Jul 30, 2010

My Top 10 tv to movie adaptations

Given the outrageous, utter disgraceful boodle of poopie that was The Last Airbender, I decided to remember, and arrange a top ten of tv to movie adaptations (That i've seen so far).


This list is not objective, as I'm basing it on the entertainment value I got out of them, but I can assure you that any movie I list here will be much, much more enjoyable than TLA.

10-South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
This one will be on this list because... well, there aren't many tv to film adaptations that I can put here and won't make me look like a complete moron (most of them will only make me look like a partial moron). South Park can be funny sometimes. Sometimes they even deliver deep messages to the audience, but more often than not you have to navigate through a whole lot of bad jokes, irreverent stuff just for the sake of being irreverent, and other in-your-face contraptions.

It wasn't an adaptation per se, more like a very long episode, but an epic one at that.

9-The Little Rascals
A bunch of kids trying to act is almost always an awful experience. They're kids after all. But most of the kids here manage to stay so adorable in their roles that I can't hate them.

I used to like this movie a lot when I was younger. I bet I won't like it much right now, but I can also bet that I will enjoy it more than the likes of mission impossible, naked gun, and of course, The last airbender.

8-Wayne's World
I was born in the early 80's, but I remember the 90's the most from my childhood, and this movie practically embodies what the 90's were about.

Also, this movie was made when Mike Myers was still funny.

7-Bruno
Oh Bruno, Bruno. You are an amazing guy, always looking for the best ways to make me feel incredibly uncomfortable, but amused at the same time. This is not a movie for the easily offended, and not even for the hardly offended.

Also this movie will make you at least 30% gayer.

6-Transformers(any)
This movie should probably be lower but what the hell. Michael Bay, blah blah, explosions, blah blah, shaky camera, robots taking a leak on federal agency guys, etc. yeah yeah it's a mediocre film. But here's the thing: IT HAS OPTIMUS PRIME.

What do you say? the transformers look like crap? what? I cant hear you over OPTIMUS PRIME'S BOOMING VOICE RADIATING AWESOMENESS EVERYWHERE.

5-The Spongebob Squarepants Movie
Spongebob is completely awesome and nothing you say can make me think otherwise. Spongebob is the greatest animated troll ever conceived and for that I applaud him.

This movie also has david hasselhoff and his missile-launching pecs, if you're into that kind of thing. Also, this movie has this completely unexpected and totally awesome guitar solo. Mind = blown.

4-The Simpsons: The Movie
You can say this movie was like an extended simpsons episode, and it kinda was, but it was funny, it was entertaining, and at some times, it felt like the OLD, simpsons. Remember those, when they were actually funny and witty?

The film looked very sharp and well animated, it was good entertainment.

3-The blues brothers(Both!)
Wait, I got the title wrong. This movie's real name is THE FUCKING BLUES BROTHERS, that's right, in all caps and all.

Here are some of the mind-blowingly awesometastic things you will find in this movies:
-John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, John Goodman
-James fucking Brown
-The Blues brothers doing a music number with Aretha Franklin
-The blues brother sing Jailhouse rock inside a prison.
-A gazillion of police cars were demolished in a single car chase scene
-The blues brothers sing rowhide in a redneck pub.
-The blues rothers doing a music number with Aretha Franklin, AGAIN. And this time is "RESPECT".
-Eric Clapton

I don't think I need to say more.

2-The Addams Family
For an adaptation of a tv show that was an adaptation of a comic strip, this movie was entertaining. It had Raul Julia, which automatically makes any movie 100% better, Anjelica Houston as the best representation of Morticia ever, and crazy time-travelling scientist turned crazy bald guy Christopher Lloyd.

The movie was certainly darker than the original series, but it retained the style of humor and the personalities of the characters. Wednesday didn't really have much character until this movie was made.

I like to watch the original series on TV whenever I can, as the original had a style of humor that was sometimes subtler than what was the norm for that time. The film adaptation is a good representation of the original, albeit a little less funny.

1-Star Trek(Any!!!... well, mostly Wrath of Kahn and the last reboot...)
This is maybe a biased choice... but hey, THEY ALL ARE!. Star Trek had the advantage of having the cast from the series available for the movies, which some adaptations like The Addams Family didn't have, but they managed to get all the elements that make the show good and pack them into a movie.

With the reboot, new territory was explored, with more successful results than failures. But Most of the movies are sucessful in bringing that Star Trek feel to the big screen, which is what everyone is looking for.

And that's it. These movies have these things in common: 1-They respect the source material, 2-They are entertaining 3-They might have bad script, bad actors, bad plot, bad directing, or 0 entertainment value, BUT NOT ALL OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME!

Picking these was hard because most of the tv to movie adaptations are pretty mediocre, but they're not awfully shitty ass bad, like, you know, some other movies.

comments (0)

Jul 28, 2010

The Last Airbender

INCOMING WALL OF TEXT, SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB

I can summarize this entry with "The last airbender is the worst movie of the year and one of the worst tv to movie adaptations ever made", but if i did that I wouldn't get to rant about it, would I?. The tubes need some more clogging, that's what I'm here for.

Oh where do I start. I have no idea. Every second of this movie is so full of bad moviemaking that I could literally write an essay about what is wrong with this movie. Yes it's that bad. I would go as far as to say that is Manos: the hands of fate bad. I've talked about watching that one before.

After watching this movie, I sat down for a while, thinking about what could I say was good about this movie. My mind was blank. I thought "maybe the show wasn't that good after all, maybe I have a bad case of selective memory". So I watched the first two episodes of the original tv series that very night.

Nope, the show's still great.

So, for the hell of it, I would point out the things that weren't completely atrocious about this "movie":

-God Bless Mr Toub who worked with this trash of a script and managed not to look like a complete retard all the time, like all the other actors in this movie. Every time he was on screen I forgot I was being lobotomized by this movie.
-The Northern water tribe country was well crafted, the architecture was one of the few things well executed from the original series. But then again, walls and pillars don't have to recite an script.
-A few moments of the fight where Aang and the Blue spirit (Zuko in disguise) battle a horde of fire nation soldiers were pretty decent.

Does 1 decent actor, 1 decent set, and 1 decent to sub-par fight scene save this movie from craptastic grandeur? If you've been paying attention, you know the answer to that.

As I said, If I listed all the reasons to why this movie is a steaming pile of gorilla dung, it would be too long for anyone to care about reading.I could point out how this is one of the most hollow scripts with the most soulless dialog I've ever had the displeasure to watch, how everything they brought in from the series has been twisted, transformed, and disfigured for the worse. How Sokka is a lifeless idiot and a duplicate of Anakim, but with even less personality and zero sense of humor. You would think that a comic relief character should have some, but M. Night appears to disagree.

And then we have Katara, which went from a strong kid which was more of a leader than Aang ever was to yet another mumbling, lifeless idiot. Aang? a soulless skull of a character, a character you feel no emotion towards, in spite of the supposed predicament he's in... a disfigured parody of its tv series counterpart. Zuko and Iroh were OK i guess. Zuko worked better because in the series he's an emo kid full of angst, and that's how every major character is portrayed in this movie.

The story? suffice to say, nothing makes sense at all. We move from scene to scene with either no explanation whatsoever, or with a voiceover with Katara telling us what happened in her best interpretation of a speech synthesizer. "Sokka and the princess became friends very quickly"... oh right, I'm supposed to imagine them doing stuff that would make them become friends, instead of actually seeing and experiencing that. Well, that helps me like the characters more, I guess?

I am not going to go into detail because as I said before: if I do this would get a tl:dr tag (It's already long). But I assure you If I were to nitpick this movie, and I can, I can point out flaws in every single aspect of this movie. It's just a disaster.

I don't have to say that this movie pissed me off quite a bit because it's very apparent in this rant, and I don't think I've been this disappointed at a movie before, not even with the phantom menace or attack of the clones. I can resume my reaction to this movie with the 5 stages of grief

1- Denial: as I watched this movie, I was in a permanent state of denial. "It can't be this bad, it must get good at some point... "
2-Anger: "That's it??? is this gargantuan boodle of horseshit is the last airbender movie??" then I proceeded to nerdrage accordingly.
3-Bargaining: "Maybe the original wasn't as good as I remember, maybe if I watch the original again I will see everything was crappy all the time, yeah it will make everything ok again"
4-Depression: "Ugh... I was wrong, only the movie is absolute shit. My faith is lost, how can I trust any movie again not to take a dump on something I really like?"
5-Acceptance: "Well, it was crap, but at least I have the excellent original series that I can watch over and over and pretend this movie was never, ever made"

Final verdict: I don't recommend this movie for kids. Kids won't have fun because nothing fun or funny happens. There are no bright colors to distract them either. No playful Momo being a rascal with Sokka, no funny Appa. No careless, lighthearted Aang. No angsty but likable Zuko. Nothing at all for a kid. I don't recommend this movie to fans of the show, as it takes a dump on everything that made the original show a great series to watch.

I can't recommend this movie to people who like good movies, because a good movie, this is not. I can't recommend this move to people who like to watch bad movies and laugh at the badness because this isn't one of those movies. It's one of the movies you feel cheated and lobotomized, and feel genuinely sorry for the two actors that were actually trying to do a good work.

I will recommend this movie to the hacker that fucked me up and grabbed my wow and rapidshare accounts and tried to ran away with them. Fuck you.

comments (0)

Jul 21, 2010

Public Plea to Blizzard

CATACLYSM BETA KEY.


PLEASE.

That is all.

comments (0)

Jul 16, 2010

Dissidia, let's finish this.

So I wanted to go through each character in the game. Well I decided I should not because most of the characters act the same!. It's so silly..


They have slightly different motivations, but its so silly that they just seem to be slashing their way to the end of the game. They want to resolve everything with one thing: fighting. Most of the conversations can be resumed in 1-enemy appears 2-useless banter occurs 3-let's solve this by fighting!

I think this game would have been so much better with a lot less story. Yeah, it's weird to say that with a Final Fantasy game, but this is a fighting game. In most fighting games you get a couple of lines of dialog before each important fight (which is just the final one, most of the time) and that's enough. This game grinds its way through the conversations, and its all so hollow discussion and sometimes it just doesn't make sense at all. I was skipping EVERY conversation and cutscene on the last characters because I knew it was just 5 to 10 minutes of the character and the enemy taunting each other while delivering asinine comments about some silly quest or purpose.

To recap things real quick:

1-The warrior of light is an asshole
2-Firion is a pussy and wants a world covered in roses so he beats the living snot out of everyone who stands in his way.
3-The onion knight is supposed to be like a super smart genius but he falls in such silly traps and delivers lines so crappy that I ended up feeling a bit dizzy from all the eye rolling I did over all his nonsense. so stupid...
4-Cecil was actually cool, his story made a lil more sense than the others, and there was some conflict goin on with him.
5-Bartz was a breath of fresh air with his cheery attitude but the humor was a bit childish and.. not so funny.
6-Tera is as insecure as ever but I was very glad she wasn't sulking around all the fucking time like in ff6.
7-Cloud was just cloud being cloud. That is, a crappy character that is emo all the fucking time for no reasonable reason and is lusting for sephirot all the time, pissing me off to no end in the process.
8-Squall... was... *gulp* actually an interesting character! wow! what the fuck, I thought I would never say that in my life. But in this game, he wasn't emo, he was kinda badass, and there weren't ALMOST any "whatever.."s and the "I will be a stupid asshole for no reason"moments were almost non-existant! He wanted to be a lone wolf, but just because he wanted to protect the friends he cared about! best interpretation of squall, ever.
9-Zidane was as meh as ever and as interesting as the coffee-soaked napkins sitting below my empty coffee mug.
10-Tidus is cheery, brave, and all around the same character that I love in ff10 but that some retards tend to hate because he isn't emo all the time about stupid crap.

About the villains, I can safely resume them all in 4 words: boring, pointless, blabbering idiots. Except for Kefka. Kefka is great, he's the same psychotic clown that enjoys inflicting pain on others just for the sake of it, or because he's just bored. Or maybe he doesn't have a real reason and just want to see everything buring and each one of his enemies suffering while he eats popcorn and watches, literally. He's the ultimate troll. He's the same Joker on steroids plus superpowers, and I loved him for staying in character since ff6.

So there you go. Some of them I felt changed for the worst, and really, this game should have been much, much more lighter in story. Anyways, this game is still a must for anyone who enjoys FF games, even if it's not a classic FF RPG.

comments (1)

Jul 9, 2010

The boss is down, pick up your loot

So the RealID debacle has ended.


In good time too, I was out of popcorn and coke already. Anyways, Blizzard took the right (may I add, NO-BRAINER) decision to not include our real names on forum posts for all the internet to see. The RealID boss is down, nerdscreams were heard, people are re-subbing.

SO is there something left to learn from this cataclysmic event?

I think there's plenty. For Blizzard to even consider doing this in the first place, it's mind-blowing. Considering how practically everyone capable of rational thinking knew this was a horrible idea it begs the question (In my best angry videogame nerd interpretation):

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

It could have been pressure from Activision. Or maybe they were testing the waters for a full facebook integration. Maybe they didn't think it through very well and went with the first idea someone sugested.

What do I think? It could be a mix of all of those reasons. I know what it wasn't though: It certainly wasn't just to get rid of trolls. It's stupid, it's complete, utter stupidity. It's an argument that contradicts itself. You are telling us that trolls who are people that enjoy seeing other people pissed off, will stop posting because they will have fear of using their real names? why would they have fear? ah, because someone can use that information against them, like how trolls always look at your armory or equipment as the first source of harassment. OH WAIT.

I want to think the people leading Blizzard are smart. If they weren't, they wouldn't be at the very top like they are now, so that argument doesn't make sense in the slightest.

Anyways, things are returning to normal, my anticipation for cataclysm has been renewed, so let's go back to business as usual. The forums will be getting an update, with ranking systems and the like, and that's something I think will contribute to better discussions.


comments (0)

Jul 8, 2010

RealID Debacle Continues

Well, it's been an amusing 2 days for us WoW players. I posted before about the utter stupidity that is the new announcement about the official forums requiring RealID, posting your real, full name on each thread that or post you make. Blizzard customers aren't happy.


The thread where Blizzard is carefully herding all complains has reached over 40,000 posts in just 2 days. This has to be the fastest growing thread in internet's history. With over 12,000 unique users, and with a disaproval rate of over 90%, it has to be the biggest display of universal discontent over a new policy for any company of this type.

The media is all over this as well, with reports even from prestigious sources outside the industry like (unbelievably) the Wall Street Journal and the BBC. The question in my mind right now is, will Blizzard change its mind now that it is undeniably evident that this is not what their customers want?

Well, there's a lot at stake. I'm pretty sure that, as players themselves, the creative team behind the game are against this, but the big heads over at activision and blizzard just recently signed a deal with facebook in order to connect their games to the social network, and in turn attract more people to WoW and Battle.net.

This is just the start. Players know it, they know it, and it's been made clear that this is just the beginning of more things to come. Facebook "Likes" inside the game? instant feed to facebook/twitter accounts on game accomplishments? yes, yes and more. All of this comes with the privacy issues that currently surround these social networks.

If there's a time to make a stand against this, it is now. If this goes through, I'm pretty sure there will be no end to the things Activision and Blizzard will make with their customers' personal information. As i said before, I don't really mind from having my personal info being made public (as it is right now). But purposefully making a profit out of it when I never joined the game for that purpose? that's something I won't be a part of.

I grabbed my popcorn and I am watching from the sidelines. It'll be interesting to see where this ends.

comments (0)

Jul 7, 2010

Battle Net's RealID

So there are news for us World of Warcraft players, the new RealID system that allows us to link our accounts under the same battle .net account, and also communicate with other players in-game regardless of server (or blizzard game), will now require us to use our real name on the official forums instead of our characters name.


This has got to be one of the worst idea, no, in fact, is the worst idea that Blizzard has ever come up with.

My name is all over the web, it's public at OCRemix. However I won't support this because it's a very different environment in there. Trolls will continue to be trolls regardless of having their identity shown to everyone, and the only people who will be hurt by this are the people who don't want their information made public.

Some people defend the decision saying that people can't do much with just a name, but I want to direct them to 4Chan or Encyclopedia Dramatica, where people's DoB, Address, and every personal detail are investigated by internet trolls by searching the web, and in many instances, hacking email accounts, etc.

In a game where you're supposed to be playing it to escape reality, this thing comes as quite the hypocrisy. I expect a lot of backlash and cancelled accounts over this.

comments (0)

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)