Enjoyability versus Quality

A lot of people seem to miss the point about how enjoyability and quality are not always tied together. This is in regard to all sorts of things, music, movies, books, etc. For me it most often is tied to movies most often, and books secondly. I am good at separating the two and seeing the enjoyability in a poor movie, and seeing the quality in a movie that I did not enjoy at all. Pretty much my favorite movie of all time is Big Trouble In Little China. Does that mean I think its the best movie of all time? Hell no, its not even the best movie of its year, but its my favorite. It is highly enjoyable for me, even though I can see that its not the most quality movie ever. The opposite is true for some other movies that I don't enjoy. For example, I didn't enjoy, for example, Cold Mountain. Actually I really hated it, but I can see that it is high quality movie making. This is an important thing to keep in mind when looking at rottentomatoes.com. RT is a great GREAT way to get a general feel for the quality of a movie. They are pretty spot on with that since it takes a whole bunch of critical reviews instead of just one. If its a high rating its a well made movie, if its a low rating its not a very well made movie. However, thats not always a good measure of enjoyability, and that is something to keep in mind.

On a side note, this is something I always kind of use in those silly Harry Potter versus Twilight debates. Sure there are a ton of people that find both of them enjoyable, and obsess over them even. However, J.K. Rowling is the clear winner. Although both series can only be classified as highly entertaining, Rowling wins because not only is it enjoyable, its well written as well. Rowling is a good writer, although not great, by almost all opinions. Meyer is a terrible, terrible writer, and she and Christopher Paolini should totally have a crappy writer competition. The same can be said for the movies, where as the Harry Potter movies generally get pretty good objective movie reviews, the two Twilight movies rank just a hair above Old Dogs and Willard on "objective" movie reviews. Just my two cents worth.

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day Movie Review 5.5/10!

Ok, firstly, I loved the first movie and I am utterly fascinated by the train wreck that is Troy Duffy. But lets be honest, what he is is a huge ass who somehow came up with a good movie idea and script and even more unbelievably got major funding with no movie experience whatsoever. Then he got blackballed because he was such an ass and his movie didn't even get main stream released. However, despite that, it became a cult classic, and is actually a pretty creative and well made movie. However, it appears, and quite predictable so, that he is a bit of a one bullet Barney. His second film does not capture the same feel or charm of the first one, and it is quite obvious that he is pressing and trying to capture the same magic and feel that he stumbled upon. It, for the most part, fails. The story is supposed to be a bit more epic, a lifelong tail, but its cumbersome flashback scenes make it less than powerful. The secondary antagonist has all this interested set up, but never gets evolved and eventually he just goes down like a chump. Also, one thing I never though I would say, THIS MOVIE NEEDS MORE WILLEM DEFOE. His role as FBI Agent Smecker was hilarious and fantastic in the first movie, and his presence is sorely missed in the second one. In the end, I gave this a slightly better than average rating because I loved the characters and the first one. However, where as I recommend the first one to just about everyone, I will only recommend the second one to hardcore fans of the original.

Avatar Movie Review 6.5/10!

Ok, first of all I would like to say that the special effects in this film are in fact fantastic. At times its hard to tell where real actors end and CGI begins. However, that doesn't hold a lot of water with me. James Cameron is the Yankee's of film making. If you throw enough money at something then eventually you will get what you want in the end. Sure, the special effects were fantastic, but pretty much anybody could have thrown that much money at enough design studios and accomplished the very same thing. This is the kind of special effects you get when you throw three times the average blockbuster at a movie. If you spent 300 million freaking Gremlins it would be the most realistic CGI ever, its just the nature of the beast. The point I am trying to make is that you can't throw a lot of shiny glitz my way and expect me to go ga ga over it. I will enjoy it perhaps, but in no shape or form do special effects make a movie good. There are terrible movies with GREAT special effects, and there are great movies with terrible special effects. So kudos for the design studio, but the quality of the effects does not terribly alter the way I rate a movie much either up or down, it does some of course, but it is not going to change a 5 into an 8 or vice-versa. The idea, which gets so much credit for being original, is absolutely not. This Avatar concept is old, well used, and not original. In fact most of the stuff in the film isn't all the original. That's not a bad thing, there aren't a whole lot of original stuff out there, I am just saying that Cameron gets no originality points with this film, the Avatar idea, things named Pandora, and especially, most especially the aboriginal people are not new thoughts. ( "I see you" Mudpeople from Sword of Truth anyone?) This movie is essentially been made already. This movie is essentially "Dance with Wolves" on a distant moon. Ok, its exactly "Dances with Wolves" on a distant moon. Personally, I am not much of a fan of James Cameron, I don't care much for his brute force style of films, and his dialogue is sketchy at best. He has come up with some memorable lines, but on the whole his writing is not terribly consistent. Which is proven by this film. There are some GREAT moments. Very visceral, very intense. But there are some slow, slow parts. Its almost as if you could break this into two movies, one of which is great and one of which is pretty bad. The real problem with it seems to lie more with whats on the cutting room floor. This movie is edited terribly with what seems to be a large chunk of pertinent story line that didn't make it into the film. I could very well see a 4 hour directors cut coming out in a year or so, and I could also very well see me changing my opinion on this film and liking it very, very much. As it is, in its current cut there were to many times during the film where I was asking myself, "why in the world is this happening." Not because I didn't understand the plot, its pretty simple, but because things kind of happened with very little explanation, however, they had the feel that it was originally set up to explains these situations in a lot of detail. I can only infer in the originally story that there was some sort of prophecy involved that was explained on the story board but only briefly alluded to in the final cut. Even with all of my misgivings about the film though, I still enjoyed it. I thought it was an entertaining movie with incredibly visceral battle scenes that affected me more than I have been emotionally affected by a battle scene in a very long time. But my no stretch of the imagination is this the best movie of all time as some are proclaiming, or even the best movie of the year. Its a spectacle, its something you should see, IN THEATER. Don't wait for DVD even on BLU-RAY this will be lacking. In fact, I doubt I will ever watch this movie again because I think it will just lose so much on the small screen. Oh, and Sam Worthington, whom I thought was the one redeeming feature of Terminator Salvation, disappointed me at times in this film. Some of the better lines of the film come out sort of garbled by him, as if he has a big jawbreaker in is mouth. Don't know why that happened, but I didn't like it. FINAL WORD: See this movie, See this in theater, see it in 3D IMAX if you can, its worth the higher priced ticket. Its emotional, visceral, and enjoyable, but its not that revolutionary.