Before you decide whether or not to see Drive Angry 3D, ask yourself the following question: do you like low budget exploitation films about driving cars? You know, car porn? If the answer is yes, you will enjoy Drive Angry 3D. Case closed.
Nicolas Cage plays Milton, a fast driving tough guy with a five-barreled shotgun that can destroy anything. He has escaped from the depths of hell to take revenge on a Satanic cult leader (Billy Burke) with the assistance of a tough-talking young woman Piper (Amber Heard). However, The Accountant (William Fitchner) is out to bring Milton back to hell and restore order in the fiery prison system. Car chases, shooting sequences, drinking, and explosions ensue.
While the Academy Awards are (kindly, mercifully) over, the Academy’s omissions are still strong with us. Many key categories saw glaring snubs that make it hard to take all of the wins so seriously. Here are a few of my major sticking points.
Best Original Song
“Chanson Illusionist” from The Illusionist
Case closed. That song is gorgeous. That and the voice actors impersonating famous singers and celebrities from the period are spot on. It’s asking too much for the Academy’s Music Branch to be culturally literate, isn’t it?
Sorry about no new post last night. There was a really messed up situation happening with one of my students and I was on and off the phone all night trying to sort it out; I couldn’t. It’s up to a Board of Ed member and the director of the drama program to fix it before 2 this afternoon.
The 2011 Academy Awards ceremony goes off on Sunday night whether you’re ready or not. Using my latent psychic abilities, weeks of research into blog posts, interviews, and articles about the Oscars, and a hot tip from a homeless man who lives two blocks over, I have the potential winners for the major categories right here. Place your bets, but don’t blame me if these tips are wrong.
I almost feel like I’m in a gaming rut. I’ve been digging through sites to find new games and consistently have been drawn to strategy/defense games. I can’t help it if the indie game developers are doing interesting things with this style of games.
Rebuild combines two of my loves: zombies and defense games. You have managed to stave off a zombie invasion in four blocks of a large city. You have a farm, a police station, and two sets of houses. Your mission is to rebuild civilization one building at a time. You scout out abandoned houses, malls, stores, and other structures for food and survivors. You kill off the zombie population then reclaim the building for your new society. Your primary objective is to survive. To beat the game, you must bring government into the new society. You have the option beyond that of both eliminating the source of the zombies and eradicating the zombie population.
You make choices with each action that change how your society will grow. Do you build a laboratory to better defend yourself against the zombies or a bar to boost morale and lower crime and desertion? Do keep population low and food supplies high at the expense of saving survivors? Do you waste your leaders trying to recruit outside survivors or do you hoard them to maintain order in the town? And how many soldiers will you assign to protect the city at the expense of not being able to expand quickly?
Try it. It’s addictive. You can log a few hours into this game without even trying. And that’s on the normal difficultly rating. It goes up to hard, harder, and even nightmare.
Altitude has all the makings of a good horror/ suspense film. Problem is, writer Paul A. Birkett is so obsessed with closing every plot-hole and setting up enough realistic content to sell the weird twists that the screenplay becomes contrived. The ending of the film is as unnecessary as the big reveal in The Village.
Yes, it makes sense, places the film in a new context, and is unexpected, but it also goes against everything that made the film interesting and suspenseful to begin with. If the story has a bad ending, no amount of continuity and fact checking is going to make the film work as a complete project.
This week, the girls were challenged with one of the standout tasks from last season: The Snatch Game. The girls had to dish out their best celebrity impersonations in a send-up of the ever-popular Match Game.
RuPaul, however, was not having it. Just look at how he responded to plus-sized queen Delta Work saying she would be doing her best Cher.
Or what about when Miss Yara Sofia, a native Puerto Rican with a thick accent, revealed she would be portraying Amy Winehouse using the British accent skills she learned from Harry Potter?
I won’t lie. I was very skeptical about this revival of Anything Goes. Joel Grey, to me, is way too old to play Moonface Martin and Sutton Foster hasn’t shown the sass-mouth brassy belt ala Reno Sweeney before (though Janet Vandergraaf in The Drowsy Chaperone was close, she played it as a vixen, not a vamp, and there is a difference). And, to put it bluntly, the book (doesn’t matter which version) is horrible. If you do not have explosive choreography and the best singers possible with just the right voices, the show is a snore.
