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Reviews
The Making of 'Dungeons and Dragons' (2001)
You HAVE GOT to see this!
If I didn't know better, I'd think this was some missing Christopher Guest film. It's absolutely hilarious.
The director, Cortney Solomon, is just... amazing. He's like a hybrid of Corky StClair and The Nutty Professor. His lisping, nasal voiceover about how "Deeeeee an deeeee should beeeee a mooooove-eeeeeeee" had me hooked from the start, along with his totally irrelevant tangents about "There's a monthser I REALLY usthed to love, called the mimic..." etc. His description of his first meeting ("There wath a guy acroth the table from me, jutht thtaring at me like THITH") is comedy gold AND offers an insight into how anyone, regardless of a total lack of talent and a speach impediment, can convince people to give them thirty million dollars. Unsurprisingly, he also likes Star Wars a lot.
Then, there's... a bunch of guys. I have no idea where they came from, or what they do, but I guess they're his friends from highschool or something. They really, really like Dungeons and Dragons. Trough talking about it (possibly all they do talk about), let slip a series of hilarious personal insights, like "When I FINALLY got a girlfriend, I had to coerce her into playing, because I didn't want to have to choose", "I met my ex-wife playing D&D", "I was too small to play football, so I had to play (raises eyebrows)... rasslin'", and, my favourite, a very unhealthy looking man with an impressive chin collection who tells us that Dungeons and Dragons helps make us better people. Like him, obviously.
This is a gem. It's the funniest damn thing I've seen in a long time. If you're ever looking for a great comedy, or just something your friends can mock MST3k style, get the Dungeons and Dragons DVD and watch the two documentaries RIGHT NOW. The only thing missing is a long, sad interview with Jeremey Irons.
The Animatrix (2003)
Mixed bag.
Final Flight of the Osiris: This is just a glorified fanfic. It bridges the gap between the first and second movies, but it's not really necessary to either of them. Even though the computer graphics are excellent, they end up detracting from the action, since they look so plastic and lifeless that there's never a sense of danger to any of it. This just sort of seemed pointless as anything other than a teaser for Reloaded.
Second Renaissance 1 + 2: These are interesting rather than entertaining. They help flesh out the backstory and overall world, but there are no characters, and anyone who's seen the movies knows what happens, so they aren't engaging. There's a lot of very stylish, scary sequences in part 2, but the saturation of historical / mythological references are just cringeworthy. Do we really need to see The Million Man March, and countless other events, re-enacted by machines? Yes, history moves in cycles, but the -exact same events- don't repeat themselves. Especially with the same names.
Beyond: This was worth the cost of disc. It's a real exploration of the idea of the Matrix, and what its effects would be. While the movies use it the virtual world as an excuse for reality-defying fights, Beyond looks at the ways it would affect the 'regular' world and people. Also, rather than having a plot with heroes, villains and danger (as per every other short), it's content to simply be curious and imaginative. After seeing it, I wished the movies had been more like it.
World Record: Similar to Beyond, this is about characters and events that aren't a carbon copy of something that happened in the movies. It's not as original or absorbing as Beyond, but since Beyond is one of the best Animes I've seen for ages, that's not really a criticism.
Program has some good fighting. Detective story has a really good film noir feel. Kid's Story is awful. Matriculated has a few good ideas before it becomes overlong. I can't really think of much to say about them, since they're just expansions on the movies rather than self-contained stories. Like Final Flight of the Osiris, there's nothing here you couldn't find on a 'Matrix Fanfiction' bulletin board.
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
Actually pretty good (but not great)
When this first came out, I got dragged off to see it, and I found it really boring. Recently, I watched it on DVD, with a different mindset, and found it to be pretty good.
On the DVD's commentary track, Lucas says that he really intended much of it to be viewed as a silent film. With this in mind, it works really well - the special effects don't just revolve around a single big centrepiece, but cover every inch of the screen - this is a great film to simply -look- at. Yes, there are films with superior effects (and a lot of them are older), but none of them are as imaginative or fully realised as The Phantom Menace. Instead of blowing the entire effects budget on Jar Jar (which a lot of other movies would have done), we get entire races, huge battles, underwater cities and an alien remake of Venice. They might look like they belong in a video game, but realism wasn't ever high on Lucas' agenda, and this even helps the film by creating more of a 'fantasy' atmosphere (This is a fairy tale, not Star Trek).
A lot of the criticism levelled at the film is that its characters are underdevelloped and the dialogue is flat. This is why I wasn't that happy with it the first time I saw it. But why the hell was I expecting the elements of a great human drama from Star Wars in the first place? None of the characters in this film are any less realised than those of the original trilogy. But...
The major thing missing from Episode One is Han Solo. All the human characters are solemn and dignified, which is why the dialogue suffers - there's no laconic wise guy to act as comic relief and give the story an everyman character (Anakin is too naive for anyone over 10 to connect with). Jar Jar stops everything becoming too bogged-down, but he's... stupid. Not the horrible, movie-destroying monster everyone makes him out to be, but we only laugh -at- him, whereas in the original films, we laughed -with- the characters.
The plot is actually quite complex. Not the one that drives the action, but the one behind the scenes, about Palpatine's rise to power. It's full of manipulation, double-crosses, deception, double-double-crosses and all sort of messy stuff. It's just that this story isn't the one that necessarily drives the action, and it's spread out over episodes 1 to 3, rather than being self-contained. I didn't realise just how twisted and Machiavellian it was until I saw Episode 2, and I guess it'll all be revealed in Episode 3. I've never been a huge fan of "plot", so this didn't really make me like the film more or less, but still; there's more here than people give it credit for.
This isn't really a bad film at all. It might not be as witty or fun as the others in the series, but it doesn't collapse into a pit of plodding self-seriousness like a lot of Sci-Fi, and the action sequences are exciting and colourful as opposed to simply violent.