The Bay

Hot damn! I am on a roll with these reviews lately. It's too bad I haven't written anything for my other blog in like two months. But hang in there, Serenity Now fans, I'm still alive and will eventually have a thought worth writing about.

In the meantime, with the weather like it is -- I swear to you I saw a bird egg fall out of a nest, crack open on the road, and start to boil -- I find myself seeking out the cool refuge of my air conditioned room, where there is little to do but watch movies and have staring contests with the anonymous stock photo in the portrait picture frame leaning against my wall that I never got around to putting a real picture in.

Last night, between writing about Monsters University and watching the new Matthew Lillard crime saga The Bridge, I decided to peruse the new releases on Netflix. What I came up with was the The Bay, yet another found footage horror movie about...something blurry and shaky.

Netflix: Like a boss
Viewer: Dynamic Duo (except just me)

Where to begin? Well let me first say that I thought Paranormal Activity was a complete and utter waste of time. And now that I'm looking at the cover of this movie and I see that it is somehow associated with that schlock, I am disappointed, but also not entirely surprised.

The concept is this: three years after some sort of mysterious happening in a small Maryland town on the Chesapeake on the fourth of July, we are told that enough footage and data has been collected to show us exactly what happened. So the story is told mainly from the point of view of one reporter there to document the holiday festivities, but we also get a collection of home videos, cell phone footage, somehow recorded skype and facetime conversations, and the dashboard cameras of police vehicles. (Nothing exceptionally new there.)

The timeline is a bit confusing as we jump around from the fourth of July to weeks or months prior, when strange events in the area signaled the coming disaster. The story itself is pretty original. It reminded me of a mix between Contagion and The Crazies, two movies that are, individually, better than this one. But I could almost see this working as a regular (not found footage) movie with a real budget. The scares were, for the most part, genuine. Not so much bogey men jumping out at the camera or the camera moving around way too much, although there was a fair share of that.

The acting was pretty atrocious, for the most part. My favorite -- and least favorite part -- was the bumbling policemen. There is a scene where screams are coming from a house. So one cop gets out of the car, approaches and enters the house, while the other one just sits there, nervously. When several gunshots erupt from inside the house, he shouts out the patrol car window to his partner. After a few moments of no response he figures he ought to get off his ass and, you know, see if the man whose back he's supposed to be watching is alive or not.

That was the most obnoxious bit screenwriting. I enjoy the talks between the head doctor of the local hospital and the CDC as they try to figure out what's killing everyone. And the fact that the entire disaster takes place over the course of a single day really adds to the urgency and desperation of everyone involved. At first the CDC sort of brushes off the first deaths as a contained anomaly, even as the doctor explains that they have dozens of people pouring in needing limbs amputated.

Now, I may be a complete moron, but the explanation for the disaster seemed fairly believable. A small town with a large chicken industry is accidentally pouring steroids into their water supply. This, added with some accidental toxic waste from a power plant upstream accelerates the growth of parasites that do, indeed, exist in real life. So, that whole thing could potentially happen. The leap to them eating people's organs from the inside out is a bit out there, but hey, this is a horror movie, remember? At least it makes a rational attempt at an explanation.

So overall, I thought the movie was pretty effective. I hate the found footage, shaky-cam bullshit, but just as I got past it with V/H/S, I found it mostly tolerable here as well. The scares were genuine. There's one scene where the reporter stands on the docks and just hears agonizing screams coming from all over the quiet town, as people die in their homes and in the streets. That may have been the most disturbing couple of minutes, even with the actress' brutal acting. Some of the twists are predictable, but luckily we don't really get bogged down with annoying characters that we're supposed to care about; instead we just watch this entire town devolve into chaos.

I don't really know what kind of person watches horror movies. I watch them by myself sometimes when I'm bored. But I guess if you watch them with friends or something, that's cool too. I would recommend this one, whether you drink to it or not. It's not really fun or thrilling. It's just eerie and discomforting. Which I think I like better.

Beer rating: 2/10

Monsters University

I have had enough with the sequels and the reboots. This entire summer has been one uninspired rehash after another, across pretty much the entire spectrum of genres. Granted, earlier this week, Mark and I discussed Pacific Rim, possibly the most original big-budget movie of the season. Oh, who am I kidding? It is unquestionably the most original. However, in that same post, I point out that, at the box office, Pacific Rim somehow placed third after two sequels, neither of which really had any reason to be made.

To some extent, we really didn't need this sequel (prequel, technically) to Pixar's hit Monster's Inc. Pixar seems to be struggling with coming up with original ideas these past few years, with uninspired movies like Cars 2 and Brave. But who can blame them when they're competing with at least two Dreamworks movies a year and, nowadays, heavy competition from other animation studios? Naturally, they want to stick with what they know.

Let me get to the point: I saw Monsters University the other day.

Viewer: Dylan Duck

Time Elapsed Since Release: Almost a month

Like I said before, this movie probably doesn't need to exist. However, Monsters Inc. was one of the better titles in what I consider the first generation of Pixar films, and I was excited to revisit the world of the monsters with Mike and Sully. I should also mention that, much like Andy's struggle to put his childhood behind him in Toy Story 3 struck a chord with me a few years ago, the cartoon re-imagining of college life, fraternities, etc. featured here is what really got me into the theater.

So here we have an origin story of sorts of the special bond between Mike and Sully. At college the two of them are the complete opposite; they immediately resent each other, but are put into a situation where they have to trust each other and work together in order to become professional scarers at Monsters Inc. It's not vital to have seen Monsters Inc. before seeing this movie, though it would help explain some of the jokes and allusions to future relationships that this picture is full of. In this way, Monsters University has a solid stand-alone story, but certainly works to enrich its world and the characters that you probably already know and love.

Much to my satisfaction, the film also does a pretty good job satirizing the most memorable aspects of college life: dorm life, classwork, professors, crappy food, a variety of inane clubs, and most of all, the social life. What the movie, being a sequel, inherently lacks in originality, it makes up for in its boldness to center around subject matter more applicable to college students and adults. I found myself chuckling at the many tongue-in-cheek references that had to be softened just enough to appeal to younger audiences, and I was never disappointed that the joke couldn't go all the way. For example, we never actually saw the characters drinking at the frat house, but there was a quick beer pong scene as well as several shots of solo cups littering the floor. It's refreshing to get a college movie that doesn't rely on fart jokes and gratuitous nudity to get a laugh.

Now onto my complaints, of which there are only two. One pertains to the relatively predictable plot and two-dimensional characters. These past three years Pixar has been testing my patience with shallow, unoriginal productions. Before all that, we had Wall-e, Up, and Toy Story 3 -- three films that were equal parts childhood fantasy and emotional roller coaster -- one right after another. And so there I can't shake this expectation for a deep, heartfelt film. While it is enjoyable to watch the bond form between two lifelong friends, the emotional element of the film leaves a bit to be desired.

My other complaint is with the ending. This is kind of a spoiler, but since it doesn't have very much importance to the rest of the movie, I'm going to mention it anyway. In the end, Mike and Sully get expelled before their first year is over. A montage during the credits explains how they go on to work at Monsters Inc. and eventually become scarers. It seems strange to me that the moral of the story is: 'even if you are a talented and dedicated student, you may realize that your dreams are unrealistic and unattainable. So...do something else. Work in a mail room, or become a janitor.' I'm not sure I want my kids taking that away from this film. But hey, maybe that's just how I, a 20 something college grad understood it. Maybe it's different from the perspective of someone younger.

Overall, I enjoyed this movie. What other animated films are out there right now? Despicable Me 2; I saw the first one, but didn't really get it. Turbo; I guess talking snails are all the rage this summer (see: Monsters University and Epic), but no thank you, Ryan Reynolds. So if you're looking for something different this weekend, I can't really promise Monsters University isn't something you've seen before. But if you enjoyed the original, I would recommend it. The voice acting is very good, the story is decent, and the animation, as always, is impressive.

Pacific Rim

Mark and I saw Pacific Rim on Friday, but in my laziness I have not posted this discussion about it until today. However, this does allow me to see how the movie performed over the weekend, in case that pertains to our talk. In this case I think it does. It's true that this has been the summer of blockbuster let-downs. A lot of high-profile titles that have left people scratching their heads as to what was the point. However, this past weekend, we got a movie that is not a reboot or a remake of any kind.

And how did this movie fare? It came in third at the box office. A fact that wouldn't be as painful if the first and second slots weren't held by Despicable Me 2 and Grown-Ups 2. There is zero originality left in Hollywood, but I guess that's exactly what the average movie goer wants. Every Adam Sandler movie in the past decade has been an enormous disappointment, and yet people still pay to see him act like a handicapped child. Thank you, America, for proving that you really are as dumb and tasteless as everyone assumes.

Too much? Well, if you're still reading, maybe you agree with me.

Viewers: Us, though we did not sit in the back row
Time Elapsed Since Release: 0 hours

Dylan: It’s refreshing to have a big budget apocalypse/future movie that doesn’t in some way feature New York being destroyed. From that alone, I say this movie is pretty original.

Mark: And damn does Del Toro make those destroyed buildings look pretty when they come down.  Well, this whole movie is damn pretty.

Dylan: As the title indicates, we’re dealing with the Pacific Ocean and the surrounding lands. Which for some reason took me a while to realize. Giant beasts come out of the ocean and start wreaking havoc wherever they can, which ends up being places like San Francisco, Manila, and Hong Kong. And the whole time I was thinking “wow, we might actually be safe from this one. That’s different.”

But yea, I thought the sets were fantastic. The Hong Kong scenes were just magnificent. The scale worked, the CGI worked. One thing I have been thinking about is the camera work. This is the kind of movie where you want to see the action. But the action is so big, how does the filmmaker go about showing it? If you’re too zoomed in, you can’t tell what’s going on and it’s just stuff moving and blowing up, ala the Transformers trilogy. But if you’re zoomed too far out, you don’t really get the sense of how huge these things are and the creatures and buildings just look like models. In the end I was really impressed by del Toro’s blending of the two so that we saw plenty of the action in panoramic, but also got plenty of street-level perspective as buildings came down and cars and trains and boats and bridges and what not were tossed around.

Mark: Yeah I was so thaknful that this didn’t turn into one of the other summer blockbusters in which the filmmaker thinks we need to be right up in the action where we can’t even figure out who’s thrown the punch or whatever, like Man of Steel.  Instead we sit back and take in all of the giant robots and monsters duking it out in the ocean or city.  And what blew my mind was that when they’re in the city, surrounded by building, it never felt cluttered.  Nothing was ever blocked off by some debris.  We never lost sight of them, and the action stayed as frenetic as it was in the ocean, albeit slow cause we are talking about massive things here.

And on that, what I love the most is that the Jaeger’s and Kaiju all have this tremendous sense of weight to them.  in Transformers, they were jumping around and flipping and shit like they weighed nothing.  But here, we watch how long it takes for them to wind up a punch, and then cutting back to the pilots made it even clearer.  It made it all feel so much more realistic, but never lost that sense of fantasy.

Dylan: I wouldn’t be a good little physics student if I didn’t say that this movies takes some liberties with the unforgivable laws of motion and gravity. That being said, I agree that it honors just enough to make the action tolerable. There were a few moments that I found annoying. Like how the Jaegar can be carried by a half a dozen helicopters when it’s the size and mass of a skyscraper. But overall, I found it pretty believable.

My other comment is how amazing the detail is. The sets were gorgeous. But I’m talking specifically about the Jaegars and the Kaiju. I loved that each Kaiju was a little different. And each one sort of had a perk. As they got harder to fight, they had more abilities, from wings, to acid spit to the ability to emit an electromagnetic pulse. And each one looked completely unique from the others and from any other monster we’ve seen on the big screen before. Del Toro has always had an interesting eye for weird creatures, and he really gets to play with that here.

Mark: And what I like, too, is that even on such a massive scale you really see the details on everything.  And I don’t mean just the Jaegers and Kaiju, but the cities too.  The neon lights in downtown Hong Kong shining off the wet streets and Jaegers, creating this almost dreamlike quality.  But then the gritty aspects after you see everything destroyed.  There’s a scene with the aftermath of a Kaiju attack, and it could have easily just all been CGI, but it’s a real set and that gives more realism to it.  Not to say the CGI doesn’t feel real, because it does.  But I think we’ve established how amazing it looks.  How’d you like the story?  And the characters?

Dylan: I was about to get to that. I thought the characters were kind of lame and cliche. Now, I can’t really complain, because this movie delivered exactly what it advertised: giant monsters fighting giant robots. But I thought Jax from Sons of Anarchy was just playing the same character. And the emotion just seemed so out of place in this movie. Whenever Mori had an emotional moment with either Jax or Stringer Bell, people in the theater with me just laughed because it seemed kind of contrived. The human drama was there, but didn’t really need to be. I thought the father-son dynamic of the Australian team was kind of interesting and I sort wanted to know more about the Marshal's past.

Mark: Well luckily Del Toro wants to expand this universe, so we might get a prequel of the early days or something along those lines.  But, i’ll agree that most of the characters were one-note, but on one level, that’s all they needed to be.  The human element needed to be there, but this was the right amount.  If the movie got too emotional or dramatic, it would detract from the monster fighting.  But I thought, if anything, they struck a good chord with the serious characters and comedic characters.  I enjoyed the science team; I thought they played off each other well and helped to break what could have been a overly consistent dark tone.  Cause you can’t have a super serious tone with monsters v. robots, it would feel too disjointed.  And as always, Ron Perlman was just fantastic.  But just to say, I thought Charlie Hunnam (Jax) was surprisingly upbeat for most of it.  Aside from the seriousness of the battles, he always kept a smile, to balance everyone else.  I found it remarkably refreshing to have a lead who wasn’t either insufferably smug (Kirk from Star Trek or Tony Stark) or fairly depressing (Superman).

And I thought the story was good.  Cliched at points, though it played with the cliches so it didn’t feel as obvious.  And if you pay attention, you’ll see where things are going very early on.  But it was the opening that set the stage for this whole movie, and I thought it was just brilliant.

Dylan: Yea the opening scenes brought us right into the action and showed us just what we had to look forward to for the rest of the movie. I’d like to see a sequel (or prequel) with a little more humanity in it; better dialogue, more interesting characters. I know that’s asking a lot these days, but just as the weight and scale of the Jaegars added to their believability, some more three dimensional character would definitely add some credibility to the entire film. Yes, I want to see giant robots smashing ships over giant monsters' heads, but it would help if I cared at all about the tens of thousands of people dying every time one of these battles takes place.

Mark: Yeah, hopefully this does well enough that they’ll go on and expand it, and with that Del Toro will know that he’s definitely not lacking in the action but just needs to bump up the character depth.  But even saying that, this movie deserves to be seen.  It’s damn fun, looks amazing, and is something original in a summer that’s been drowning in remakes, sequels, and reboots.  It’s giving us something new, which for the first time gave me some tension while watching.  Cause I didn’t know who might be killed.  Instead of Star Trek where none of the leads were ever really in danger or Man of Steel where obviously Lois or Perry isn’t going to die, this brings back those old days of being held in suspense of what’ll happen to the characters.  So go see it damn it!

Dylan: Yea, I don’t usually say this, but I kind of wish I had seen it in Imax 3D. I just felt like the screen was too small. I would go see it again. But I doubt I’ll get the chance. The color-scheme, scale, cinematography, everything is just begging to be seen in high definition. So I would definitely recommend a viewing in one form or another.

Mark: Yeah, I’d see it again, and try to get to at least an Imax, cause damn, it would look amazing on that.  Best summer blockbuster this year.  By far.

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UPDATE...

Dylan: So I went back and saw this bad boy in IMAX 3D. You may know already that I don't really care for 3D; I find that even when the filmmakers and studio promise that the 3D looks better than the 2D, it usually muddles the visuals and just costs more to see. (Also, up until recently, I had to wear prescription glasses underneath the 3D glasses, which was just humiliating.) But Pacific Rim is probably the first film I have ever seen in 2D and thought to myself "wow, I need to see this on a bigger screen." So I gave it a whirl and, holy shit, did it look magnificent. I remember I saw Avatar in 3D. That's about all it was good for. But Pacific Rim in IMAX 3D is an entirely new experience. It is never gimmicky at all (nothing flying at the screen). It serves only to make the beautiful destruction so much more visceral and mind blowing. If you haven't seen this movie yet, and, box office statistics from the past few weeks suggest that you probably haven't, I highly recommend that you see the movie in this format. You will not regret it.

Troll Hunter

Every once in a while it's important to watch a foreign film. We have ventured across the proverbial cinematic seas before, with The Host and Outrage (and technically a selection from the United Kingdom. This time we head to Norway. Much like The Host, Troll Hunter (2010) is sort of a low-budget-by-Hollywood-standards monster flick that stands out among the rest for its ability to make the very best of what it has. As with The Host, a unique story, decent acting, pretty exciting and interesting monsters, and a gorgeous backdrop make this film not only stand out in its home country, but also gives most American monster movies a run for their money.

Netflix: Yea, baby, yea!
Picker: Distant future...the year 2000

Mark: I thought I’d start by saying that this was much better with the whole handheld camera concept than End of Watch.  While End of Watch was able to do more -- since apparently everyone had a camera, and they placed cameras everywhere somehow -- this one sticks to the single, believable, camera throughout.  And it sits on the line between believable amateur and professional.  And for that, I was glad.  It never really became too impossible to figure out what was going on.  Well, most of the time.

Dylan: Yea, so this is an example of the now-overused ‘found footage’ cliche. And in the beginning we get the text that’s like “yea, this footage was sent to a news agency, but the people you see have never been found. We’re not sure if it’s real, yada yada.” Usually that means we’re dealing with a horror movie. But I wouldn’t really classify this as a horror, even though it does get pretty dark and maybe even a little scary at times. And the first time we get a night scene, you figure it’s going to be like the Blair Witch Project or something, where three inept college students are stumbling around in the woods, and the camera is all over the place, and you never see anything at all. But this movie is the complete opposite. There is the shaky cam effect inherent to this style of filming, but it really isn’t that distracting. And in fact you get to see the trolls pretty early on, often in full view and lighting. So the movie really doesn’t hold back or tease you too much with revealing the monsters. In fact, the real anticipation comes from learning that there are several different types of trolls, and as the movie progresses you get a glimpse at each species and what makes it unique. But we can talk about that more when we get to the story.

Mark: Ok, looks like we’re doing a little role reversal here, cause I found this movie to be a tad bit on the boring side.  I opened myself up to it, and found some of it to be really interesting, but on the whole, I never really got drawn in and wanted to see where we were going with Hans and the film crew.  I agree, that I was interested in seeing the trolls, but for me, it was never as interesting as listening to Hans explain a lot of the mythos of what we (as well as the film crew) believe about trolls versus what he knows.  As well as the government agency working to keep it all hidden from the public.  I found that much more engaging than the scenes with the trolls.  Albeit, the last part of the movie got my attention.

Dylan: I agree that the slower points were often more interesting. They really created a sort of believable world of trolls. For example, the scene where the veterinarian is explaining why they either turn to stone or explode when touched by sunlight. It was, in my opinion, a pretty well-crafted story. And very original. I mean we have hundreds of movies about werewolves and vampires. And garlic and crosses and silver and stakes...we all know how to fight vampires. But here you have a completely new story that is just as grounded in ancient fantasy and mythology, but hasn't been looked at through a real-world lens. 

What really impresses me about it is how the countryside is used perfectly to create this world. Maybe this is just because I love Norway and really really want to visit someday. But the landscape and the geographic features are all used so well. The natural boulders that (we're told) the different trolls throw at each other, the abandoned mine, the power lines running through miles of bare snowy hills (which are part of an electric fence), the acres of downed trees (which were caused by stampeding trolls). I’m not Norwegian, but I feel like the setting in the movie really says a lot about the real place, and is maybe an indication of how the mythology of trolls got started to begin with.

Mark: I completely agree, it does a great job making a real place feel much more like it comes from a fairy tale.  Blending the real with the fiction.  This is what I meant by saying the camerawork felt professional even though it’s by, for the movie, an amatuer.  The shots of them on the ferry and across the water are the mountains with low moving clouds, or the village nestled among the mountains, it does a great job giving a sense of place.  And the snowy tundra at the end was really good, and while the CGI didn’t always work for me -- granted this budget wasn’t exactly huge -- there were moments when it blended together amazingly.

And one of the things I did like was when the mythos that Hans was saying overlapped with what we think we know.  The trolls obviously look much more grotesque than what the college kids think, but they still do things they’ve -- and we’ve -- been told in stories.  My favorite was when Hans was tying sheep to a bridge, and for a second I didn’t really get all that interested, but then it clicked, that trolls live under bridges.  Or at least I knew that from stories.  And suddenly it got interesting because of that blending of their rewriting of trolls and what is already known.  They did a good job recreating trolls and the mythology without dumbing it down or making it contrived.

Dylan: It’s both humorous and interesting to see how the fantasy is melded with the ‘reality’ in this film’s universe. On the one hand, there is the legend that trolls can smell Christian blood. So Hans asks the film crew right away “none of you believe in God or Jesus, right?” And then there is a scene in the beginning where they spy Hans tossing a tire under a bridge, and at first it doesn’t make sense, but later on we realize that it’s because trolls go under bridges and like to gnaw on rubber, and this is Hans’ way of keeping track of their movement. So it’s a balance of the sort-of ridiculous and the kind of scientific.

My favorite scene is when the head of the TSS is bickering with the Polish paint crew in English about the species of bear that they brought as a decoy for the newspapers. Apparently they brought a bear from Russia, and the poor TSS guy was going to have to explain to the public how a Russian bear made it to Norway and killed a couple of tourists.

Mark: That was a good scene.  And I liked when the Russian guy spoke with the film crew, and he was trying to explain why he does what he does for the TSS, but his broken English, which he was speaking for some reason, kept him from making any sense.  But he was damn happy to be talking.  But this scene highlighted to me how much darker the rest of the movie is.  It has to be in some parts, but it could have used much more levity from time to time to balance it out.  At least I thought so.  But then again, as things get darker and darker, you get a better sense of how this operation is run, and why it has to be run the way it is.  If the ending title cards are to be believed.

Dylan: Even without those, things go downhill pretty steadily in the second half. More than you would expect. Especially since, as I said earlier, it’s not really a horror movie. But I wouldn’t really hold it against the film. In fact, as in the case with Thomas’ (the leader of the film crew) health, and that tire thing I mentioned before, I enjoyed how things from the beginning that we may not have put much thought into, came back into the story later on in the film.

Mark: Yeah, you forget about that injury, as after it happens, it never really is brought up again.  But when it is, suddenly things become just a tad bit more dire.  And what I liked about the injury, is that it wasn’t some made-up troll-based illness.  It’s something normal, or rather, real.  So suddenly the fantasy gets a little bit more realistic when the trolls can be affected by real illnesses.

But on the characters, I guess since this was playing out as more of a “blair witch” kind of story, in so much that there isn’t a story except that they’re following Hans around, none of them had much development.  And while that’s not always a bad thing, I just didn’t get attached to them much.  So I didn’t care what happened to them.  Well, maybe for Hans, but that’s cause you really get the sense, even as he tells us, that he’s been doing this for a long time and he’s kinda disgruntled.  And you feel for the guy.

Dylan: While I agree that the film crew is kind of boring, I would argue that, as the title suggests, the movie is about Hans, the Troll Hunter. And if you think about it, his character is pretty interesting. He’s a seasoned Troll Hunter. At first he tells the film crew to leave him alone, but his disappointment with the handling of trolls leads him to take these people along, to show the world what’s really going on. The scene where he puts on the Iron Man suit just to get close enough to a troll to get a blood sample really speaks to his character. He gets tossed bodily across the bridge and probably knocked unconscious, but then he gets up, follows the troll down to the stream and finishes the job. He doesn’t seem to have any family or obligations. His only job is secret and kind of shitty, but he does it anyway, sort of to protect the entire country and the world from the truth.

And I’m not saying all that to contradict you. In fact, in was on this, my third viewing, that I really took in the setting and the characters more than ever before.

Mark: You’re right, it is very much the story of Hans.  It’s just that since the college kids are with him the whole time, I feel like very little is ever brought up or established about them.  Maybe a few things when the plot calls for it, but nothing in conversation.  Which is how we learned more about Hans.  And this was a small film, so it had limited time to tell it’s story and focused on only what it wanted to without losing itself in too much, and I applaud it for that.  But a little something for the kids would have given more to the tension.

Also, while I did like the scene with the Iron Man suit, and how it showed his character, it was difficult for me to fully appreciate it cause I was laughing too hard from when he got hit.  Not only did I not understand why he whistled at it when he successfully snuck behind it, but the CGI of him getting hit was funny.  I’m a terrible person.

But a scene for me when the CGI was just something next to brilliant was with the massive troll at the end.  Specifically when they were driving underneath it, getting closer.  the snow being kicked up by the troll, creating this whiteout around them, as the tail swishes by, and the camera keeps trying to stay focused.  It all came together great right then.

Dylan:  You can tell that the effects team had a great eye for detail, just not the budget of an American special effects company. It was a similar situation with The Host. At certain times you could tell what they were going for, but it just came off as laughable. But for me, 90% of the CGI was effective. It could have been much, much worse; surely you're familiar with the Megashark titles on Syfy.

Overall, I think this movie might be kind of hit or miss for most people. I really like it because I’m into weird, unique foreign films that aren’t dramas. And I think for a film from a country that isn’t exactly renowned for their filmmaking, this is a very solid picture. The acting is decent, the story is pretty great, and the CGI and camerawork is beyond acceptable. Best of all, you get an hour and a half of beautiful rainy Norwegian landscapes.

Mark: Whoa, whoa, the Megashark titles are in a league of their own.  Nothing can be compared to them.  But speaking on this, I think what got me was that it took more time than I had ever thought setting up the mythology of both Hans as the Troll Hunter and the Trolls themselves.  So much of the first half of the film was showing us the truth behind it all, and then as we understand more, we get to see more and things begin to escalate.  And if you go in knowing that, you’ll apprecaite more of the film.  You’ll appreciate the original story that the filmmakers are trying to create, as well as some really stunning shots of Norway.  I agree that this movie does such a good job showing you the almost fairy tale-like scenery that I want to go there.  You can tell that the filmmakers put their hearts into this, showing and telling us so much.  So I say give it a shot, just knowing that you need to be ready for a lot of slow build up.

And it hurts me knowing that there is already an American remake in the works.

Dylan: Damn. Really? Is it going to take place in America? That is so awful.

Mark: Yeah, as far as I know it is.  The rights were snagged by Chris Columbus.

Dylan: Ah, the guy who discovered America...and then made the first two (and shittiest, debatably) Harry Potter movies.

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Fun fact of the day: the Norwegian word for 'troll' is...'troll'! What the hell did you think it would be? The creatures first appeared in Norse mythology as early as the 9th century. The word we use in English is therefore derived from the Norwegian, and not the other way around. Fools.

And that's a rap. Our next film is sort of a secret for now. Which should really be that exciting, since we have been neglecting to tease films for the past few reviews now. But we think you'll enjoy it. It's a pretty big deal. All I can say is that some people would go so far as to say that it defines a generation. And no, I'm not talking about anything by John Hughes.