secondtechnicianrimmer's reviews

Have you ever gone to places, or attempted to do something thinking that it would really suck, only to realize that maybe, after all, things seemed to be better than expected? And then see those hopes get crushed at the finish line? Well there you go. You have The Long Halloween in a nutshell, there.

Don't get me wrong, there was a true and honest effort made and the movie has some undisputable qualities to it. The way the characters are portrayed, the general tone, the choice of colors, the voice actors... well of course, I would take Hamill over Baker anythime to voice the Joker but he had very few lines anyway. Some small but important details, often overlooked in other productions, added to the positive balance. For example, the evil left side brain of Dent using his right hand as dominant, which is anatomically pertinent. However... the story they tried to tackle here is a real monster. It's the Everest of Batman tales and certainly Jeff Loeb's masterpiece in my opinion. It couldn't be done in just two parts if it were to be done right. Very large parts of the story, some being the most important ones, were left off and the final twist was a gross oversimplification of what really went on during this long, long Halloween. The rollercoster ends with a tiny slope and squeaky wheels.

I won't spoil it. If you really want the story, though, read the comic instead. It's probably the best Batman comic ever made, even if its visual style is decidedly odd. If you're going to watch the movie version, just watch it after you have read the original work.

Rule number one: don't make it a japanese folkore based movie if you don't knox your basic japanese history and your actors can't pronounce the two most used japaneser words in the story. "Shogun" pronounced as "Show Gun" and "chikara (power) pronounced "shikara" (an asian cousin of Shakira maybe?). The rest of the movie is a train wreck and despite Nemic having been part of more crappy SyFy movies than you can shake a cattle prod at, none was as lkame as this one. He should have stayed away, he was the only decent bit in it.

This is just a loose mish-mash of two distinct stories in the Hellblazer universe and they managed to even mess that up. The tactics John uses here make no sense, and are just a deus ex machina the writers pulled out their ass because they didn't have enough imagination to come up with something that works. Of course they could have just used the original plot... which worked way better. Read the comics. Way. Way. Better. The only right thing in this sorry excuse of a story is the voicing.

I thought I had seen it all when it comes to movies with Nick Cage in them. The good, the bad, the ultrabad... I was wrong: I was missing the crazy. This not really a story that we're seeing unfold there. t is, rather, a psychedelic trip the director had after snorting the ashes of an incinerated abomination, cremated right after a female cenobite gave birth to it during a shroom-induced seizure. The locations exist in two flavours only: surreal or mundane. Nothing is done to explain Nick's weapon of choice, there are weird bits of cartoon scattered all around the piece... the only thingthis vaguely reminds me of is the spirit that reigned in Metal Hurlant, only much darker in tone. And for such a paroxystic piece, it's a very slow burner, so you'll never know where you stand with the pace or the plot. That movi is made to be analyzed by cinema students and psychiatry interns. It's certainly not mùeant for the average moviegoer looking for a good time.

It sounds cliché but still: I don't know where to start. Arsenic has been hollowed out to be *only* a SJW with purple hair and they've both aged and re-ethnicized Molly Hayes. We don't need SJW propaganda to take over our beloved characters and we don't need "diversity" to be enforced by tweaking the genome of an originally endearing little imp with a nekomimi hat. None of these serves any purpose other than the studio trying to get a good rep and we really should wonder who the entire show is aimed at. LSD's bracelet was a medical bracelet? Oh, let's make it a cult trinket. Hello? Have you *$@! even *read* the comics or did you just pick up a few bits and added it with random elements in a big shiny shaker? Just so you know, there's someone out there who does the very same thing as you did there and he's been mocked for it. His name is Uwe Böll. Only he, at least, doesn't try to appeal to moraltards. Aside from Molly, the rest of the cast look the part, but that's it. I started watching Cloak and Dagger thinking they had stretched the material too far, but Runaways rips it apart. People who don't know the Runaways yet but are curious: read the comics and run away from this show.