Eragon (Review)
Eragon
2006
Directed by Stefen Fangmeier
I have just seen the greatest film of the last 50 years: STAR WARS!!! Unfortunately, it was buried beneath a train wreck of a movie called Eragon. Eragon is based on a book written by Christopher Paolini, who started on it when he was 15 and got it published by age 18. When reprinted, he became a best-selling author at age 19. Sadly, his novel is not unique, and is in fact just Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings, with a few references to Dragonriders of Pern and Robert Jordan novels. It is less of a theft and more of a wholesale rape, as what he does take isn’t turned into a brilliant work of fantasy, but just some fanboy wankery hardly worthy of posting on bad fan-fiction sites on the internet. Paolini managed to pimp out his age (due to finishing home schooling early he was free to do a book tour of schools while dressed in some knight costume) to successfully get his book republished. This shows us that you don’t need originality to succeed in the world, only ambition to promote yourself and your repackaged ideas. Sure, Star Wars borrows from Kurasawa and mythology canons, but it melds together into an interesting story that reshaped science fiction movies. Eragon becomes a mess, complete with shots identical to those in Star Wars and others, and manages to even screw up copying from Star Wars correctly. George Lucas never ruined Star Wars this bad with Jar Jar Binks, but Paolini enters new territories. So in a way it is ground-breaking, nothing has ever sucked so much like this before.
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Dungeons & Dragons (Review)
Dungeons & Dragons
2000
Starring
Jeremy Irons as Profion
Bruce Payne as Damodar
Justin Whalin as Ridley Freeborn
Marlon Wayans as Snails
Zoe McLellan as Marina Pretensa
Thora Birch as Empress Savina
A group of high schoolers sit around a table drinking copious amounts of Mt. Dew, all while pretending to be orcs or sorcerers and rolling handfuls of dice with more sides than golf balls have dimples in this thrilling true to life adaptation of the classic game. No, wait, instead we get a live-action adventure that puts the “Dung” in Dungeons & Dragons. Ignoring the shelves of existing literature set in the D&D universe littering bookstores and comic book shops, and also ignoring the fairly decent cartoon of the late 1980’s, the director instead chose to give us an all-new adventure, which breaks new ground in the amount of source material ignored in order to produce a terrible Hollywood movie of an existing property. Director Courtney Solomon had the rights for the film for ten years, and this is his best effort. The culmination of all his dreams. His shining star in a dark void. Ten years…..wasted! Drunken monkeys banging away on keyboards with bananas produced better scripts in that time. The lone bright spot of the movie is Jeremy Irons seemed to realize what junk he was in, and had a grand ol’ time hamming up, over acting, and becoming the best performance in the film.
His sorcerer gone mad in his lust for power and dragon control is fun to watch, hilarious at times. Fellow villain Bruce Payne plays his Damodar character with a permanent scowl and low voiced threat voice that he seemed to either be loving his role, or he was awakened each morning at 4 am by construction and the scowl lasted all day. Either way, it’s a boon for us, as fun with acting is always preferable to being bored to tears. Grab your +3 Mace and come with me on a grand adventure, a quest to parts unknown to retrieve an ancient device, the magical “Eject” button of the DVD player!
Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Bruce Payne, CGI trainwreck, dragons, Jeremy Irons, Justin Whalin, Marlon Wayans, The book was better, Thora Birch, wacky faces, Zoe McLellan
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Review)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
2005
Starring
Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent
Mos Def as Ford Prefect
Zooey Deschanel as Trillian
Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox
Alan Rickman as Marvin (voice)
Warwick Davis as Marvin (body)
The classic work by Douglas Adams finally comes to the silver screen. Twenty years or so it took, with pitfalls all the way. It was originally a radio play, then a book, then sequels, miniseries, video games, and towels followed. Finally, after years of stalling, the movie has been realized. Douglas Adams died, but the film continued onward. He did manage to contribute a lot toward the script before he left us. I myself read the books in high school years ago, but had not read them recently, so they were not fresh on my mind. I did not want to constantly compare the film to the books, so I stayed away from them until after the show. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or HG2G as the slang goes (Or even H2G2, which is being used as well as typos rapidly expand their stranglehold upon the English language) the movie has some big shoes to fill and big expectations to meet.
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Alan Rickman, cool robots, Douglas Adams, Martin Freeman, Mos Def, Sam Rockwell, The book was better, Warwick Davis, Zooey Deschanel
