Tag Archives: Emmy Rossum

Is YA novel film Beautiful Creatures the new Twilight?

Posted on by
Reply

[adrotate banner=”1″]Beautiful Creatures certainly wants to be Twilight and Harry Potter and True Blood combined.

Let’s see,

  • We got a girl who moves to a new city and meets a boy
  • We got the rural South (South Carolina instead of Louisiana)
  • We got magical powers and spells and crap
  • We got goofy characters and high profile actors playing these supporting roles.
  • We got based on a popular Young Adult book series
  • We got dumb terms like Parselmouth (example: Palimpsest – One who reads time)
  • We got…THIS:
Beautiful Creatures Twilight

Oh, Edwar– I mean, Ethan!

No, I do believe this is a totally original property!

For those of you who need convincing of the originality, here is some more information:

The small town of Gatlin, South Carolina will never bee the same when newcomer Lena Duchannes arrives to live with her recluse uncle and enrolls in the local high school. There, she catches the eye of local guy Ethan Wate, who is having reoccurring dreams of a girl who smells like lemon. Oddly enough, Lena Duchannes smells like lemon. When life gives you lemons, you gotta lemonade that girl, but before that can happen they have to get through all this stuff about Lena being a Caster (aka someone who can do magic) and at age 16 will undergo the Claiming, which will make her choose light or dark. This family takes their Thanksgiving turkey dividing seriously! Also there are a bunch of weirdo magic relatives of hers and a bunch of small town anti-witch people. And probably some smooching. No word on if a shirtless character that transforms into an animal falls in love with a baby, but this is only the first book in the Caster Chronicles series. Don’t get your hopes too far up!

Featured players in Beautiful Creatures include Alice Englert as Lena Duchannes, Alden Ehrenreich as Ethan Wate, Jeremy Irons as Uncle Macon Ravenwood, Viola Davis as Amma, Emma Thompson as Mrs. Lincoln and Sarafine, Thomas Mann as Link, and Emmy Rossum as Ridley Duchaness. Richard LaGravenese directs. Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl wrote the original novels. Expect February 13th to be a day that lives in infamy.

Dragonball Evolution (Review)

Posted on by
2

Dragonball Evolution


2009
Directed by James Wong
Written by Ben Ramsey

Dragonball is a famous manga and anime series from Japan that has fans all over the world. I am not one of those fans so I don’t give a crap how they deviated from the source material. If you just want to read a review that complains about that stuff, then I am sorry, this is not the review for you. If you want to read a review that complains about other stupid stuff and yet still gives the film a fairly positive review, then you have hit the jackpot. Also, there is a monkeyman in this movie, and a CGI dragon. Just saying.

Dragonball the anime is about some dudes who spend 99% of the show charging up for the 1% where they fight and someone gets blasted only for them to fight next week after more charging up. It is the most popular show that has ever existed in the world. The movie decided to ignore the charging up and instead do some sort of “Find the Dragonballs!” plot. Fine with me. The film then basically becomes a low-rent Star Wars ripoff, or at least that same stupid farmboy mythology that everyone does. Sure, that legend has been around forever and Star Wars is known for borrowing elements wholesale from other myths itself, but all of those stories now just end up being compared to Star Wars, like it or not.


And where were the fistcams we were told about? I don’t remember any fistcams in the film. Maybe they realized it looked stupid.

Justin Chatwin does a good job with the normal teenager parts, but the sections where he is vowing revenge, questioning people about stuff in the dragonball mythology, or calling upon dragons to resurrect his master all come off as very badly acted. He just isn’t a good genre actor at this point, but he would be find chatting up some girl on 90210 or something.

Goku (Justin Chatwin) – Goku is the grandson of Master Gohan and your average American teenager who has a martial artist grandfather and is the heir guardian of a mysterious Dragonball that is sought by evil warlords. And he is secretly an evil monkey. Justin Chatwin is the annoyingly not-killed son from War of the Worlds. Here, he is less annoying.
Master Roshi (Chow Yun-Fat) – Master Gohan’s friend and mentor to Goku. Master Roshi is a creepy dude who enjoys some good porn and robots and being a slob. But he cleans up his act to teach Goku. You should know who Chow Yun-Fat is so I am not going to explain it.
Bulma Briefs (Emmy Rossum) – Bulma wants to use her father’s dragonball to develop a new energy source, but the dragonball is stolen by Mai and Bulma runs into Goku while tracking it down. Bulma Briefs was named by a guy, in case you were wondering. Emmy Rossum is enjoyable and graduated high school at age 15.
Chi Chi (Jamie Chung) – Chi Chi is not only a celebration of food, but is Goku’s love interest. She is a secret fighter and also a child of a super rich family and her parents are never around. Jamie Chung likes being on reality shows and drinking and driving. My wife was friends with her sister so that makes me totally famous! And we got cheesecake pics!
Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) – Lord Piccolo was trapped for 2000 years or some crap when he and a monkey failed to steal all the dragonballs long ago. They never mention how he escaped, nor how he got his zeppelin. Zeppelins are cool. Piccolo is green. James Marsters was on Buffy, but I don’t watch Buffy.
Yamcha (Joon Park) – Yamcha just shows up in the middle of the film as a semi-criminal guy who joins our heroes in chasing balls. Joon Park was a member of the music group g.o.d. in Korea.
Mai (Eriko Tamura) – Mai is Piccolo’s servent who just steals all these dragonballs and does other stuff while barely saying anything and looking like Bai Ling should have played the role. Eriko Tamura was in Heroes and the great film Surf School.


Continue reading →