Most disappointing movies I watched in 2015

It would be hard for me to narrow down an "objective" list of worst movies for 2015, since I watched -a lot- of low-budget, badly rated movies this year, but at the same time, I'm not sure I'd want to put them on such a list. See, while I'm not drawn to actors or characters like many movie viewers, I'm a sucker for world-building, unique story elements and a strong visual style - leading me to love several "objectively not very good" movies like; Demolition Man (amazing world building), The Postman (some very interesting ideas about an image overpowering the person), Wanted (love the stylistic choices, wish it'd done less story), The Grinch (world-building, visual style), the Matrix sequels (there's so much depth hidden between the overly-long fighting scenes) and Hellboy 2 (visual world-building, creature design).
But most of all I'm a story-oriented viewer.
Show me something, anything unique, creative and/or complex and I'll forgive most other technical faults because I can see the original intent of the writer/director, and can appreciate the ideas that were lost during production.
This year was for me filled with flawed products featuring interesting, unique and creative story-elements I didn't expect to find in cheap made-for-tv movies.

No, what really gets me going are movies that failed to do anything with their set-up, movies where I went in with low expectations and still ended up disappointed, movies where I turn off and sit there seething with frustration and anger over what I just watched. Most of the movies on this list stuck with me for days after as negative emotions, and the top three managed the impressive feat of making me both exceptionally bored and incredibly angry at the same time.

Presenting; the most frustrating, irritating, disappointing things I watched this year

9. Man of Steel (2013)

I really, really disliked Superman Returns, and wasn't especially intrigued by the Man of Steel trailers, so I went into this movie with a sort of "I guess I have to see it some day" attitude. And I was still disappointed. I found most of the movie boring, Zod's characterization two-dimensional and underdeveloped, but the final peg in the coffin for me was that it just wasn't a Superman movie. That ending both rewrote everything Superman has been - and removed any chance of a sequel.
How do you one-up the villain that broke Superman?

8. Equilibrium (2002)
Equilibrium was well-received (by audiences, critics hated it) when it released in 2002, and maybe I'd have given it more leeway at a time when Matrix-rip-offs weren't such a dime a dozen as they became in the following years, but I just had no patience for this "trying to be more poignant that it really is" visual slog of a movie. Everything is symbolic in an incredibly obvious, in your face way, the "twist" was much better realized in Half-life 2, and most of all; ANGER IS AN EMOTION!!

7.Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

You could have been good Terminator 3!! I didn't like the "happy every after" ending of Terminator 2, so I was all up for the "Rise of the Machines" plot-line, and the script had quite a few interesting elements in it, it's just.. The action is boring, the acting is meh, there's several lines of dialogue that directly contradicts both the movie's plot and the character's personality, and I do not understand the weird, sexy female Terminator!
I wouldn't have minded a female Terminator who played on her sex-appeal if she was a Terminator built for infiltration and blending in, but she's not, she's a Terminator-killer, and while she has a scene where she "fixes" her breasts to look more appealing, she doesn't actually use her new "attributes" when dealing with the cop, she just shoots him. I'd also accepted a Terminator-killer that's a sadist, that I could see Skynet programming, but I do not accept a computer programming a Terminator to almost get an orgasm when she DNA-tests blood!
There's no in-movie reason for her behaviour, just as there's no plot reason for her to drop the "boyfriend-disguise" she puts on to trick Kate Brewster when she does, besides the production requiring its actress to be on screen for most of the movie.

The biggest disappointment is the ending. The ending is so good at first - the slow reveal when we figure out what's happened together with the protagonists, and watch them slowly accept their predetermined future and that everything they did was in vain - and then it's totally undermined by the insulting narration explaining everything like we're a 9-year old watching a sci-fi movie for the first time.

Stop insulting your audience!!

Also, where is my scene where Arnold pulls of his stripper pants? You had fun with the silly sunglasses, why not use the stripper clothes you had him wear the entire movie?!?

Such a wasted opportunity.

6. Robocop (2014)
See Robocop, I could have been one of your biggest fans. I'm not a big fan of the original movie (having barely seen it at the time and not liking hyper-violence) but I am a big fan of exploring what it means to be human, AI and robots. I came into it with low expectations and no baggage, and you still pissed me off!
Robocop is one of the new crop of "sci-fi" movies that doesn't like exploring its own sci-fi elements. It introduces a lot of concepts and questions (some of them being "why is he in such a cumbersome, heavy suit when you -just- showed us advanced prostheses and much slimmer, sleeker robots" and "why did you show him having most of his body just to remove it for no reason, also what happened to his eye??") but never bothers to show us enough to even try to answer any of them.
We're never shown both sides, we're never shown what could be problematic about robot soldiers (the first scene does not count! Just increase their threat-level detection a bit! "Don't kill people with knives" - fixed. Also "they won't feel bad after killing someone" is not a good argument! What, the most important part of using humans in combat is that they'll get PTSD and mental problems afterwards? How is that good for anyone? Besides, you seem completely naive about how humans manage to kill other humans) and we're never shown the "bad guys" motivations or goals.

Android Cop, Hammond and Helen from Android Cop

What's worse, Robocop is a character-driven movie without any character-development. Alex Murphy is a robot before he's put in the suit, and he's a robot after he's in the suit. I couldn't care less about him as a person, and I'm never given enough time with his family to care about them.
I'm also never given enough information or characterization on any of the other characters to even understand what they're trying to achieve or what their jobs are.
I love Jackie Earle Haley and while I thought he had the only interesting character in the movie, he's not given enough time to develop his character or the plot surrounding him, leading to him just portraying a 2-dimensional specieist(?) baddie.

And WHY do the scientists keep getting confused and surprised by their own deliberate research???

"I changed his serotonin levels. Huh, he's acting like a robot now, I don't understand!"
"This serotonin gauge which is the main part of the screen I've been watching this whole time is increasing at the same time as Robocop is behaving erratically, I don't understand!"

Having just watched the Asylum-mockbuster "Android Cop" I can confidently say that Robocop (2014) was outclassed completely by its low-budget, shot-in-2-months counter-part.

Android Cop (2014)

5. Gåten Ragnarok (2013)
I was so happy when this was announced, I love low-budget, not-very-good adventure movies, so I was really excited to get a Norwegian one. I wasn't expecting much, I know from experience that when we stray into a genre Norwegian cinema isn't known for we end up with a regurgitation of common genre tropes, but I was expecting something like The Librarian, Macgyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis or Voyage of the Unicorn (a Hallmark mini-series I watched when I was young).
The Bluray was purchased not long after release, but when I sat down and watched it this year I was so disappointed. This isn't an adventure movie!
Gåten Ragnarok is a generic low-budget monster movie, that seemed like it didn't have the money to feature its monster in all the scenes it had planned to.
If you've seen films like Jurassic Park: the Lost World, the direction of the plot loses all semblance of suspense and mystery. You know exactly what's going on, why it's happening and how it will end, complete with "monster doesn't kill the kids immediately, just stares at them" trope.
Most of the actual adventure and lore elements are delivered through exposition and dialogue (show, don't tell movie!), and the movie keeps changing locations without ever explaining or justifying the scene/time-jump.
Did the movie mean to have them arrive at Bodø airport or was it using it as a generic air-port stand-in, hoping we wouldn't recognize it? If it is Bodø, do they really think you can drive from Bodø to Finnmark in a few hours? There's no good way to tell because someone thought a sense of time and explaining scene-transitions was unnecessary.
How did he get down again into the cave after the rope broke? How are they suddenly on a raft in the middle of the river? We don't need these in-between scenes, that would be -boring-. ...

Replicant and happy endings - a rant

First of all, this movie should've been called "Stockholm Syndrome the movie" or "How to be an abuser - a visual guide"...

Replicant is the story about Jake Riley, favourite detective of serial killer "Torch" (Van Damme), known for murdering single mothers and torching their bodies with the child still in the house. After failing to capture him one last time, Jake goes into retirement, but is picked up by a clandestine government agency who are planning to clone terrorists, and have cloned "Torch" to use him as a test subject.
The Replicant (he's never given a name) is telepathically connected with his murderous source, and Jake is tasked with activating the latent killer in the Replicant, any way possible.

The tag line on my Bluray "Think twice before you clone a killer" is just blatantly lying about where the story goes. Actually, cloning a killer works pretty well, though making it a much darker and more uncomfortable movie than I expected.

The intro is ludicrous; exposition, extremely fast cutting and jumping to our main plot after 5 minutes, never even -trying- to defend its idiotic set-up, while the end is even stupider than anticipated, ending on the most unrealistic happy ending you would never guess.

Everything in between features naive, newborn replicant Van Damme being abused, manipulated and scared by his "daddy" - the supposed hero of our story, and struggling family man (maybe. We could never figure out if he was related to the fellow police officer/mother he keeps visiting. The kid called him "uncle", he sends his mother to stay with her, and yet, in a deleted scene, they were making out. O.o)
Jake might not be doing it on purpose (we weren't sure), but the way he treats the Replicant is basically a blueprint for creating a dependent - he ignores the Replicant, is overly violent, blames him for any tiny mistake, and just when he's ripped all the footing out from under his feet, he shows him just a little bit of kindness. (Rinse and repeat)
It's depressing, uncomfortable and sad, but not bad. Van Damme absolutely shines in this role, and every time his "daddy" gets angry with him it is heart-breaking to watch.

It's just that nothing else supports the amazing performance and moral lesson presented by Van Damme's Replicant. His serial-murder version is not especially fleshed out or interestingly played, Michael Rooker as Jake just phones in his role, the dialogue is incredibly ham-fisted and likes hammering its points home (while not following up on them. At all) the one-liners are weak and the Van Damme/Van Damme fight scenes are not on the quality level they should have been.

There's a scene in the deleted scenes showing Jake going back to his whatever-their-relationship partner's house and receiving a drawing from her son - illustrating him standing over the beaten up replicant (he brought the replicant to her house, because of course he did, handcuffed him in the basement, son found him, offered him a snack, came running out from the basement, mouth bleeding. Jake went ballistic and savagely beat the replicant - turned out the kid had knocked heads with the dog) which I understand why they cut (it was part of a larger scene with family drama), but really wish they hadn't, because it would have been the -only- indication in the movie that Jake's behavior isn't okey.

I was assuming the movie would be either funny-bad or forgettable, but it's neither, solely because of that replicant performance. It is sad, touching, heart-breaking, infuriating and meaningful, and the movie insults everything it is, it could have been, and its viewers with a bullshit ending that ignores everything that's happened to give replicant Van Damme a girl friend.

About halfway through the movie serial killer Van Damme finds out about his clone and starts manipulating him to turn against Jake because they're "brothers", so I was expecting the movie to end with replicant Van Damme having to choose between his "daddy" and his "brother", killing serial killer Van Damme to save Jake.

It doesn't.

What I wanted to happen was after we'd dealt with serial killer Van Damme and everything is over we enter Jake's house at night, Jake is on the floor, dead, while replicant Van Damme is sitting in a corner, crying, covered in blood.

That definitely doesn't happen.

What happened to bad endings? When did we decide that all movies, no matter what age rating, how dark the story is or what the movie is about shall end on a happy note, ham-fistedly inserted or not?
Some times a dark ending is more meaningful, more poignant, more likely to make an impact, and yet I feel I haven't seen a bad ending in.. 15 years?
Give me my unhappy, terrifying, heart-breaking periods back!

This was a story about a new-born clone given the genetic make-up of a killer, reliving every bad thing that'd happened to the original, every murder he'd done and even being telepathically linked to the guy while he does his deeds - all the while being abused and hated by the first, and only human he's connected with, and we still felt this was the perfect set-up for a nurture over nature ending?

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008) review/love letter

It is not often I watch a movie and go "why have I never heard about this one before, it is amazing!", knowing there and then that the movie will become one of my new favourite things, but that's exactly what happened when I watched Starship Troopers 3.
I was one of the people who really liked Starship Troopers the movie, and I still credit it for stopping the incredibly annoying "these bad aliens are attacking the earth because they're aliens"-trope films like Independence day and Titan AE perpetuated. But, any interest I had in the subversion and social commentary alluded to in first movie was extinguished by the travesty of a body-snatcher "horror film" Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. Bleh.

Marauder is the third film in the series by writer Ed Neumeier, and the first one he directed himself  - apparently to firmly answer once and for all the debate over whether the first movie was a satire or not.
Marauder just ramps everything up; the satire, the social commentary, the propaganda, the mass-manipulation, the "to defeat our enemy we're becoming our enemy", humans still underestimating the bugs, people benefiting from the war going on forever as both sides try to vanquish each other completely instead of trying to find a compromise.. He even brings in the Mech suits and the planet-destroying bomb fans of the books wanted in the first film.

It takes some time to understand the tone of Marauder, it keeps jumping from over-the-top, comedic propaganda broadcasts to the bloody reality of war, but as we progress the propaganda clips build a more and more ironic view of the Federation, as we see both the glossy outward image, and the behind-the-scenes scheming.
I really appreciated that the movie took its loss and combat seriously, keeping the comedy in the dialogue and non-life threatening parts. There are of course weaknesses to the movie - the budget is low, some of the actors really struggle to pronounce their lines and the dialogue in itself is trying a bit too hard to be cool (also Casper Van Dien plays one scene great - the meeting his old friend/bar struggle is really well done - and then he sort of phones it in for the rest of the movie), and the movie flounders revealing the (by then) rather obvious plot twist - but everything is alleviated by the amazing over-the-top performances of Stephen Hogan as the Sky Marshall and Amanda Donohoe as the wannabe new sky marshall. No matter what the rest of the movie had been, I would probably have recommended it anyway just for those two. You need to see Hogan's slow reveal of his character's true motivations, it's masterful.

I still do not understand why this one isn't a more well-known cult film, it seems like it should appeal to people who like movies like Stranger than Fiction, Thank you for Smoking, Cradle will Rock - subversive films that deal with human motivation and how we can be manipulated.
One theory is that the movie can be read as both highly pro-religion -and- highly anti-religion. I'm still not sure what the writer/director was going for, but I'd say it's pretty safe to say the movie is anti-organized religion, and it can definitely be read as anti-military - all highly controversial subjects a lot of movie viewers seem to react negatively to (at least that's what I've concluded from reading IMDB comments over the years. People hate both religious films and anti-religious films, and don't you dare say anything negative about the military).
It is not being subtle about it either. In fact, it is being so unsubtle about its symbolism that it is rather genius, culminating in two of the main characters getting engaged in front of an exploding planet.
In the end the humans won a small victory, all our main characters have been subdued into new positions, and the Federation is ready to keep fighting the "righteous", never-ending war, now with a new weapon in their arsenal, in the most depressing happy ending I've ever seen.

It. Is. Glorious.

"In related news; peace terrorist Elmo Gonif and 51 of his closest friends where hung this morning, in what many believe to be the all-time record for executions in a single day since the 21th century!"

Also, it has boobs.

Ella Minnow Pea book review

"Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn was a really interesting book about language. A small island Nollop - outside the US - have built their society around the guy who came up with the pangram "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". When the letters on his statue fall down the council decides this is the will of Nollop and removes the characters from all discourse.

The epistle-based society fall into despair, but do not dare fight the council, and we follow through letters, notes and other written communication the fall of the Nollopian society.

It's a very smart book, with a huge glossary and some interesting grammatical choices as the letters fall, though you have to have a huge vocabulary to follow it - as they start using more and more synonyms I spent an increasing amount of time looking up words in the dictionary, until they lose so many graphemes that they resort to "sound-likes" which makes it difficult to read in a totally different way.

While I really liked the word-play and the intelligence in the language-based writing, I wasn't as fond of the story-telling. I felt the book kept telling me plot threads right before them coming into effect - why doesn't the increasingly tyrannical council read the islanders written communication? Because Nollop said before he died "never to read your neighbour's letters". Literally the next page is the council putting into effect a written-communication checker. He's just French so he won't be able to actually read the letters, keeping true to Nollop's wishes. - and stuff like this happens several times. I also found the tone took a heavy turn towards the end, suddenly becoming very dark, and there's a huge plot element with one of the council members I felt was never acknowledged or resolved.

So, I really liked it as a intelligent language experiment, but not as much as a stand-alone story. I'd recommend reading it if you're interested in language, grammar and creative takes on writing.

Sharknado has been seen!

So, we finally sat down and watched the “cult B-movie that attracted a whole fan base of not really b-movie fans” and it was.. much better than I expected (in a bad B-movie way). 
I think it manages to straddle the line between wink-wink and just low budget necessity really well, and while there’s some scenes that try too hard, I felt enough of the movie was trying genuinely to make its idiotic script work for it to be entertaining in the “bad B-movie” way. 

Ian Ziering does a surprisingly good job, playing his role totally straight - loving family guy estranged from his wife, and Cassie Scerbo does a passable job as Nova, the action hero of the group. Minus points for killing off the best character in the movie early (George - John Heard!). 

Don’t get me wrong, the movie is bad; stock footage with only passing similarity to where the movie is shot, obvious stationary studio shots when in the car/helicopter (where we spend most of the movie), inconsistent editing, bad dialogue (nobody knows each other’s background/history even though they’re friends/work together), horrible CGI, reused shots (so much repeating!), sharks acting like mindless killing-machines (and shark species from all over the world all fall down in California)… But it’s fun. 

My 2 favourite scenes are: 1. the guy who has his arm bit off by a fly-by shark, falls to the ground and has his leg chomped by another shark, and then, after he’s dead, he’s hit in the face by a Hammerhead shark that fell out of the air. That’s jumping the shark so highly that it works again. 

2. The ending. Not spoiling, but it was exactly what we wanted and where the movie should have gone. It was campy, it was ludicrous and excused everything else. I’d recommend the movie just for that scene. 
Though it should have ended on the “I fucking hate sharks” line. 


We watched “Into the Storm” before this, a high-budget tornado disaster movie, and Sharknado was a lot more enjoyable and memorable. Into the Storm couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a “ramp-up” disaster movie or a character driven lower-budget disaster movie, and ended up being neither. Its storms just don’t have any impact or show any signs of actually being “the biggest tornado ever” (ex: it only uproots specific trees to then throw towards our cast), and there’s no character development to speak of. A camera man who wanted to quit his job does a 180 and decides to sacrifice himself for a dangerous shot and his camera, and the conflict between the father and the youngest son never reaches a climax or solution. 
There’s just nothing there. 

For all of Sharknado’s faults it at least has charm. It feels like it had something to build off of, it’s just that the end result is a mangled mess with “funny because they’re bad” scenes. I’ll take that over big-budget “meh” any day.

Arctic Outbreak/The Thaw review

Arctic Outbreak, or "the Thaw" (real name according to movie and Imdb, no idea why it's been renamed) is... Err.. Hmm. 
The first 40 minutes are bad. Really bad. A boring, preachy drek that insists on not showing you anything that's going on, and skips 2 days forwards over what could have been the most interesting part of the story. 
The second half is too filled with shiny cgi to actually be scary, and the "shock twist" is blatantly obvious if you bothered to stay through the first half. 

And yet.. I kinda like it. The second half is almost a psychological thriller, and even though it falls into some of the common disaster movie tropes (no one ever knows even basic first-aid), it also subverts several of them. 
You so seldom see people willing to take the difficult choices, willing to maim themselves to get rid of infection or sacrifice themselves to save others, and here most of the main characters do, they even react rationally and efficient in crisis situations. The action hero of the story is the most unlikely one, and she makes a choice in the end I've never seen a woman make on film before. 

Most of the actors give decent performances too, notable exception being Val Kilmer, who just couldn't be bothered. 

I just.. There's so much wrong, the editing is bad, the score is manipulative bleh, the movie has no idea if it wants to be a disaster movie, a gross-out horror, a psychological thriller or an environmentalism warning, and yet.. 

I think I like what this movie could have been. If the first half had focused on the 2 days we skipped over; showing the beginning of the infection and them slowly figuring things out, if they'd not had a cgi-budget and had to do everything with props, puppets and prosthetics, if the bug threat had been turned into an invisible horror instead of a overwhelming, always visible thing, and the whole "epidemic as scare that'll finally convince people of the reality of global warming" plot-line had been dropped.. 
There's some really good ideas in there, and good acting performances too, I just wish the final result was something I on good conscience could recommend to others (it's not). 
:S

Talking about Homeward Bound

Rewatched Homeward bound last night. That movie still holds up today. The editing and cinematography is great, there's no special effects, the pets don't move their mouth when they talk, and they don't understand the humans, making them a lot more animal-like than other family pet movies. Also the dog that plays Chance is such an adorable doofus. He keeps crashing into things and tripping over his own legs. 

There's this great subtle side-story where the new father (who married into the family) stands alone to the right in the shot while the family grieves the lost pets, but at the end he's playing with the children and standing with the family when the pets come back. In the time we've followed the pets' journey to get back to their family (and becoming their own little pet family, with Chance being the "New one") the human family has become a family too. 
Totally love the subtle, visual pictures that give depth to the movie's story and moral.

On Adam Sandler and his type of comedy

I’m one of those who hate Adam Sandler with a passion because (yes, I will elaborate), because he perpetuates a type of comedy that bases itself on being stupid and demeaning. The main character is an arrogant, selfish, stuck in his own head stupid asshole who inadvertently and on purpose is mean to people and animals around him, but go through some sort of redemption arch so that we’ll sympathize with him in the end, forgetting all the lives he ruined to get there (see Nostalgia Critic’s review of Eight Crazy Nights for a good example). 
During the first part of this video they mention a list of things one expects to see in an Adam Sandler movie, which also perfectly lists why I hate them, as well as talk about how these movies are really just a big scam to advertise and earn their actors money. 

There’s a reason the Mr. Bean movies didn’t work, there’s a reason the Pink Panther remake didn’t work, you cannot do a movie based solely around the concept that your character is an inadvertent asshole that hurts other people, and yet, this is the only thing Adam Sandler does, and he gets away with it! 

To be fair, I’ve seen very few Sandler movies, I didn’t like the two I’ve seen (Hotel Transylvania doesn’t count!), so most of my impressions of his work comes from the horrible trailers, like Click, where they showed me Sandler slowing down a woman to look at her boobs, which, to be fair, was a great way to tell me never to see it, not a good way to make me watch his stuff, but even just from the trailers I feel I’m justified in giving these movies flack for keeping alive the dickish, childish humor, where we laugh at others getting in trouble, and creates an audience for things like this: https://youtu.be/ScMOyURq9os where straight up murdering a cow is played for laughs in the trailer. 

(And yes, I do not like the original National Lampoon movies for the same reason I don’t like this new remake trailer. I can’t stand when animal cruelty is played for laughs. It’s one of the best ways to get me to stop being entertained and instead feel just sad and frustrated. Killing sentient beings shouldn’t be amusing!)

AG Sins - Syberia: Kate Walker is an asshole

I love Syberia, it’s still one of my top 10 games, and the journey you and Kate take throughout the 2 games is both fulfilling and emotional, but it’s also home to one of the worst examples of “I can’t touch that” puzzles in video game history. 
Not only does she refuse to pick up the oar because it’s “dirty and wet”, not only does she treat the poor kid as a grunt, having him do everything for her after asking for “help”, but she could have just walked over the stupid river, it’s what, 2 feet of tranquil water?! 
Is this how you treat other people Kate? 

Syberia is a 2002 point and click adventure designed by Benoît Sokal and developed by Microïds. It was released on Steam by Anuman, who’s supposedly developing Syberia III.

Broken Age thoughts

Finished Broken Age. It's fine, cute, extremely pretty, well animated, gorgeous art-style, amazing voice acting, and in the end just like Double Fine's other games; it lacks impact and staying-power. 

More than the art style, or the animated sequences, the story is what makes it a "kid's game" for me, it's just so light, so shallow, and what started as a really interesting story about breaking the mold and rebelling against family and societal constructs just turns into a bog-standard sci-fi plot, where everyone switches long held opinions and beliefs on a dime. 

Most jarring is the supposed "connection" between the two main characters who never meet face-to-face (until the end) everyone seems to be harping on about, and the rewiring puzzles that require knowledge you as a player have acquired from playing both stories, but the protagonists themselves would have no way of knowing. 
It's just so crude, a desperate attempt to make sure you alternate between the two characters, to make sure you follow the story parallels (though it stops being a parallel a while in, and just turns into the same story told with 2 different people) 

Don't get me wrong, it's a worthwhile play-through, several side-characters are fun to interact with, with their own small story-lines, and the best voice acting I've ever heard in an adventure game, and it's such a pretty game to look at, 
but in the end, what I'll remember from this game is the small side-story about the Dead Eye God's guards, which I thought was cute, funny, adorable and genuinely surprising. 
I was left with more warm, fuzzy feelings after that little section, than the entirety of act 2.

This is why I don't do poetry

On the last episode of Top Chef they had to make dishes based on famous New-England writers. One contestant chose Poe - the Raven and described it as a sad and mournful love story about a man who’d lost his beloved, and I seriously went “the Raven is a love story? Since when? I’ve got to reread the Raven”. 

I see the mentions of Lenore when rereading it, but it’s not what I would have focused on in an analysis. 
For me the Raven has always been about a lonely, old man’s decent into depression and paranoia/madness, being haunted by the very thing providing him a semblance of the companionship he seeks. 
The Raven both driving him further into paranoia and madness, while at the same time jolting him out of it by providing a constant presence, and taunting him with the idea that he’ll never have companionship again. (while the Raven in itself is a sign that he’s lost his grasp of reality) 

After all, Lenore is gone, it’s a love lost, it’s more a tragedy than a love story, and I’ve always thought the loneliness he’s experiencing is the focus, not the lost love in itself. 
Also, I seem to be reading the poem a bit more severely than other people. 

It’s just realizing again that I’ve been missing a huge, obvious part of the poem, which is part of the “standard” analysis of it, and would’ve caused me to score badly if I ever were to write about it on a test. 
Bah.

Oscar nominated animation

Have finally finished watching the Oscar nominated animation shorts.
Interesting combination of animation styles and subjects, not sure what I think about Logorama, the winner. It has too crude humour for me, and I spent the film wishing the Big Boy (?) kid would just die. At least I understood the usage of the logos, as opposed to the previous imdb featured comment, which accused the film of being a marketing vehicle trying to shove as much commercials as it could in 16 minutes..

Of the 5 nominated I personally prefer the Italian "The lady and the reaper", even though it has too much "Benny Hill running around" and the ending was really sad. I seem to prefer animation that tries to convey an emotion, and takes its subject matter seriously, even if it's in a comedy form.

Granny O'Grimm's sleeping beauty is well animated and well voiced, but I wish it had been longer and a bit more complex.

French Roast is a situational comedy, which I actually think should have been shorter, and Wallace and Gromit's "short" (at 30 minutes it's way longer than all the other nominees) follows the standard "Wallace and Gromit" set up. I did like the introduction of some real feelings with Gromit and Fluffles and I think it has improved greatly from the first "Wallace and Gromit" shorts, but for some reason I'm still not very fond of them.

Now I just have to see "The Secret of Kells", and I've seen all the nominated animated films this year, though, the Golden Globes also nominated "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs" which I haven't seen yet, and the Baftas nominated completely different animation shorts.