All posts in “Reviews”

Yippee-ka-yay, motherfucker

Posted 20 years ago · Tagged: bruce willis, die hard · 4 Comments

It's funny to rewatch a movie you've grown up with. I still have the VHS-tape with Die Hard recorded from some random tv-channel more than 10 years ago, it almost became a tradition to watch Bruce Willis kick some ass every time I was sick and couldn't go to school. Watching movies back then was kinda rare, my mom was very anti-everything-electronic, so we had to rent a so-called MovieBox. Anyway, it's probably been atleast five years since I watched Die Hard until today when the Special Edition DVD dropped into my mailbox.

Seeing it again was interesting, I noticed some mistakes I hadn't in my previous viewings, and, once again, I saw how damaging bad subtitles can be. Relying on subtitles was necessary back then, when I didn't understand much English and it's a bit chocking how easy it is to misinterpret dialogues, feelings, etc. when the subtitles have been created by some ignorant twat who didn't really listen when he or she watched the movie. It's almost as bad as translating the original movie titles to ridiculous Danish ones.

Well, back to Die Hard, Hans Gruber and John McClane were both as badass and cool as I remember them being, but Al Powell, the black cop, was a lot more annoying than I remembered. He was really bugging me. Now, I like grading movies, my vote history is steadily growing on IMDb, but when I grade this movie I base it on the memory I have of it, and not on the movie experience I had when watching it tonight. I feel that it's pretty much the same as playing a blockbuster-game today that was released 10 years ago, naturally it won't be the same experience and you would grade it lower now than back then, and the memory I have of Die Hard makes it atleast worthy of a nine out of 10. Bruce Willis (as John McClane) truly is the coolest motherfucker on earth, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Norris, Seagal, you aint got shit.

Die Hard – 9/10.

By the way, does anyone know the correct spelling of "yippee-ka-yay"?

Blood Diamond

Posted 20 years ago · Tagged: leonardo dicaprio · 3 Comments

Great movie, fantastic performances by everyone except Jennifer Connelly who disappoints in the emotion-filled scenes. Especially Leonardi DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou act incredible. DiCaprio's accent fails at some points but is believable overall, the Jamaican-like twist to his dialect is funny and makes the character a bit more interesting. The stories in the movie come together nicely, and the movie gives an interesting sight into the creation of child soldiers, the fierceless brutality of the rebel forces, and the trade of blood diamonds from Africa.

8/10.

Preacher

Posted 20 years ago · Tagged: comics, preacher · 1 Comment

Thanks to polt I've begun reading Preacher, a comic book series from the late nineties. Me being lazy I'll just paste a synopsis from the series' Wiki-page:

Preacher tells the story of Jesse Custer, a down-and-out preacher in the small Texas town of Annville. Custer was accidentally possessed by the supernatural creature named 'Genesis' in an incident which killed his entire congregation and flattened his church.

Genesis, the product of the unauthorized, unnatural coupling of an angel and a demon, is an infant with no sense of individual will. However, as it is composed of both pure goodness and pure evil, it might have enough power to rival that of God himself. In other words, Jesse Custer, bonded to Genesis, may have become the most powerful being in the universe.

Custer, driven by a strong sense of right and wrong, goes on a journey across the United States attempting to (literally) find God, who abandoned Heaven the moment Genesis was born. He also begins to discover the truth about his new powers, which allow him to command the obedience of those who hear his words. He is joined by his old girlfriend Tulip O'Hare, as well as a hard-drinking Irish vampire named Cassidy.

Sounds weird? It is, weird in the most magnificent way, I just finished volume two, and it's probably the best comic book I've ever read (that doesn't say alot though since I haven't read a lot of them, just trust my taste in litterature, okay?). The theme is pretty dark: brutal murders, rape, child-molestation, disfigured characters, stuff like that, the language is written like it's pronounced and it's very harsh, profanity on almost every page, very Tarantino-like actually, which means it's great and it's one of the things that makes Preacher so entertaining. The stories are very interesting, so are the characters, it's just incredible. If you want to start reading comic books but are tired of superheroes then buy Preacher.

Call of Duty 3 is utter crap

Posted 20 years ago · Tagged: xbox 360 · 10 Comments

Oh my god this game sucks. I'm guessing the Wii-conversion is to blame, but that doesn't justify it.

Just look at those hands.

First of all we got the graphics, naturally it can't be even close to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, no one expects that, but the result on the Wii just looks like a poor conversion… which it is. Compare it to games like Zelda: Twilight Princess, Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime, all running on a GameCube, and you will really start realising how crappy the graphics are. All right, next:

THROW IT, THROW IT FOR GOD'S SAKE!

One of the things I was looking forward to when I purchased Call of Duty 3 was the use of Wii Remote gestures in the game. The first encounter is fine, some German wants you dead, he grabs your rifle and then you have to shake him off and give him a nice punch with the rifle-butt, controls respond nicely, but it's only downhill from that point on; as a default option you throw grenades by pushing the D-pad, it's also possible to throw them by doing a throwing motion with the nunchuck, me wanting to get everything out of the game I quickly enabled this, and subsequently blew myself up 10-20 times before disabling it again. It just doesn't work, I'm waving the nunchuck like a maniac, the grenade fuse counts down, and the 'nade blows up in my hand. Once in a while it does throw it, apparently whenever it's feeling like it because I'm doing the same motion over and over again. It's even harder when you have to pick up a grenade from the ground and quickly flick it back at the enemy. The next frustrating thing is preparing explosives to blow up whatever needs to be blown up. First you have to insert the fuse by thrusting the nunchuck forward, no problem, then you turn the nunchuck to screw the fuse into place, still no problem, but then you have to pull out the pin by pulling the nunchuck back, in nine out of 10 situations you have to pull atleast five times until anything happens, also, in most situations bullets are flying around your ears because your retarded teammates can't hit anything, which means you'll be dead before the pin is pulled. Other than that the gestures seem to work fine so far, when driving you need to hold the controllers as a wheel, which is pretty funny.

Lastly I'll just explain the latest mission I played, because it made me turn of the console and write this. You're supposed to plant some explosives around a factory, fine, I plant the bombs, die a couple of times because I can't pull the pin, finally make it and now I have to defend the factory from the German reinforcements, I start shooting enemies, sometimes it seems like you can't hit soldiers from some angles, may just be my lack of skills though. Then a tank rolls in, surprise surprise, I need to pick up a Panzershreck and blow it up, but the Panzershreck is no where to be found. I'm looking at a nice big crate but it's closed, i shoot at it, punch it, nothing happens. I run around a bit, looking for the rocket launcher while my teammates are frantically screaming at me because they're too stupid to pick up the fucking rocket launcher themselves, and suddenly the crate is open, but now I can't pick the weapon up, I have to crouch down and very slowly aim at different spots on the weapon while trying to time pressing the minus-button when the "Press the minus-button" message suddenly appears for a second and then disappears again. I finally pick it up, shoot the tank and then have to protect a soldier who's supposed to plant some more bombs or something. Now this would've been a piece of cake if the god damn controls wouldn't suddenly have gone insane. It's like the worst lag you've ever experience, impossible to control anything and when you're able to shoot the rifle keeps shooting for a couple of seconds. And this is not the first time this have happened, I'm not saying this couldn't be the controller's fault but so far I've tried to Wii Remotes, both with plenty of power, and it's still happening. While aiming into the sky and running towards a squad of German soldiers I die and have to do everything all over again.

I'm probably still going to complete it though, because apart from the mentioned annoyances it's pretty entertaining.

The Jackal, how to ruin a movie

Posted 20 years ago · Tagged: bruce willis, jack black, richard gere · 3 Comments

This action flick was a lot worse than I remembered, the only remarkable performance is by Bruce Willis playing The Jackal, unfortunately his character goes from genious assassin to arrogant schmuck pretty fast in the end. Let's start with Richard Gere, he plays the protagonist, Declan Mulqueen, an Irish ex-IRA sniper who has been sentenced to 25 years in jail or something like that. First of all, he has got the worst Irish accent I have ever heard, it more or less ruins the movie, secondly I hate movies in which inmates are not only helping whatever amateur investagion-teams that need help, but are also more or less leading the entire investigation. The only reason he is helping them is because he knows what The Jackal looks like, so why the hell do they let him decide what strategies to use, where to attack, etc. Then they try to make him seem like a good guy by letting him say stuff like "Oy nevah used bumbs!" in an angry way.

Back to Willis, I'm just gonna skip to the end, because the character is pretty cool until the last 20 minutes, I was actually rooting for him, the scene where he shoots the arm off Jack Black is priceless. So, he's got his Gatling-gun in his Van, he's found a nice spot, got his Gatling-gun controlling laptop ready and is more or less seconds away from being able to blow the first lady, his target, to smitherens. What I don't understand is why it takes him atleast 20 fucking minutes to open the laptop, aim the gun and press the god damn firing button. As you may guess Declan saves the day by shooting the Gatling-gun's scope (with a sniper-rifle, don't ask me why the marksman from the SWAT team wasn't allowed to fire, and don't even get me started on the fact that they just freely gave a convicted IRA-terrorist a rifle) a few seconds before The Jackal opens fire.

What follows is a chasescene in the Metro, Willis being all cool and mental, Gere being annoying. Finally Willis takes a girl hostage, makes Gere drop his gun, is about to shoot him, and boom, Willis is shot in the neck by some chick who was Gere's girlfriend back in Ireland or something. "How the hell did she know exactly what station they were at?" you may ask, well I have no fucking clue, she was supposed to be hiding somewhere so it doesn't really make sense. This movie could easily have been a lot better, a few stupid choices just ruined it.

To summon it all up, 101 on how to ruin a movie:

Let an American play an Irish guy.

Lower the IQ of the villain steadily through the movie, so it'll hit ~20 in the end. That way the lead character'll win no matter how dumb he is. (as seen in most b-class movies, remember the villain kicking ass and more or less being indestructable until he meets the protagonist in the end?)

End the movie with the most improbable thing you can imagine.