What If... (The Expendables Review)

You've grown up making these kinds of "what ifs" all your life.  "What if there was a Lord of the Rings-Star Wars crossover?"  "What if the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fought the X-Men?"  "What if every major action star EVER made a movie together?"  Well, I'm still waiting on the first two (though Eregon comes uncomfortably close on the former), but the third "what if" has finally been answered, and The Expendables is the result.

My jaw was somewhere below sea level the first time I saw a trailer for this thing.  Stalone.  Statham.  Li.  Couture.  Austin.  Willis.  Crews.  Rourke.  A cameo from the Governator!!  OMG WANT.

The plot is delightfully simple.  The "Expendables" is a group of mercenaries who get contacted to take out a tyranical dictator in South America.  With a movie like this, you don't need a terribly complicated plot.  Just give all of those guys the biggest weapons you can find and let them loose, and that's pretty much what happens.  There are some twists, sure - some greedy American buttholes have a hand in the country's corruption - but mostly it's nothing more than action and some odd character development.

Stalone actually wrote and directed this thing himself, so I have to commend him for getting so many action stars together for his project.  I understand that Segal had to back out due to conflicts, and I'd have liked to have seen Van Damme, but maybe next time.  I am not sure if I really get Stalone's sense of writing, though.  I swear, practically ALL of the banter between the heroes went completely over my head.  It sounded to me like they were all sharing some inside jokes or referencing their old movies, but it would be nice if the audience was clued in to some of them, too.  At least it made the group look sufficiently buddy-buddy.  That's what surprised me: the six Expendables didn't act like six individual stars.  They meshed together in a way that causes me to hope that Stalone goes on to write some more action flicks.  Sure, Stalone and Statham are clearly the "main" Expendables, but everyone gets good screentime, particularly a philosophical Rourke.

The action is fun and fast-paced.  One scene involving a dock got IGN's summer movie award for "best explosion", and I must agree.  Each hero has a specialty - Statham uses knives, Li uses fists, Crews uses the most ridiculous shotgun I have ever seen in my life - so you get a plesant variety of viewing experiences.  The finale in particular felt as though you were watching half a dozen separate action movies, each one starring one of the heroes as they run around destroying an entire army of nameless minions.  These are guys who know their business: if you want some dependable, old-school ass-kicking, then look no further.

There's really not much else to be said about The Expendables.  It's as solid a guy movie as there's been this year.  Add it to the list of movies I made in my Predators review if you want to create the ultimate man night of movies.  It's simple, it's explosive, and the entire thing is worth seeing just for the Schwarzenegger cameo.  Don't miss it.

Me vs. The Critics (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Review)

Don't believe a word the critics say.  At least not if you fall within the generations currently about 20-35 years old.

My parents are old.  Both now qualify for senior citizen discounts at the local cinemas and all-you-can eat buffets.  And they would hate this movie if they were confused enough to actually go and see it.  On the flipside, they loved Something's Gotta Give.  I watched it with them once, and while I didn't quite hate it, it was, and will always be, a movie for old people, and I found it boring, just as they would probably find Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to be spastic, random, and downright weird.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World has not done well in theaters.  Total in its two months of release, it has only made about $31,000,000, or roughly half its budget.  It is, frankly, a movie with a very specific target audience.  Luckily for me (and you, reader), I fall right square in the bullseye.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a film about a 23-year-old bum "between jobs" who lives with a flagrantly gay roommate (played brilliantly by that scene-stealing Kulkin kid who always wet the bed in Home Alone), plays in a band who calles themselves Sex Bob-omb, and is dating a 17-year-old Chinese high-schooler.  He is, essentially, something of a loser.  But when he meets Ramona, a girl with dyed hair and a slick pair of roller blades, his whole life flips upside-down.  In order to date Ramona, you see, Scott has to defeat her seven evil exes.

What makes this movie so brilliant is its comic book style.  Sound effect words pop up over characters like the Adam West Batman film of the 60's.  Scenes are cut together like a comic strip.  And, miraculously, none of it felt overdone, as would have been so easy to do.  You honestly feel like you're watching a comic come to life before you (in fact, a few stills from the real Scott Pilgrim graphic novel do make an appearance).  Combine that with the excess of videogame jokes (their band IS called Sex Bob-omb), clever dialogue, and fantastic characters, and you have yourself what is, in my opinion, probably the best representation of millenial nerd culture to date.  Seriously.  This film was made for me.  It was like the filmmakers followed me around, observed my self-depricating humor, my love of poking fun at Canada for no good reason, my obsession with videogames, and, honestly, my desire to become the hero for the girl, rolled everything into a coherent plot, and made me pay $9.00 to see it.  And I can't thank them enough for it.

There are too many little jokes and references to even try counting in this film.  The Legend of Zelda theme makes a appearance.  Scott scores a 64-hit combo on one of the evil exes (complete with a small hit-counter displayed on-screen).  A man yells "Kaaaaaaay Oooooohhhhh!" when Scott blasts an ex.  And don't even get me started on Ex number 3 (played by former Man of Steel Brandon Routh!) or any single bit of the final fight and its aftermath.  I realized, after a good chunk of the movie had passed, that I was grinning from ear to ear.  For no reason.  The film was just that much fun.  I must have looked completely insane.

 

As previously mentioned, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is based on a series of graphic novels that came out between August of 2004 and July of 2010, and for the most part, the movie does a fine job of condensing the 6 graphic novels into a single two-hour movie.  The first volume in particular practically makes the transition verbatim into live-action.  The graphic novels obviously gain significantly more time to develop characters, hilarious subplots, and a far more insane final fight than witnessed in the movie, but so it goes.  Sometimes certain points that are absolutely amazing in one form would be God-awful in another, and I for one am glad that the movie made the various adjustments that it did.  While having Scott and the final ex disappear into Subspace, where the ex transforms into a gigantic Super-Saiyan monster, seemed a perfect finale in paper form, I really can't imagine how they would have pulled it off on-screen and not lose half their audience.  A fifty-foot Jason Schwartzman would have just been silly.

 

I could go on for hours about this one.  It may very well be my favorite movie of the year.  If you have any love of the video game culture, if you secretly wish that you could bash in the faces of your lover's exes, if you want to see what a comic book would really look like in live-action, and if you simply love all things Michael Cera, then please, see this movie.  Check out the graphic novels.  Buy the Xbox Live Arcade game.  Listen to the soundtrack.  Do what you can to give this movie the loving attention it so deserves.

Ancient Egypt is... Interesting? (The Red Pyramid Review)

While I impatiently wait for Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Last Olympian to come out in paperback, Rick Riordan has not been so idle.  In fact, he has started not one, but two new series!  One of them appears to be a continuation of the Percy Jackson series starring different kids, but the other is entirely new, called The Kane Chronicles, and its first entry is called The Red Pyramid.

Where Percy Jackson & The Olympians dealt primarily in Greek mythology, The Kane Chronicles does the same for Egyptian.  Carter and Sadie Kane are the brother-and-sister duo who take turns narrating, and they are about as wildly different as you could ever imagine.  Carter grew up with his dad traveling from dig site to dig site, museum to museum, while Sadie grew up in England with her grandparents following the death of their mother some years ago.  At the start of the novel, their dad takes them both to a museum in London, where he performs a ritual of magic on the Rosetta Stone, which promptly explodes and unleashes five of ancient Egypt's biggest dieties.  Thus begins a whirlwind of gods and magic, with Carter and Sadie right in the middle of it all.

If you've read the Percy Jackson series, The Red Pyramid should feel quite familiar.  The kids narrate in much the same way as Percy Jackson, and many of the peripheral characters are just as zany, like their uncle's baboon who only eats things that end in -o (Cheetos, cherios, burritos), or Phillip, the huge albino crocodile who guards their house.  Riordan's ability to take myths thousands of years old and paint them in a new and relevant way continues to shine through with his take on Egypt.  I'm proud/embarrassed to say that I knew quite a lot about Greek myth and was able to pick out more or less everything Riordan threw at the readers in Percy Jackson, but my entire knowledge base of Egyptian myth comes from "Stargate-SG1" and The Mummy, so you could say that I was a touch limited.  I can't speak for Riordan's accuracy in his myth retellings, but the explanations he gives are easy to understand, make perfect sense within the context of the story, and are terribly interesting, particularly in the way that he deals with conflicting myths and times when brothers and sisters are sometimes husband-wife, or even mother-son.  Only Riordan could make that so unconfusing.

The Red Pyramid keeps the same blistering pace of the Percy Jackson novels.  The kids hardly spend more than a chapter in one location before being chased elsewhere, barely managing to escape before the goddess of scorpions, just to name one, turns them into afternoon snacks.  It is The Red Pyramid's fast pace that makes it so suitable for today's ADHD, gotta-have-it-now generation of kids, but adults may find it a little too fast.  I admit that my reading preferences do match that of a 12-year-old boy, but even I sometimes wished that things would slow down a little.  It's not that there isn't character development - the two kids in particular are well-thought out and fun to follow - but sometimes it just felt like there was a little connection missing.  Percy Jackson had the same problem, like the characters moved too fast for me to truly see them.

Where The Red Pyramid shines is its portrayal of magic.  Again, my knowledge of Egyptian myth is about as limited as my knowledge of Hungarian folk dances, but I'm assuming that Riordan has done his homework and created a brand of magic as close to that of ancient Egypt as possible.  Have you ever noticed that this is what young adult fiction novels do?  Your typical teenager (Carter/Sadie, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Eregon, even Luke Skywalker) is thrown into a new and magical world and subsequently spends the majority of the first book (at least) learning all about that new world while at the same time stopping some kind of destructive force.  Well, The Red Pyramid follows that same old formula, but the world created here is one of my favorites that I've ever encountered.  If you think that Egypt is dead, or that myths about Osiris or Anubis are irrelevant to today's world, check this book out.  I dare say you may think differently when you finish.

I can't wait for the next in the series.  You had better hurry up, Rick Riordan.  Your books are addicting.