MYST: Interstellar

I try really hard to think of movies that I know nobody has seen for these but honestly I ran out of time so instead I just watched Interstellar instead.

I hate this movie soooo much

Honestly I think one of the reasons I hate the movie SOOO much is because I went into this movie in the worst possible mood I could be. I really didn't want to go see this movie at all but my friend kept complaining to the point where I decided to just go anyway. Honestly the idea of having to watch Mathew McConaughey act for three hours just sounded unbelievably unpleasant (and don't worry it was.) After all of that we got to the movie theater too late and got the front row seat, which was horrible and you literally couldn't see anything that was happening. After that I somehow got my phone lost in the new mechanical seats at the AMC and had to spend the entire time before the movie trying to find it. (It took like 20 minutes)

The plot of the movie is that Mathew McConaughey's character lives on a farm in the future when earth is dying. Crops are failing, Dust storms are frequent, and there is little hope for the continuation of man kind. But one day he gets a gravitational message that gives him a code that takes him to a secret NASA research base where they are getting ready to launch a rocket into space to try to find new planets for humans to inhabit. They immediately ask Mathew McConaughey's character to come with because he's the best pilot in the world or something but somehow they didn't contact him before? (this and a lot of other parts doesn't make any sense)

One of my problems with this movie is I honestly really wanted to like it but I just couldn't because it's awful. I love Christopher Nolan as a director and I think he brings a unique level of care and attention to detail into big blockbuster movies such as the Dark Night. And a lot of that shows in this film, many of the effects were actually practical affects because Christopher Nolan thought that using to much CG would take you out of the movie and it definitely shows in the final product. This movie looks absolutely amazing and from a strictly visual standpoint is fantastic.

At least the movie looks cool right??

However, This movie is probably the dumbest movie I've ever seen in my entire life (or at least from a good director). The script of this movie makes pretty much no sense and this movie has some of the most cringe worthy scenes I've seen recently. About 75% of the movie actually isn't all that bad but the parts that are bad are just so unbelievably unpleasant I can't/ refuse to look past them. Basically about half way through  the movie there is a scene where Anne Hathaway talks about love and how it's some unexplained force in the universe that is somehow important and from that point on I could no longer take the entire movie seriously. It was so ridiculously cliched and nonsensical and was clearly only there to re-incorporate into a later scene which was somehow made even less sense. From that point on the movie just dives into some ridiculous plot about time travel, and black holes, and reversing gravity that just doesn't make sense. Basically it seemed like the writers were like, How much fake science can we throw at the screen until people stop believing it. Apparently a lot because this movie actually got pretty decent ratings some how.

Honestly this movie isn't ALL bad and it does have quite a few redeeming values. But overall when I walked out of the theatre and I think back on this film I don't think, oh hey, that one scene was filmed really well, I think instead of all the terrible scenes and the nonsensical plot.
I'd give it 4 out of 8

MYST: Exit Through The Gift Shop

This movie doesn't actually have a trailer.

Exit through the gift shop is a documentary about street art created by one of the most notorious street artists Banksy. Banksy is a British street artist who's appearance or real name is still unknown to this day. He became famous for his satirical street art and his art shows he would put on in London. As street art broke out into the mainstream and people started to take note, Banksy became the most well known street artist in the world. An original Banksy artwork sells between 100,000 and 1,000,000 euros

The movie itself is a "documentary" about a man named Terry who got introduced to the street art world through his cousin "Space Invader" who was a well known street artist. Terry has an odd habit of filming everything that happens in his life and he becomes intertwined with the world of street art. This whole time he told everyone he was filming in order to make a documentary and after a bunch of years of filming Banksy tells him it's time to release his documentary. Terry however had no intention of making a documentary but upon Banksy's request creates one out of thousands of tapes he has piled up in his basement. He makes the documentary and it's absolutely horrible so Banksy decides to use the footage in order to make his own documentary, which is the movie you are currently watching. So the movie ends being a documentary about the documentary you are  currently watching, which is awesome. During the time Banksy is creating the documentary through Terry's old footage, Terry starts to become a street artist himself despite being terrible at it. 

I won't spoil the end but all you need to know is as the movie goes on it gets progressively more ridiculous and unbelievable. This has led to a discussion about whether or not anything that happened in this movie is real? Despite marketing itself as a documentary, many people actually believe that it isn't a real documentary but a piece of "art" that Banksy made to mess with people. Nobody actually knows if anything that happens in this movie is true and there is definitely no way to prove or deny it. Despite all this I love this movie. This is probably one of my favorite documentaries of all time. It's combination of humor along with very interesting and hard to get shots of street art being made and put up help immerse the viewer in what was before a very mysterious world. Not much is known about street art or the artist who make it but, this movie does a lot to show people what it is actually about and, hopefully sway public opinion of these street artists. 

Overall I give this 7 out of 8

MYST: The Holy Mountain

Experimental films are great, right?

Alexander Jodorowsky, the director of this film, is a crazy person. That's really the only way to explain how anyone wrote directed and published this film because, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. I'm almost 100% certain this is the most insane film ever created, and I honestly mean that. Despite all the craziness of this film many people consider it to be a great film. After discussing some experimental films in class, I decided to get a better grasp on the genre I should watch what I have heard to be the greatest experimental film of all time.

The movie follows a Christ like character who is woken up by a man with no arms or legs. He is put up on a cross and stoned by a group of children. From here he and the crippled man walk through the city and observe all the horrible things going on in the city. Protesters are being slaughtered in the streets by men in gas masks while rich tourists follow and take pictures and pose with the corpses. Birds and other animals fly out of the open wounds of the dead protesters. After a bunch of other strange things happen the main character ascends the tower in the middle of town to meet the alchemist, the strange religious figure shown above. He tries to fight the Alchemist but fails and the alchemist makes him his apprentice. 

This movie has some really awesome cinematography

After going through initiation rituals the Alchemist tells the main character that he is planning to assemble the 9 most powerful people in the solar system, one from each planet, to ascend the holy mountain and over throw the 9 immortal gods who control the universe. 

As strange as this movie is, it's actually a pretty good film. It has easily has some of the best cinematography I've ever seen in a film. The set designs and use of color is fantastic and depth of field are amazing. This movie also has a lot of interesting messages about things such as, consumerism, the treatment of violence and war in the media, and the exploitation of third world cultures by the developed nations. Almost everything in the film has some kind of symbolism behind it, and it makes it a very engaging movie to watch.

 That being said I STRONGLY recommend you don't see this unless you're in the mood to watch 2 hours of the most confusing absurd things you've ever seen. Although many of the absurd things in the movie seem to make more sense if you analyze them and look for the meaning behind them. However, some of the scenes are just so absolutely ridiculous that I can't possible find any meaning to them. I almost turned this movie off about 5 or 6 times while watching because some scenes are so strange. Also, if you're offended easily most likely you won't even make it through the first 10 minutes of  this film. The movie says a lot of VERY controversial things about plenty of topics one big one being religion and particularly Christianity.

Overall I give this movie a 7out of 8. I think this movie has a lot of very important messages that most films are unwilling to dare take on. By being so ridiculous Jodorowsky is able to personify certain problems he has with society in order to get his point across. However, as much as it's absurdness is a lot of what makes this film so great, it's also the major downfall. This movie is just too insane for it's own good. Although some of the really crazy scenes are actually interesting if you analyze the meaning behind them, some are just dumb and so ridiculous it takes away from the things that make this film great.

Formal Film Studies: M. Night Shyamalan

The Legend Himself

M. Night  Shyamalan is probably one of the interesting directors of all time. In the late 90's to early 2000's he was one of the most promising young directors in Hollywood. Theaters would be filled just by having his name on the cover of  a movie. More recently however, his films have been so bad that his name isn't even mentioned in the trailers, posters, or anything else for his movies. The only way to find out the M. Night directed After Earth, his most recent film, is to look it up on IMDb. So how did this director go from making classic films to films people wouldn't even want to be paid to see? Honestly, I have no idea but, lets look into some of his films both  the good, and the bad.

The Sixth Sense

The opening scene from The Sixth Sense

Honestly, The Sixth Sense is one of the greatest films I've ever seen. It was written and directed by M. Night, and was released in 1999. The writing, acting, cinematography and everything else in this movie is absolutely fantastic. This movie easily has some of my favorite scenes of any movie ever. However, it also has some of my least favorite. The movie seems like a constant switch between amazing beautifully shot scenes and scenes that are distracting and take you out of the movie. This movie does a lot of what M. Night does best which is very calm depressing interactions between the characters. In a lot of M. Nights films he has certain characters not show a lot of emotion in scenes. In most conversations in the movie both characters do not speak much and with very little inflection in their speech. M Night chooses to show the emotion through the  faces of the actors and the scenario in which they are placed. In most scenes where one character is very intense and emotional the other actor is very calm. Examples of this are the opening scene (posted above), and the final scene with Cole and his mother in the car. Another thing M Night does in this movie is he keep most of the dialogue between the main characters, not the main characters and side characters. M Night links all of the characters to a central theme of grief and loss. Every character in the movie is haunted by their own demons or in Cole's case others. Even when he introduces other characters into the story they are still bound by that same trait. One example of this is the father watching the tape of his daughter at the funeral. By linking every character in the film to a central theme it allows a special connection between the characters. Although Malcolm and Cole are going  through very different experience  their characters are able to bond and relate over their own suffering. This is just  one example it applies to other characters in the film as well. M Night also does a great job with for shadowing and respecting his audiences intelligence. A good example of this is at one point Cole leaves his house with one of his "friends" and it's implied that the other kid doesn't like him but is only pretending to because his mom asked him to. He doesn't clearly spell out that this is the case but anyone who was watching could very easily imply it. After watching the movie for the second time the movie still makes sense even after you know the twist at the end. There are no moments that don't make sense once you know the twist. Despite this i think a lot of the scene between Malcolm and his wife are a bit hard to believe after knowing how the movie ends. Overall I think this is an amazing movie that was sadly spoiled for me before I could see it.

Signs

This  scene made me cringe so hard

Now if we're being honest here I absolutely hate this movie. Both the script and acting in this movie is god awful and I 100% mean that. While The Sixth Sense was able to pull of calm minimalist acting in order to set a tone throughout the movie Signs fails to do the same thing. Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix sound more bored than anything else throughout the majority of the movie. And when they weren't being boring they were doing incredibly stupid things, like yelling at TVs... Honestly there were just  so many horrible writing and directing choices throughout this movie I don't even know where to begin. First, one of the things that made the Sixth Sense so great was the twist at the end of the movie. It's ability to completely catch audiences off guard and carry such an emotional weight combined with it's ability to make sense with the rest of the story made a great way to end the movie. However, with signs the twist is that the aliens weakness is water. This makes literally no sense because there is water in the air so the aliens would just die from being on earth. Not only that  but there is so much build up to the big twist and honestly it's not very interesting. While the ending of Sixth Sense was emotionally involving the twist here is just a piece of information that helps the main characters end the movie. Unfortunately that's not the only stupid thing in this movie. There are many specific instances where characters make unrealistic decisions that leaves most people just screaming at there TV about how dumb it is. In one scene one of the main characters walks into a room full of aliens without an ax that is sitting just in the corner of the screen. Another problem with this movie is that it isn't nearly scary enough. At many points in the movie you'll find yourself feeling that a scene was supposed to be scary but wasn't at all.The scene I posted at the top is a great example of this. In M Nights other films he's struggled with this same problem. In both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable in certain scenes I felt that he was trying to scare the audience  but ended up failing. This was much more excusable in these other movies however, because they weren't horror films.Some of the scenes in this movie are actually scary and it helps make up for some of them that aren't.This movie isn't all bad however, the movie actually has a decent amount of good things going for it. It's pretty competently directed and a lot of the shots and cinematography is set up really well. Although there are far to many scenes where the acting isn't great, there are some scenes where it is actually pretty good. 

The Happening

Looks decent right?? Wrong.

As bad as I think Signs is as a movie it still  has a lot of good scenes and you can see that some of what makes The Sixth Sense so great is still in this film. The Happening however, has no redeeming values what so ever. If you sat someone down with this movie, without telling them who directed it, and asked them who directed it, there is no way they would respond M Night Shyamalan. I think this was undoubtedly the film that ruined M Night's career. When this movie was released it had a huge advertising campaign with short ads playing on TV and movies with just the view of hordes of people jumping off of buildings and the title of the movie "The Happening". Almost nobody knew what this movie was about they just knew it was directed by M Night and it looked awesome and terrifying. It was all set up to be the next great horror movie but then, it came out. The first thing you should  know about The Happening is that it is NOT a horror movie. Despite every trailer and advertisement making it seems this way it was not even in the slightest. The Happening is more of a mystery movie I would say but it's hard to nail it down to just one genre. The mystery of  The Happening however is not in the plot, because the answer to that is plants, but more in how could anyone possibly make a movie this bad. A lot of what makes this movie bad is the performances of Mark Wahlberg and almost all the other actors.

 As much as you could say this isn't at the fault of M Night I think a lot of it is for the way he made Mark act in this role. In an interview he talked about how he had to put a lot of effort into making sure he played the role like he did instead of his normal macho persona. Along with the acting for  this movie being bad the script and plot are almost worse. There is literally a 30 second scene of Mark Wahlbergs character talks to a plastic tree. 

This movie does have some traces of M Nights previous stylistic choices. Many of the conversations have the same tone as one's in The Sixth Sense or Signs but the content and acting in them ruins them. This movie actually has pretty weak cinematography. M Night's films are usually very well shot and use interesting angles to show what is going on in the scene. A good example of this is in the  Sixth Sense when Bruce Willis looks at his wife  through  the  mirror in the bathroom. It allows him to observe her without her seeing him but still allowing the audience to see her. However, The Happening is pretty much devoid of  shots like this. Nothing about this movie stands out as good at all. Not the story, acting, cinematography, sound, or even lighting stand out as a saving grace for this  movie. I've heard theories that this movie is a parody on the genre and not meant to be taken seriously but, if you watch interview footage about this movie M Night seems to defend the movie and even get angry when people criticize it. 

After making this movie M Night went on to make Avatar: The last Air bender the movie and After earth, both of which were terrible. It seems that the days of M Night making great films is over. All we can do about it is appreciate the great films he has made and pretend the other one's simply didn't happen.

MYST: Birdemic: Shock and Terror

This is an actual screenshot from the movie, I wish I was kidding.

Birdemic Shock and Terror is easily one of the worst and also funniest movies I've ever seen. It's so bad in such a fantastic way it's honestly hard to explain. However I will do my best to explain this masterpiece of a film from the mastermind James Nguyen. James Nguyen was a Vietnamese immigrant who's life goal was to film a movie. Eventually he poured his entire life savings into producing Birdemic. After being rejected for a screening at the 2009 sun-dance film festival James then decided to take matters into his own hands and decided to rent a van and cover it with fake blood and eagle statues. He then drove down the main streets Park City playing Eagle sounds and humans screams as loud as he could out of the van. Somehow this genius marketing strategy actually worked and attracted the attention of many film goers and executives at the festival. This is what propelled Birdemic into the hearts of thousands of loyal fans.

The word Birdemic is spelled wrong on the posters on the van

The movie opens up with a shot from the side of the road of the main character driving to breakfast. And then the movie proceeds to show 15 to 20 more shots of the exact same car driving down the exact same road but from different angles. At this point we're 15 minutes into the film and despite there not being a single line of dialogue, you already know it's going to be awful. Even though you know the movie is going to be bad it's not until the first line of dialogue that you know exactly how bad. In the first scene in the restaurant all of the audio is cut in at  the wrong points so the audio of the characters talking doesn't actually start to the character has already started talking. Basically the audio starts mid word and at this point you are either A) laughing very loudly or B) in shock that anything THIS bad could be considered a movie. Once you've recovered from shock you'll find the rest of the movie is slightly better than the opening but, unfortunately it is only very slightly better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27g4H-yAm-w The master of Romantic Thrillers himself

From here on out it's just boring poorly edited scenes of the two main characters who sound like they have never acted before. There a bunch of REALLY forced shots of people in news casts talking about global warming and the environment as some kind of lazy reincorporation later. I give it credit that it tried to do something that resembles what an actually good movie does but it fails pretty hard. Rod sells a bunch of some kind of product and becomes a millionaire and Natalie becomes a professional model or something? The movie  tries to act like this stuff is important but it's really not, because we're are not even at the good part of the movie yet. The two main characters  are walking on the beach and they find a dead  bird and some crazy scientist tells them all the birds are sick or something. Then they go to a restaurant where possibly the greatest song of all time is played and the  main characters dance to it. They even got the guy who wrote the song to be in the scene it's great trust me. After that, the main characters go to a motel and OH NO THE BIRDS ATTACK. The scene that follows is so fantastic that I literally couldn't explain it with words luckily youtube is a thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrxZblVUkMU As a result of this scene coat hangers became the Mascot of this movie. Still not kidding.

After this the main characters drive around in there van for a while untill they find what I can only assume is Satan's children because they are SO annoying. After this the two characters they meet outside of the motel both die in equally hilarious ways, no reason to spoil this masterpiece of a film by telling you how. They go around for a while and do a variety of stupid activites that result in people dying in hilarious and horribly edited ways. At the end of the movie he main characters of the film are on a beach with the really annoying kids, who i'm really sad haven't died yet, and then the birds just fly away into the sunset and everything is great. At this point I think everyone was too lazy to right an ending so it just sort of ended. The best part of this scene is that whoever filmed it didn't account for the sound of the ocean so literally everything in this scene is inaudible.

Make sure to get the Blu Ray.

This movie is absolutely fantastic in the worst possible way. If you like so bad that it's good movies you may have just found a new classic. I spent most of my time watching this movie on the ground laughing it was so funny. If your not a fan of these kind of movies do yourself a favor and avoid this movie at all costs. My final review of this movie is 8 M. Night Shyamalan's out of 8

Review of the Reviews: Black Dynamite

This Review  is a very  solid and fair Review of one of my favorite movies of all time. She does a very good job at comparing this movie to the type of movies it's suppose to be parodying and explaining how it does it well. She also brings up the good point, that a lot of people have made about this movie, that it seems overly long winded  and can be boring toward the middle to end. The only problem i have with this review is she gives away too much about the end of the movie  which could be a problem for someone who hasn't  seen it.

http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/20100114-Black-Dynamite-6903.ece

This review is also a pretty decent review. I don't think he talks enough about what he didn't like about the movie for the most part he just said that he didn't like the movie with out giving much support. He made a few good points about the topic being overdone and that it doesn't do it very well but he doesn't  explain why. This is why this isn't a great Review but it's still very solid.

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2009/11/20/black_dynamite_is_mostly_a_blast/

I agree more with the first Review of this movie. Allthough this movie does have it's  slow points the funny parts are WELL worth the waiting. There is a slow point right before the end of the movie but the actually end of the movie is absolutely fantastic. I also believe that by making  this movie so over the top it's a lot funnier than actual blaxploitation of the 80's.

I would agree more with the first Review of this because it uses more points from the film and clear cut evidence to explain why they didn't like it as opposed to the second one who just seemed to not like it without clear points.

Things I would include about this Film if i were reviewing it is that it really only appeals to certain people. The people who really like this movie love it but those who don't probably hate it and think it is extremely stupid. Also a lot of people find  that the joke behind this movie gets old quickly but I disagree personally. Unlike the first Reviewer i would leave out what happens in the final scene because it's a lot more funny if you don't know it going into the  movie

For people who enjoy movies

www.youtube.com/user/YourMovieSucksDOTorg 
Feel free to check out any of his movie reviews. He knows a lot about movies and his video's are 
pretty funny as well.