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Now that everybody's back from vacation, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
esrblog and I went to the movies with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pmat and shakati tonight.
The objective of the expedition was to see Journey to the Center of the Earth. Unfortunately,esrblog and I didn't realize what our friends meant by saying it was in "3d" until they started to hand us 3-D glasses at the door. 3-D glasses don't work for esrblog because his eyes don't focus together--he has one very nearsighted eye and one farsighted eye and he uses them more or less separately, alternating between the two. That works fine for real life, but doesn't yield much fun when trying to watch a 3-D film.
Since we had ridden to the theater in our friends' car, we were stuck there for the duration of Journey. So we scanned the marquee to find something else to watch. The best match was a showing, beginning 40 minutes later than Journey, of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Since that was what we'd really wanted to see, we exchanged our tickets accordingly. But how to kill time before the movie?
Turns out there was a Best Buy near the theater which was still open. After eyeballing new laptops for awhile, we found the movie department and began scanning the racks for items of interest. We bypassed tons of compendia of cheesy martial arts movies with a promise to return later, and ended up leaving with a DVD of the parody commercials from Saturday Night Live, an itemesrblog had wanted for some time.
On to Tomb of the Dragon Emperor! How was it, you ask? It wasn't bad, though it wasn't as much fun as the first three Mummy movies. In case any of you haven't seen it yet but want to, I'll place my spoilerish comments under an lj-cut.
Like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the adventurers of TofDE have a young adult son who's taking after his parents, and are lured out of retirement back into the action (which is set in 1947, about 20 years after the other Mummy adventures). Unlike Indy and Marion, Rick and Evelyn O'Connell are wealthy, solidly married, and concerned about their archaeologist-adventurer son Alex, who's in China looking for the Dragon Emperor's tomb. So when an official from the British government shows up, asking them to take a valuable historic gem to the museum in Shanghai, naturally they jump at the chance. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
Lots, of course. This set up leads to some horribly trite moments with heroic mom and dad attempting to meddle in the life (love and otherwise) of grown son Alex. Just in the nick of time, the bad guys show up and the real fun starts. Rather than bore you with an account of the plot, I'll just list a few good and bad points of the movie.
Good points: Great chase scene and fight choreography.
Creative use of explosives/explosions.
Some amusing and relatively subtle jokes (if you go, look for the father-son conversation about assault rifles which doubles as a veiled sexual one-up-manship scene).
Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, doing a much better job than the movie really deserved.
Seriously great costumes (The gowns the women wear when they're in Shanghai at Evelyn's brother's nightclub are period for 1947, and are both classy and sexy).
The archaeologist son gets the witch-queen's incredibly beautiful, martial artist daughter in the end.
Bad points: Way, way over the top special effects (after all the buildup, it's hard to believe that even Brendan Fraser could kill the immortal Dragon Emperor, who can control all of the five classical Chinese elements).
Cheesy CGI critters (the Dragon Emperor is a shapeshifter who favors reptilian forms, and the yeti are so critical that they should have gotten speaking roles).
Cheesy Buddhist Shan-gri-la.
Cheesy undead manage to stand off terracotta army.
Overall, TotDE is pretty typical summer fare. Go and see it if it's still playing in your area, but if you aren't a hard core Mummy fan, you're just as well off awaiting the DVD.
One final note--I saw the trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince tonight. It promises to be seriously good, if much more noirish than the first five movies.
esrblog and I went to the movies with pmat and shakati tonight.The objective of the expedition was to see Journey to the Center of the Earth. Unfortunately,
esrblog and I didn't realize what our friends meant by saying it was in "3d" until they started to hand us 3-D glasses at the door. 3-D glasses don't work for esrblog because his eyes don't focus together--he has one very nearsighted eye and one farsighted eye and he uses them more or less separately, alternating between the two. That works fine for real life, but doesn't yield much fun when trying to watch a 3-D film.Since we had ridden to the theater in our friends' car, we were stuck there for the duration of Journey. So we scanned the marquee to find something else to watch. The best match was a showing, beginning 40 minutes later than Journey, of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Since that was what we'd really wanted to see, we exchanged our tickets accordingly. But how to kill time before the movie?
Turns out there was a Best Buy near the theater which was still open. After eyeballing new laptops for awhile, we found the movie department and began scanning the racks for items of interest. We bypassed tons of compendia of cheesy martial arts movies with a promise to return later, and ended up leaving with a DVD of the parody commercials from Saturday Night Live, an item
esrblog had wanted for some time.On to Tomb of the Dragon Emperor! How was it, you ask? It wasn't bad, though it wasn't as much fun as the first three Mummy movies. In case any of you haven't seen it yet but want to, I'll place my spoilerish comments under an lj-cut.
Like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the adventurers of TofDE have a young adult son who's taking after his parents, and are lured out of retirement back into the action (which is set in 1947, about 20 years after the other Mummy adventures). Unlike Indy and Marion, Rick and Evelyn O'Connell are wealthy, solidly married, and concerned about their archaeologist-adventurer son Alex, who's in China looking for the Dragon Emperor's tomb. So when an official from the British government shows up, asking them to take a valuable historic gem to the museum in Shanghai, naturally they jump at the chance. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
Lots, of course. This set up leads to some horribly trite moments with heroic mom and dad attempting to meddle in the life (love and otherwise) of grown son Alex. Just in the nick of time, the bad guys show up and the real fun starts. Rather than bore you with an account of the plot, I'll just list a few good and bad points of the movie.
Good points: Great chase scene and fight choreography.
Creative use of explosives/explosions.
Some amusing and relatively subtle jokes (if you go, look for the father-son conversation about assault rifles which doubles as a veiled sexual one-up-manship scene).
Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, doing a much better job than the movie really deserved.
Seriously great costumes (The gowns the women wear when they're in Shanghai at Evelyn's brother's nightclub are period for 1947, and are both classy and sexy).
The archaeologist son gets the witch-queen's incredibly beautiful, martial artist daughter in the end.
Bad points: Way, way over the top special effects (after all the buildup, it's hard to believe that even Brendan Fraser could kill the immortal Dragon Emperor, who can control all of the five classical Chinese elements).
Cheesy CGI critters (the Dragon Emperor is a shapeshifter who favors reptilian forms, and the yeti are so critical that they should have gotten speaking roles).
Cheesy Buddhist Shan-gri-la.
Cheesy undead manage to stand off terracotta army.
Overall, TotDE is pretty typical summer fare. Go and see it if it's still playing in your area, but if you aren't a hard core Mummy fan, you're just as well off awaiting the DVD.
One final note--I saw the trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince tonight. It promises to be seriously good, if much more noirish than the first five movies.
satisfied
(no subject)
if Brendan Fraser is actually old enough to have a son old enough to
wander around on his own in a foreign country, he doesn't look it.
(no subject)
(no subject)
I also had issues with the lead taking out Jet Li's heavy; I think he probably have gotten a bit more help from ancient long-practiced martial artists (actually, if I'd staged it, I'd have done a lot more with the "Yeoh has had an extra 2000 years to practice martial arts, but Li is still immortal and has more combat-effective magic" angle rather than the more symetrical fight they actually did).
Li and Yeoh very much steal the show with their duel -- but that's completely unsurprising. When you put the best two dancers of the age on stage together, you kinda expect their dance to be better than anyone else's...oddly enough, it is.
Compared to Indy...well, I'm not as attached to the characters (Marion!) but I think it's overall a better move, if largely because it has a lot of good scenes and no anchors like the "refrigerator" scene.
(no subject)