Freelancin': The Movies I Saw Last Friday that Weren't Lucy

It's a review of "Hercules" and "The Purge: Anarchy".  Only I had almost nothing to say about either, so let's just ramble about them in front of the microphone:

Lucy

The concept of "Lucy", the new Luc Besson film starring Scarlett Johansson, is absolute nonsense.  It bases itself upon the myth that human beings only use 10% of their brains, leading people to imagine what incredible potential we might have if we were able to use the full hundred.  Unfortunately no, you did not fail your sixth grade math test just because of some cruel twist of evolution forcing you to use only a fraction of your potential, you just did not work hard enough.  Your brain currently is eating up 20% of the energy in your body, a massively disproportionate amount consider its size.  Within that organ, you are unconsciously commanding yourself to breath, determining body temperature, directing heartbeat, remembering your identity and opinions of this blog, imagining Scarlett Johansson naked and moaning, decoding the words of this sentence, and ignoring half of those because your brain is lazy and wants to skip forward down the paragraph.  All that takes 100% of your mass, which is all doing something right now, keeping you alive and making you you.

So therefore, one's brain would imagine, since its files on identity have given you the belief that movies that are based on bullshit pseudoscience are bad, that "Lucy" is a stupid movie that should be avoided.  However, your brain is wrong.  Pulp SciFi for decades has been dissatisfied with the incredible cognitive abilities of the mind and used the 10% myth to imagine all sorts of fantastic magic you could summon with a better brain.  Besson has trumped them all, saying, "no, just being really smart and motivated like that Bradley Cooper movie, 'Limitless' is not enough, I'm going to go seven billion light years further with it".  "Lucy" passes beyond the point of stupid absurdity to reach over-the-top parody, then keeps going to the point that it becomes absolutely brilliant, a wonderfully weird work of true 100% genius.

I fear that a lot of audiences are actually going to be disappointed by "Lucy", since the trailers have been proudly wearing its stupid premise on its sleeve.  They wanted a dumb superhero movie where Scarlett Johansson beats up Taiwanese gangsters with telekinesis but will instead get what is basically a big budget Phillip K. Dick novel.  We a movie that is part French punk action movie, part navel gazing philosophy on the nature of life and discovery, and part "Akira".  This movie is completely insane and in the very best ways.  It is the kind of movie that will instantly weird out audiences who were very comfortable using as little of their cranial potential as possible, and most terrifyingly, might even give the most dangerous thing of all:  new ideas.

Freelancin': America the Movie

I've dusted off my old Youtube channel, now with a brand new editor and a new microphone.  So hopefully this will solve that idiotic problem of black borders around all my videos.  Here is a review of "America: Imagine a World Without Her" by Dinesh D'Souza, a right-wing pundit reinterpreting all of history to prove we are indeed the best country ever... and that Hilary is the Antichrist.  Yeah, it's a very messy movie, and I had a lot to say:

Anyway, this movie is pretty much trash.  As a historian, or at least somebody with a history degree, it is offensively bad, D'Souza completely misinterprets the craft with a lot of very weak arguments.  But you know, as long as Obama looks bad, it should be fine.

More videos to come.

Review of the Rise of the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes of the Living Dead

Back in 2011, the Planet of the Apes rose.  Now that same planet is dawning.  I cannot keep track of these titles, they both sound exactly the same, and have far too many articles.  Either way, seems like the Ape Planet is constantly getting started, but not really making much ground.  And if this Planet of the Apes prequel/reboot* franchise is hoping to continue, they're going to have to accept the fact this isn't the beginning anymore.  Is it not time to reach "Act 2 of the Planet of the Apes"?

The main point though is that this reboot or whatever of the Planet of the Apes series has been very successful.  I had a dim view of the first film, considering it to be very uneven thanks to James Franco and a few odd story decisions, but mostly James Franco.  Really though the new-ish franchise was just beginning, it didn't quite know what it was going to be yet.  The tone was off.  The things that worked, such as Andy Serkis as Caesar, were matched by things that didn't work, such as twerpy Tom Felton sacrilegiously stealing Charlton Heston's iconic lines from the 1968 original.  Importantly though, and I admit, I didn't give the movie enough credit for this back in the original review, it did have its own story to tell entirely unique to itself.  It is remake/reboot/whatever that is justifiable in its existence.  And it opened the door for sequels to expand upon that narrative.

"Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" is probably the most perfectly improved sequel that has ever come along.  It recognized the faults of the (kinda) first one, and logically moving forward in the story, fixed them, making for one of the best movies of 2014 so far.  James Franco's character is out, having been wiped out by the 'Simian Flu', a super virus he himself created while trying to create a cure for Alzheimer's in the first movie**.  In his place the hero has been made none other than Caesar himself.  The once lonely hyper-intelligent Ape now is the ruler of an Ape civilization in the redwood forests north of San Francisco.  The conflict this time comes from the first contact between this rising race of Apes and the last remnants of human kind, desperately holding onto what remains of the world they once ruled.  The new story is an intense study on a clash of cultures, nearly perfect in its tone and completing its aims flawlessly.  "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" is a film so well-made it retroactively changes my opinion on the first one - go watch that, if only to be set up properly for this installment.

Final Fantasy Explorers First Look

At E3 this year Square Enix had nothing at all to show.  Its booth was more barren than Betty White's womb.  And though that was really depressing and unfortunate, luckily SE did have things to announce... just not at E3.  One of those games was "Final Fantasy Explorers", a brand new multiplayer action RPG for the 3DS.  Now, a month later, they're finally showing some gameplay:

First of all, I have no idea why there was "Final Fantasy V" footage before the trailer.  But I will admit, I am about 100 times more nostalgic for that old game than I've ever been before.  Here I thought FFV was just a forgettable nothing title, but when you hear that old battle theme rocking, you just want to get Bartz back on Boco and start beating up dungeons with as a Mystic Knight.

Anyway, "Explorers".  I looks like fun.  Basically the combat looks like a multiplayer version of "Final Fantasy Type-0", only with a fixed slightly overhead view, solving that game's crippling camera errors.  It is also much more cartoony and kid-friendly, so instead of building mountains of bodies, you're just fighting big silly monsters with your friends.  And that is something I'm looking forward to doing when this game comes out.  Nobody is sure when that will be, but since it at least has a window of next year, it will probably be a few decades before "Final Fantasy XV".