Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Monday, May 22, 2006

Just to Tell You Once Again Who's Bad!

We caught a matinee of the Da Vinci Code this afternoon and it's not so bad ... it's not a great flick, but it's fine. The movie critics who trashed the flick are just reacting to the hype and not giving honest reviews. Ebert's is the only one I've read that keeps some perspective. Many of the critics complaining about this flick gave Star Wars III the nod, and Da Vinci Code is much better than that load of crud.

But like I wrote, it's not a great flick. It sticks too close to the book and that wrecks the pace. Whole chunks of stuff don't make any sense (for example, the Silas flashback) in the context of the movie and could ... should ... have been chopped.

Now, if you want to talk about CRAP, watch LOST. It wraps up this week. Second season was a complete waste of time, and displayed a drop in quality rivalling the plunge that happened when original Battlestar Galactica morphed into Galactica 1980. There were two key problems with LOST S2: 1) nothing happened, and 2) what happpened was stupid.

Here's an example: in the nothing happened department, Charlie almost got on drugs ... but didn't. Then he tried to help build a church ... but didn't. And last week he finally kicked the drugs he wasn't addicted to and Locke was able to take a break from his own crisis of faith to approve even though it had been strongly demonstrated in the previous episode that if someone gets shot in the gut, those drugs come in handy. See? When Charlie finally gets to do something, it's stupid.

The first season of LOST worked because of the tension, pace and because it was scary. All that was absent from season two and what was left was either boring or unwatchable. I hate LOST but I hate more that I have to keep watching just to find out what happens to those idiots.

Wait, there's still one thing I like about LOST and that's the way it depicts power and force. On the show, all of the characters are trying to get the guns because, obviously, you get the guns, you get the power. But, in the course of events, every time a character gets hold of a gun something unintended and terrible happens. That's a nice flip, too bad the rest of the writing isn't that smart.

Smallville had a good season and ended well. Things happened that mattered, the characters changed (or croaked) and Lex's descent accelerated at a satisfying pace. Also, the show gets full points for treading into Queasyville by having both Clark's mom and Lana hooking up with Luthor father & son. Ew. There's also a second trailer for Superman Returns ...

Oh, hey, there's a movie based on Fast Food Nation.

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