Weekend of cinema
Fri, 6/9: My bro, dad and I went out together on Fri night. We originally intended to hit the cajun place in Parkland, but they were really hoppin', so we hit Marzano's 2 doors down. Still really hoppin', but at least they had open seating outside. After a tasty dinner, we headed over to the theater to see The DaVinci Code. It was an ok movie, but I feel like the script was lacking. I almost want to read the book to see how they compare in organization, but... we all know how I am with books =PP yeah, I'm a damn phillistine, or whatever it is you people call me =P But yeah, I really felt like there was some lack in the suspense and thriller side of what I thought was supposed to be a suspenseful thriller. And the whole "follow the clues" part didn't feel any more intriguing than the same thing in National Treasure *shrugs* ah well. I didn't dislike it, but I felt like it was average at best.
Sat, 6/10: I made it to at least half of KB this time, but seeing a late show the night before didn't help ^^;; Anyhoo, after martial arts I headed up to Seattle for some happy fun time Parkour, which lasted till about 4:30p or so. After the requisite showering, I ended up w/ capnexposition, uriel_godfire and damienroc in the U-District to get food and see Beowulf and Grendel. I have to confess, I was not really very familiar w/ the story before going in. I think really all I knew about it was that Beowulf is a warrior who is charged to kill a troll, Grendel. I had a lot of fun with the movie, I think it was quite enjoyable. One of my favorite parts though has to be when Grendel was singing the "Doom" song XD To put that in context, it happened when Beowulf was yelling at Grendel something about bringing his doom, and Grendel seemed to parrot the word "doom" back at him in sing-song. So, yeah, the "Doom" song XD Also, the witch was apparently a witch because she didn't have a local accent. =PP She talked in, well, like a generic American accent, while everyone else had some sort of England area accent. Weird. Though speaking of accents, I do wish the movie had been subtitled, as some of the charater's accents were pretty thick at some points and their English was hard to understand.
Sun, 6/11: Met up with the same group of people plus my friends Hitomi and Elias in the U-Dist for lunch before the 2 movies that day. Hitomi and Elias joined us for Shinobi then took off, and then uriel_godfire had to go to work, and then my friend Jeremy joined us for Seven Swords.
Shinobi was quite good, though a lil' light on some of the action for what I wish we could have seen. Especially since the plot was 5 ninja each from 2 warring clans battling each other, I wish we had seen more of some of their fighting techniques before some of them died. Also, I was kinda hoping for more of an actiony ending when it got to the last 2, but they went for the dramatic and tragic ending, which was still also good, if not a lil' gut-wrenching at one point O_o (I will never think of the 3 Stooges the same again... *shudder*)
Seven Swords was enjoyable, but not at what I would consider peak performance. Turns out the movie was based on a book (Seven Swords of Mt. Tien, which also seems to be part of a series of books), which leads me to a particular conclusion after having seen the movie. There is a bit of incoherence in the movie, which I think stems from trying to include far too much story for how long the movie was. Either it needed to be longer to flesh out the relevant parts of the story they wanted to tell, or it needed to be cut down to focus more on particular elements. It still had some really nice action scenes and good story to tell, it was just kinda lost in it's own epicness. Actually, now that I know that the book the movie is based on is a series, I think they would have done better to shorten the movie and just make more of them to spread the telling of the story out more. I dunno. It was still worth watching, but overall as a work of cinema I would say it was unpolished.
Sat, 6/10: I made it to at least half of KB this time, but seeing a late show the night before didn't help ^^;; Anyhoo, after martial arts I headed up to Seattle for some happy fun time Parkour, which lasted till about 4:30p or so. After the requisite showering, I ended up w/ capnexposition, uriel_godfire and damienroc in the U-District to get food and see Beowulf and Grendel. I have to confess, I was not really very familiar w/ the story before going in. I think really all I knew about it was that Beowulf is a warrior who is charged to kill a troll, Grendel. I had a lot of fun with the movie, I think it was quite enjoyable. One of my favorite parts though has to be when Grendel was singing the "Doom" song XD To put that in context, it happened when Beowulf was yelling at Grendel something about bringing his doom, and Grendel seemed to parrot the word "doom" back at him in sing-song. So, yeah, the "Doom" song XD Also, the witch was apparently a witch because she didn't have a local accent. =PP She talked in, well, like a generic American accent, while everyone else had some sort of England area accent. Weird. Though speaking of accents, I do wish the movie had been subtitled, as some of the charater's accents were pretty thick at some points and their English was hard to understand.
Sun, 6/11: Met up with the same group of people plus my friends Hitomi and Elias in the U-Dist for lunch before the 2 movies that day. Hitomi and Elias joined us for Shinobi then took off, and then uriel_godfire had to go to work, and then my friend Jeremy joined us for Seven Swords.
Shinobi was quite good, though a lil' light on some of the action for what I wish we could have seen. Especially since the plot was 5 ninja each from 2 warring clans battling each other, I wish we had seen more of some of their fighting techniques before some of them died. Also, I was kinda hoping for more of an actiony ending when it got to the last 2, but they went for the dramatic and tragic ending, which was still also good, if not a lil' gut-wrenching at one point O_o (I will never think of the 3 Stooges the same again... *shudder*)
Seven Swords was enjoyable, but not at what I would consider peak performance. Turns out the movie was based on a book (Seven Swords of Mt. Tien, which also seems to be part of a series of books), which leads me to a particular conclusion after having seen the movie. There is a bit of incoherence in the movie, which I think stems from trying to include far too much story for how long the movie was. Either it needed to be longer to flesh out the relevant parts of the story they wanted to tell, or it needed to be cut down to focus more on particular elements. It still had some really nice action scenes and good story to tell, it was just kinda lost in it's own epicness. Actually, now that I know that the book the movie is based on is a series, I think they would have done better to shorten the movie and just make more of them to spread the telling of the story out more. I dunno. It was still worth watching, but overall as a work of cinema I would say it was unpolished.