So, PRINCE OF PERSIA Is On...

...which is a terrible, terrible movie. Let me mention just a couple of the things that happened in the first half hour of this movie I've never seen that make no fucking sense whatsoever.

  • Random people who Gyllenhall's character has never met are recognizing him as a prince, even though photography does not exist and most subjects had no idea what their rulers actually looked like at the time this movie supposedly takes place.
  • News of the price that has been put on Gyllenhall's character's head is apparently traveling faster than they are while escaping even though the goddamn telegraph won't be invented for hundreds of years.

There. There are just two things. I won't get into the fact that all the extras are swarthy Middle Easterners while the characters that we're supposed to care about are all as white as Rick Santorum after he Googled his name for the first time. That's just the usual Hollywood racial ignorance on display. Sort of like how the leads all have British accents while the extras are allowed to sound like pseudo-Persians.

Ahh, racism...few do it better than you, Hollywood.

But the ultimate point that I want to make is that this is a terrible movie that doesn't even understand its own faux-historical context.

Regarding GREEN LANTERN

I'm probably not going to bother seeing it. That's a strange thing for me to write, because I've been a proponent of a Green Lantern movie for a long, long time.

But I never wanted Ryan Reynolds in it.

He's a fine performer for certain things, and I've liked him in some movies. But he isn't Hal Jordan, and from what I've seen of the film in trailers and such, it's nothing we haven't seen before: a chosen one; training montages; a new recruit introduced to a larger world. Hey, Green Lantern producers: I've already seen all of those Harry Potter films. Although we shouldn't be surprised that Warner Brothers is aping the story points of their very successful wizarding franchise.

It just looks dumb, and cheesy, and with an over-reliance on CGI (which, arguably, is the only way you can make a GL movie, I know...but did his costume need to be computer-generated? The answer is NO.).

It just looks wholly unremarkable, and I can't afford to blow my money on films that are wholly unremarkable. That said, I've heard really good things about X-Men: First Class, and today it'll only be 5 bucks. So, yeah...sorry, Green Lantern: I won't be seeing you this Friday, or whenever you come out.

It's your own fault for looking so fucking bland.

THE PRESTIGE

Prestige

It gets sort of forgotten by the wayside with all of these Dark Knights and Inceptions, but in my opinion The Prestige is Chris Nolan's real masterpiece. Then again, with its dueling magicians, Victorian-era fetishism, and Nikola Tesla balderdash, it's almost like it was designed from the ground up to be one of my favorite movies.

Watched it last night. Watching it again right now.

Look It up Yourself

I was going to post about today's Superman casting news, but then I remembered that I don't now, nor have I ever, given two shits about Superman. They chose somebody handsome. Is there any other requirement for playing the dullest superhero in the world?

You want to get into casting for Green Arrow, or Lobo, or, I don't know, Blue Beetle? I'll theorize and pontificate until the cows come home. But the only people who really care about who plays Superman are childred, grown men who have never known the touch of a woman, and Spandex fetishists.

My Taste Is Impeccable

My roomie bought a DVD combo pack including The Hangover and Wedding Crashers. You may have seen my recent post enthusing about The Hangover, so I thought I owed Wedding Crashers, which I'd never seen, a shot as well. After all, they were packaged together, right? Perhaps the style of humor in the second movie would appeal to me as much as the first one.

Nope.

Maybe it's just my allergies to both Vince Vaughn and weddings, but I couldn't watch more than half an hour of Wedding Crashers. There is literally nothing I enjoyed about that formulaic pile of rom-com garbage. You know, just because a movie has some nice tits and some raunchy jokes in it, that doesn't make it "special" or more than a paint-by-numbers exercise in predictable, crowd-pleasing swill.

Blech.

Somebody please explain the appeal of this movie, and while your at it, define Vince Vaughn's queasy, Sasquatchian "charm".