Guardians Of The Galaxy

Yeah this was pretty good too.

I honestly can't imagine this movie ever being made outside of that time and place in the world. It's a friggin' weird movie and the characters are some of the most obscure ones but I have to give credit to the director and writers. They took the most unknown Marvel characters save for possibly Squirrel Girl, and practically made them household names, if you weren't a die hard Marvel Comics fan you would have noooo idea who these people were. So how did they do it? Well the story is admittedly very simple, with clear cut characters, a basic villain, and a lavish colorful variety of worlds. We follow Star Lord, essentially a space pirate that gets roped into a deal that makes him come into contact with a variety of different people, there's Gamora the daughter of Thanos, Drax a man seeking revenge for the death of his family, Rocket Raccoon an augmented animal with a penchant for weapons, and Groot a walking talking tree. Comic books are weird. Granted the designs are really good, save for Gamora though of course no disrespect to Zoe Saldana but blood red hair and bright green skin just don't work for me at all. The character's personalities are strong though, you don't technically know much about them, with my personal favorite being Drax cause he's just a great guy and never failed to entertain me and I fully supported his character. I will say the tone is consistent, but the style and art direction is...how should I say this? Garish. I don't know, I think I'm so used to seeing practical, no frills, basic designed spaceships that when these ostentatious, very colorful, incredibly artistic designed spaceships appear I just start asking why they are like that. Don't get me wrong the environments and tech we see is interesting, certainly visually appealing, but it reminds me a lot of the more cheesy lowbudget sci-fi films of the 60s and 70s with aliens having skin tones the color of every shade of the rainbow, bizzare tech, kinda hammy performances, it like blends tongue in cheek sci-fi with modern effects and not half bad writing. It's an interesting one to watch. Villain's super basic yet again, guys I'm really not asking for much with the villains. Just make their motivation and character memorable, I mean he has a neat design but there's nothing to it. At least the soundtrack is (mostly) good, but if you're going to give us a throwback with cassettes actually release the soundtrack on a mother loving cassette! If vinyl can do it, cassettes can do it. I'm tired of sounding like an old man, commit to the tech of the 80s if the culture has such a hard on for the 80s. You don't make the soundtrack look like a cassette but not be a cassette, and you do not release movies that look like videotapes from a 1980s video store if you are not going to put it on tape! Who are you trying to impress?? Just dew it! Urgh, rant over. I'm sorry, I just had to get that off my chest one day and it was today. It's a good movie, I think I would give it 3 stars, 7/10, I'm interested what will happen next but at the same time I'm not in a rush to get back to them.

The Battle Of The Five Armies

I must be truthful in terms of this. I once told you that I saw The Hobbit movies, and well I can honestly say I told you the truth, I might not have told all of it. I never wanted it to end, the adventures, but all things must come to an end no matter how much you try to stop it. Today was the first time I saw The Battle Of The Five Armies.

After finally claiming the mountain and the imminent death of Smaug, the dwarves and Bilbo seem to have completed their quest. But Thorin grew sick, a sickness of the mind took over him, the dragon was with the gold too long, it started to drive Thorin mad. But there were some who resisted the King under the Mountain, an army of men and elves marched toward The Lonely Mountain, trying to bargain for the riches Thorin swore they would possess. He would not part with a single coin, thus beginning the war. But all were decieved, for another army was approaching the mountain, Sauron conjured an army to gain a foothold in this world again, starting with the mountain. The battle of the five armies begun. This film does not take any time getting down to the war for the mountain. It takes maybe 25 minutes before all hell breaks loose, and save for the last fifteen or so minutes, there is nothing but fighting going on. I'd almost say this movies outdoes even Return Of The King standards of battles but with Return Of The King, we knew the stakes. It was a battle for Middle Earth, a fight for everything, but here we know the story goes on past this point so the battles lack so much punch. It's not bad, the fights are magnificent but it just lacks all the tension. You want to know how it all ends yes, and surprisingly the battles never grated and felt like there was no time to even breathe, so I was very happy about that but the film just was missing something. The best scene in the entire movie is when Saruman, Elrond, and Galadriel stormed the fortress and rescued Gandalf, that was un-flipping-believable! I would pay money just to see that again! I also noticed the story got very Shakespearian with Thorin, a king slowly being driven mad, forcing everybody away from him, bloodthirsty and not having even a second guess about killing one of his friends but luckily that subsides although we still do kinda end with tragedy and death. Actually speaking of death, I'm not quite sure what happened halfway through this movie, in almost all The Hobbit movies we got violence and quite a bit of severing body parts but the movies did a good job of hiding it or not making it too bloody but this friggin' movie has blood splurting everywhere! It's like if Peter Jackson went from Oscar winning director back to his Brain Dead days, of violent, gory, and exploitation days. You see blood just splash all over the place! I swear on my life I saw an R rating before the movie began. An R rating?? Oh I see, Tolkien was never child friendly! Maybe it was just with the extended cut. Oh yes, and free word of warning, you know how I said the extended cut of Lord Of The Rings was the only way to watch it? Well...with The Hobbit it's the exact opposite. The extended cuts add nothing to the story. In fact the extended cuts actually hurt the movie. I prefer the much shorter theatrical cuts. Just proving that longer is not always better. Do I think The Hobbit needed 3 movies to tell the story? No. Did I still enjoy the three movies for what they did? Heck yes! But I would still just stick to The Lord Of The Rings, no disrespect to The Hobbit, I greatly enjoy the movies and appreciate what they did, but Lord Of The Rings just knocked it out of the park for me. But of course, that's just my opinion. Maybe you will enjoy these three movies compared to the other three movies, you never know. Well, that about does it for Middle Earth here for The Dude, not unless I really want to talk about the 70s animated one, I do really like it but I doubt it shall come to pass. Thank you for joining me on my last adventure for the year, but don't worry, there is still much more to talk about before the month is through. Catch you all later on down the road.