Metallica would say "Sad But True." However, I am undaunted and in the spirit of tremendous intestinal fortitude, I'll shall continue to blog. So I now give you my review of yet another duo/copy-cat movie and a cartoon that should not exist.
P.S. - This movie came out 3 months ago.
None of you recall this, but I bloged about the Prestige and the Illusionist in a prior post and how Hollywood seems to make 2 similar films in a short time frame. Here is my list:
The Illusionist & The Prestige
Armageddon & Deep Impact
Harry Potter & LOTR
Star Wars & Flash Gordon - That's not a stretch!!
Tombstone & Wyatt Earp
Speed & Blown Away
First Knight & Braveheart
Dark City & The Matrix
Mission to Mars & Red Planet
Pirates of the Caribbean & Master and Commander
Conspiracy Theory & Enemy of the State & Arlington Road
I recently blogged on Dan in Real Life, about a widower who falls in love during a family trip. A couple weeks ago, Jules and I saw P.S. I Love You, and it was Julie's turn to watch the wife as a surviving spouse after her husband dies of brain cancer. A great bonus for me in this movie is that it starred Gerrard Butler (Phantom of the Opera / 300), so if I ever got bored with the movie, I could just imagine the guy shouting "THIS... IS... S-P-A-R-T-A!!!" or singing "Past the
Point of No Return." His Irish accent in this movie was way over the top, but I still liked it. From what I've read, this movie was panned by critics and scored 20% out of 100% on the Rotten Tomatoes meter. One critic called it, "the cinematic equivalent of a Celine Dion song." Despite it getting destroyed by people paid to watch it, it has grossed nearly $50M in the US, which is no failure and I did enjoy the movie. The movie is about the wife following instructions from random notes that her husband planned to arrive over the year after his death. Good ol morbid humor - many of the notes bring us to flashbacks where Mr. Butler gets into the movie. My favorite person in this was Harry Connick Jr., who had plenty of lines that cracked me up - yes, there is a cure for rudeness. I would definitely say that of the two, Dan in Real Life is the one to see, but this one is still worth a rental.DRAGONLANCE: Dragons of Autumn Twilight
When Lord of the Rings came out many people asked me what I thought about the movies because they thought I had read the books. Close, but not quite. Dragonlance is a similar Fantasy book series that really got me into reading back in Middle School. After LOTR, I figured Dragonlance could make for some great movies. So when I heard a movie was in the making, I was fairly exited. But then I found out it would be animated, then found out it was only going to be 90 mins, then I heard it was a mix of 2D and 3D animation, then I heard the project was about to be scrapped.
So what I ended up getting was the WORST ADAPTATION EVER. Honestly, I think they ran out of money and just put this out there to try to re-coup some sunk costs without finishing. I don't know how they did it, but this cartoon looks like it was made in the late 1980s. Seriously, overall it looked that old. The 3D animation with 2D animation looked clumsy and out of place. The music was genuinely bad. The characters were wooden, shallow and the dialog was always awkward and rushed. There was waayyy too much totally unnecessary cleavage on women and the violence was quite graphic for a PG-13 rating. So have I lost hope? Pretty much. LOTR survived some really corny but at least memorable cartoons (the Hobbit) and still got made into a live-action film 30 years later. The problem is that LOTR is a classic and this is just some popular Fantasy series from the 80s. Not likely to endure.
The question I have is how does something this bad get made? Its almost as if they set out to destroy any chance of these stories ever making it to the big screen in the future. Perhaps its for the best, this film will die in obscurity and the books can live on without fear of anyone else ruining a perfectly good story.