an ass than the last one. Having Xavier as a powerful telepath is a convenient Deus Ex Machina. Whenever convenient, the writers can just re-write history, and make something happen differently, but Xavier had mind-wiped the events to protect the characters. Thus, explaining how they could just manufacture Scott’s other brother out of thin air.

Movie: Firewall, An Unfinished Life

Firewall, the new Harrison Ford movie.

Think The Fugitive. But nowhere near as good.

Ford is a father in this movie. He’s almost 64 years old. And he is playing a father.

Basic plot: some geeks with guns hold Ford’s family hostage, while they force him to do an electronic bank heist. A few murders are pinned on him. He runs from the law and tracks down the villians via his dog’s GPS collar.

Moral of the story: If you’re a bunch of geeks that can’t take down a 64yr old banker with automatic weapons, please invest in a couple of goons who can. You’re heisting 200million dollars. You can afford a few goons for crying out loud!

Speaking of old actors, I also just watched An Unfinished Life with Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman, and Jennifer Lopez. Oddly, I didn’t recognise J.Lo at all until I checked IMDB…

This is just a simple, ungimmicky movie about a grandfather getting to terms with the death of his son, and connecting with his granddaughter and daughter in law. And Morgan getting to terms with being mauled by a bear.

Not the kind of movie you’ll rush to the cinema to watch. Just something that you’ll watch and forget on HBO.

TV: Giant Simpson’s Foot - I’m LOST!

Lost season 2 has ended with it’s final two episodes last week. And here be spoilers.

Michael got Walt back, and Henry gives them a motor boat to take them to ‘rescue’. Once he leaves, he can never come back.

Oh, Henry the balloonist, is the leader of the Others.

Desmond, the ex-occupant of the hatch, comes back with his sail-boat. His love story is told. And he proceeds to solve the mystery, and assume responsibility, of the crash of flight 815.

John’s faith, broken by Henry, refuses to punch in the numbers, and the hatch blows up. Two French guys in the Antartic detects the explosion and reports the event to Desmond’s lover.

Sayid’s plan went according to plan, he managed to reach the Others’ camp ahead of Jack & Michael’s group, and secured the premises single-handedly. He was an Iraqi Republican Guard after all.

On the way to that camp, the fisherman, his wife, and the soldier saw a collosal statue of Bart Simpson’s foot. It’s like a rubbled Argonath from FOTR, but only has four large toes.

But Michael wasn’t leading Jack, Kate, Sawyer & Hurley to the camp. They went to a clearing where a pneumatic tube outlet was dumping all the surveilance reports coming from the ex-occupants of The Pearl.

Despite Jack knowing about Michael’s betrayal, he still led everyone into an ambush. Hurley was released to warn the rest not to come after them ever again. Whilst Kate and Sawyer gave Jack betrayed looks, for betraying their trust in him.

Just because he’s got an MD doesn’t make him qualified to lead. His leadership, I might liken to 16th century Catholic church. All self-righteous and imposing his brand of morals upon everyone else. Expects blind allegience and gets hissy when he’s not given what he wants. He doesn’t give a crap about other people’s opinions, believes his way is right and best, and gets mad when other people does things without his consent. He’s undemocratic, and bordering on fascism, but his military decisions are all disastrous. Each ‘invasion’ against the Others had given the enemies more guns and/or hostages.

The original plan for the series was to have Michael Keaton play the role for Jack, and have the character killed very early. Wish the producers had stuck to that script.

Maybe the idea of the love triangle between the babe, the rogue & the doctor is just too good to give up. It makes for a fascinating case study of primate reproductive tactics. Had a good discussion about this before. Isn’t it true that women want to swoon with the dashing, rogue pirate and his virile sperm, yet will also marry the grizzled old millionaire with the financial security? It’s a fascinating dilemma, to either go with the good genes (maximising NATURE), or go with the rich partner (maximising NURTURE).

Movie: Hoodwinked - Trouble in the Hood

It seems an animated CG flick snuck under my radar last year. Hoodwinked is a relatively low-budget cartoon taking place in Little Red Riding Hood’s universe. It’s like Shrek, except that it’s funny. They didn’t even have simple physics like gravity right; and there’s no fur/hair effects like Monsters Inc or Final Fantasy. Everything’s just textured 3D. But they’ve got the humour.

It’s a kid-flick. Complete with random bursting of songs ala Disney’s Snow White, but no grand production like Beauty & the Beast.

But there’s also a lot of adult sub-text meant for the grown-ups. The whole story is told like The Usual Suspects, a damn good movie if there ever was one.

There’s also a bit of social commentary about big business killing the mom & pop stores.

Plot: There is a bandit stealing recipes all about fairy tale land. Red is safe-keeping her grandma’s recipe book, and running from Wolf. Wolf is after Red. Grandma has a secret she’s hiding. And the Woodsman has an … impediment. It’s up to Hercule Poirot, a toad, to cross examine the suspects and solve the case. (I figured it out 15min into the movie.)

There are some great voice talents, like Glenn Close and James Belushi. But my favourite is Patrick Warburton as the Wolf.

Patrick who?? He’s the voice of Kronk (the guy who speaks to squirrels) in The Emperor’s New Groove, still one of Disney’s most enjoyable cartoons. He’s David Puddy, the mechanic in Seinfeld. Joe Swanson, the cop neighbour in Family Guy. And plenty others. He’s got a very distinctive voice that lends itself to humour. His voice has a special character, like… the anti-James Earl Jones.

Another special character in the movie is Twitchy, the squirrel photographer on Desoxyn. It’s nice to see so many movie homages to insane squirrels lately. Ice Age 1&2, Over the Hedge, and now this. Twitchy gets to drink coffee here too.

Memorable quotes:
Wolf : What kind of candles are those?
Twitchy: Dee-na-mee-tay! MustbeItalian…

Villian: Dolph, tie up the brat; Liesel, hold the book; Vincent, get the truck; and Keith, change your name, please, that’s not scary and I’m embarassed to say it. Boris, try that. Keith, ya know, OOOO Watch out for Keith!

10 Year Trauma

10 years ago this day, I had the worst time I’ve ever had in a cinema.

Ben, Julian and I somehow ended up at Bishan with time to kill. There wasn’t any movie of note showing at Golden Village. We took stock of the options, and I voted for City Hall, by Al Pacino. Julian, wanted Nicole Kidman in To Die For.

Ben had no strong opinions either way. And it went down to a coin-flip. Which I lost.

OMG, that was the worst movie I ever paid money to watch!!

A story about a psychotic blonde who’ll do anything to get on TV. What a bloody boring plot!

This happened during that period of time when everyone thought that the best ticket to an Oscar was to act a dumb / crazy character. Think Hannibal Lector, Nell, and Forrest… It’s pretty naive thinking, but the Academy IS that shallow and predictable. Even Sean Penn, despite all his great works, had to play an idiot in I Am Sam to get noticed. (Which he didn’t win, because 2002 was the Academy’s ‘Patronise the African Americans’ Year.)

Back to the blonde… I sat through a shitty, dull movie, just so that Julian can get an eyeful of cleavage in the scene where Nicole jumped a high-school kid in order to get him to murder her husband.

There wasn’t an ounce of suspense in the movie. The husband was gonna die, and I could feel nothing for the dumb jock. Nicole was gonna die, and I couldn’t care less either. There was not one relateable character in the story. It’s like a satire, that’s not even funny. It’s like watching a child’s purple balloon drift away from his grasp; the event must have meant something for someONE, since the movie was made at all, but the rest of the world really can’t care less.

I could have had two plates of Boon Tong Kee chicken rice for what it costed me to watch that movie.