Change Your Image
heroineworshipper
Reviews
Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)
Debbie Gibson lives!
The only reason we watched this was because Debbie Gibson was in it, allowing us to go back to the 80's. Otherwise, it's really horrible. How long did the 12 writers spend on the script? We all know the other 11 writers disowned it & left Jack Perez to take the bullet for it.
Fake Irish accents, overloaded microphones, machinima special effects, stock footage, & stock Maya models abound. Most of it takes place in a set intended to look like a submarine bridge & on beaches obviously intended to reprise "Only in my dreams". Didn't know Tokyo looked exactly like Long Beach harbor.
Debbie Gibson looks beautiful in an auto mechanic outfit & it's sort of a childhood vision turned reality to see her finally as a warrior after all those years seeing it in our head. There's definitely a market for remakes of 80's movies with Debbie Gibson filling in the parts, maybe as a jet pilot. What a fantasy if some day we actually met the real Debbie Gibson.
The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers (1986)
Great for its time. Not anymore.
It was on at 7:30am, too close to school to see very often. The animation & computer graphics were spectacular for the time. The idea of cowboys & ordinary people casually throwing around space vehicles & robots was amazing. Maybe it inspired Treasure Planet.
Unfortunately, it's really boring in the DVD format. The shows are all basically identical. When viewing non-sequential episodes on a DVD, you're stoned by disk #3. By today's standards, the animation is spotty. We don't notice the computer graphics anymore and focus on how corny the characters are instead.
The bright spots are the heroine characters. They were a lot more believable, took themselves more seriously than modern heroines, and weren't corny. They actually saved men.
Vozvrashchenie (2003)
A Russian version of Dutch
A Russian version of Dutch with a Russian ending & a much creepier father. By the time Dutch was over, was convinced the father/son road trip formula was done, but then came The Return. A much slower pace, static camera angles, and foreign language definitely give it a high art feel, but the camera angles aren't too creative and where the father in Dutch was somewhat justified, the guy in The Return was a complete jerk.
From the moment he first appears, unshaven and lying half naked in freezing cold, to the moment he eyeballs a hottie in front of his son, to the moment he breaks out the hatchet, this story doesn't hide anything about his quirks.
Some moments are intended to stimulate our interest, like some insinuations that he really loves the kids and isn't just looking for a cat to kick around, some note about hating fish, a mysterious metal box, and some short bursts of affection, but there's not nearly enough material to overcome what we're shown with 99% of the father, even as a means of "stimulating the audience's imagination."
The World's Fastest Indian (2005)
Obviously not American but excellent story
Americans would have just bought the motorcycle from China and paid a Mexican to ride it. No wonder this movie was never a hit in old U. Know. Where.. Fabricating pistons from molten metal, stripping tire treads with a kitchen knife, trying to break speed records for 1000cc motorcycles, it's definitely New Zealand material. It takes a certain mentality to relate to it.
Definitely refreshing to hear Anthony Hopkins speak something other than British, but the real Burt was much skinnier. There's no way Anthony Hopkins could have fit on that motorcycle or gotten over 55mph. You would think in this age of premium value for visual continuity, the critics would have picked up on that one.
The story is definitely not 100% factual. Burt visited Bonneville many years before the ride depicted in the movie. Wish the ending had more punch instead of fizzling out, but all you have to do is stop watching it before the ending to get the same effect.
Space Battleship Yamato (1979)
Greatest anime of all time
The first bit I saw of this was a scene where Wildstar & Venture were trying to open an underground door by inserting some weird rectangles in a comb device. It looked pretty boring. That opinion soon changed when the wave motion engine blasted and the hand drawn masterpiece of guns, engines, & steel smoothly glided away from camera. The animation was more ambitious and realistic than any of the Jetsons, Scoobie Doo, or cat shows of the time, loaded with original cell sequences of very detailed objects which were only used once.
The most rewarding sequences were when the Argo would get more and more damaged as a battle waged. Every detail of the damage from gun turrets flying off the deck to steel plates bursting was meticulously animated and retained in the next shot. The end of the episode would consist of completely new cells of the Argo looking like a disaster. Other cartoons would rarely bother updating for continuity like that but produce the battle sequences with a pristine looking spaceship to save on animation.
Then there was the attention to the physical mechanics of how things work. It's a rare show in which the props actually look like they can do what they do. Engines looked like real engines. Seats & elevators looked like they could really work. Guns looked like real guns.
The obsession with Starblazers lasted 5 years, then Robotech came out, but Starblazers remained the bible of animation.
Night Skies (2007)
I've watched Night Skies, I can take ANYTHING!!!
Yes, this was pretty awful. It's somewhere between a Dubya economics essay and waterboard torture. Only watched it because Blockbuster is closing all their stores and this is one of the few movies still left in a store.
Low budget, horrible dialog, horrible plot, horrible acting, and extreme boredom combine forces with this one. It's so boring, could listen to any insurance seminar for days with a big smile on my face. When they'd say, "How can you stand it??" I'd say because I've watched Night Skies, I can take ANYTHING.
When the price of gas rises, less seems to happen in U Know Where. With this movie, gas must have been $8 because absolutely nothing happens.
Transformers (2007)
An awful movie from the generation that grew up with Transformers 1
The generation that grew up with the first Transformers movie comes back with an awful version. The watergate babies truly are the least creative generation. Maybe the high school comedy was too long. Maybe the robots were too detailed to watch. There are no heroine transformers, unlike the 1986 movie.
The shaky camera, home video look is hard to follow, but it's all in a day's work for a generation which grew up with hand held home videos. The human heroine is pretty independent, never depending on the men 2 save her, although she depends on the autobots.
The dialog in the 1986 movie was preposterous and out there, but it made it interesting. The new dialog just fits in and is boring. Except for Optimus Prime, the voices were disappointing. The original Megatron, Starscream, and Bumblebee voices are gone. The new voices are indistinguishable, just fitting in again.
At least John Voight got 2 B the good guy for a change.
Crash (2004)
Awful
Crash was another horrible movie. It was a horrible version of Babel, which itself was horrible. It did remind me of LA, which has a huge number of extremely poor people and a tiny number of extremely rich people. The rich people have vicarious lives indeed. They don't know how to do anything, like fix their own locks or protect their SUV's from robbers, and they depend of the poorest people to survive.
Still a horrible movie. Human beings are 10,000x smarter than the characters in that movie. Can stand characters who vote for democrats. Can stand characters who lose money in the stock market. The characters in this movie were so over the top in stupidity they could only have been on the same strings that the Babel writers pulled.
It's remarkable that no matter how stupid movie characters are written to be, the youtube generation - the conformist generation - actually thinks they're real.
House of Sand and Fog (2003)
This movie is not quite sure what 2 do with itself
Starting out as a story of injustice and survival, halfway through turning into a story about materialism corrupting the innocent, this story didn't quite know what 2 do with itself. We have the usual references to post 9/11 racism, of which we've seen none of in reality but which the media says there is, so we guess there is. We have the usual bad cop story. We have the usual victimized wife who can't survive without a man.
As our government rushes to monetize millions of bad mortgages by making dollars virtually worthless, this movie gives our inflation problem rare coverage with the Iranian who can either buy a house he can't afford or watch is money evaporate into relentless rent inflation. Then there is an interesting nugget in how his wife, accustomed to the Arab system of gold currency, can't quite understand why he is so desperate to buy the house.
On the other side, we have a heroine whose husband and father are gone and for some reason can't make enough money to support herself. She's evicted for an apparently mistaken tax on a business that never existed, but it's hard 2 believe someone like her covering property tax, insurance, or homeowner association fees either so whether her eviction was wrong is a moot point.
The Connely heroine, in true post 9/11 American character form, turns into a real bitch, attacking the Iranians for "stealing" her house, yelling and screaming to lawyers and cops. She is really over the top with this. In fact, you hate her as much as the villain in Mission Impossible III.
The Iranian husband has issues with gender roles and is a bit violent, but still seems to be the victim in this story, even as the plot derails and shifts to the topic of corruption by material greed. When Brad Pitt was just as violent in Babel, we seemed to accept it, but Ben Kingsley's Iranian accent seems to give him a little more evil.
Then the bad cop comes in. Ron Eldard is such a bad actor, it's sort of like watching a brick grow moss. Kingsley and Eldard are in separate universes as far as acting is concerned. We go along with what he tries to do and ignore the way he reads the lines as best we can.
The Connely heroine re-enacts her boardwalk shot from Dark City and has some moments of regret, but we have no sympathy at all for her. The movie tries to make us think certain things, but the Iranian still gets our vote.
House of Wax (2005)
Finally a movie so stupid it's funny
Who would think guys ran around abandoned towns in the back woods with a pair of wire cutters in their back pockets. You never know when you're going to need a pair of wire cutters.
Then of course, given a town full of dozens of buildings your friends could be trapped in, where do you first think of looking? The creepy house of wax past the end of the road of course. At least it could have been part of the main road so the characters wouldn't have to walk so far.
It's always fun to imagine what the characters are thinking in these mindless plots. "Why do we have to search the mad serial killer's pockets for bullets if there's a gun store just outside?" "Why do we have to go back to the creepy house of wax to look for our friends who are probably already dead and couldn't help anyway because the mad killers would kill us instead of run away and get a bigger army?" "Given miles and miles of vast wilderness, why do I have to find the smallest car in the most cramped garage to hide in as the mad killer slowly pounds around." Then of course, this is Paris Hilton, so any stupidity is possible.
You've seen these stories before. The stupidity reaches new levels in this movie.
Blade Runner (1982)
Greatest sci-fi movie of all time
Considered by many to be the greatest sci-fi movie of all time, the truths it teaches about our own kind are just as convincing today as they were 40 years ago. In the next 1000 years, only half the time since Jesus, humans are most certainly going to stop dying from natural causes, humans are going to hit the limit of Earth's resources and expand to other planets, and humans are going to achieve robots almost indistinguishable from themselves.
Sci-fi movies are more fascinating for their vision of the future world that surrounds the plot than the plot itself. Bladerunner is no different. If the future world vision falls over, the movie falls over regardless of the plot.
Philip K. Dick nailed one possible outcome of our inevitable future 40 years ago, and Bladerunner succeeded in bringing that truly unique vision into a convincing visual format, even by today's special effects standards.
In the movie, humans run out of space, build ever taller buildings, run out of natural resources, and leave Earth. What remains after humans leave is an enormous amount of affordable housing, days blocked out by eternal clouds of pollution, and nights of eternal rain as the pollution cools and condenses.
Then of course, is the usual plot about androids turned bad and the crazy cop waging a one man war against them.
For the most part, the depiction of the future world is more convincing than any modern computer animation. Closeups of cars lifting off aren't as convincing. Wide shots of the cities and cars floating in the distance are perfect.
The blind ornateness and overwhelming magnitude of the future buildings, the result of having an unlimited supply of free android labor, is truly unique in sci-fi depictions. The dots of super bright light in the distance growing into floating cars bring a Spielberg feeling to this story.
If you're into unique visions of future worlds, this movie is for you. If you want an original plot, it probably won't do it.
Blue Thunder (1983)
Best helicopter movie ever
As a helicopter movie, this is probably the best one showing an actual flying copter doing maneuvers. They could make a newer movie about a Comanche or an Apache but they won't and even if they did, the machine and the flying would be an aside with the story focused instead on the chief's marital affairs or the mayor's taste in coffee.
In Blue Thunder, the machine is the focus. There are shots of the mechanisms, the swash plate, the tail rotor, and the foot pedals, that you couldn't put in any modern movie. We have many shots showing the swashplate gimballing in flight. The machinery looks real and substantial, not the plastic molded middle manager toys you get in new movies.
After learning to fly copters you realize how hard it is to pull off some of the maneuvers in the movie and how hard it would be to aim a gun by cyclic inputs, like the characters are doing. It must have taken many takes and many gallons of gas to get the aerial footage. Being made in a time of $0.89 gas, such a movie would be too expensive to make today. It would have to be computer animated.
Whisper mode? That can be achieved by extremely low RPM and high blade pitch but makes for very unstable handling. Loops? That's now done in models with symmetric blades and inverted blade pitch, but human rated copters don't have enough power to do it. Forward looking infrared and internet access from the air are well documented today.
The Hughes H-6 depicted was indeed a scary opponent, a high performing military copter and one of few which could best Blue Thunder. You appreciate Blue Thunder when you realize those inferior copters it was defeating were Jet Rangers, highly sought after and one of the most successful copters ever made.
A French copter was used for Blue Thunder in a time when most of the metal in the air was made in U... something. Can't remember the name. Today most of the metal in the air is manufactured in Europe. A French copter being the only one futuristic looking enough and forward thinking enough to play Blue Thunder was indeed foreshadowing the future.
Close to You: Remembering the Carpenters (1997)
There was a time when "Karen Carpenter" didn't mean "anorexic"
For most people, the word "Karen Carpenter" means "anorexic". It's like "Clinton" and "Lewinski", "Bin Laden" and "911", "collosal failure" and "NASA". What's fascinating about this show is before 1978, the word Karen Carpenter was never affiliated with anorexia. No-one knew what anorexia was or that Karen Carpenter was anything but a voice.
The first 40 minutes of the show rely on the Richard Carpenter of 1997 sitting by his piano and giving accounts of how the music was made. He talks in a kind of apathetic, removed, Ben Stein voice, maybe because he's told the story too many times or wants to forget it.
Famous modern musicians tend to speak in terms of "spirit of the music", "peace love and happiness", "life is beautiful". Richard seems to be from another world, talking about why he used a major 7th, how he used a quintuplet at the end of the first bridge, extemporaneously recalling passages at the keyboard while he talks.
His account is very matter of fact and down to earth about about the mechanics of the music. It wasn't knowing the right people or having the right mojo. It was chord progressions, key modulations, and major 7ths.
He definitely seems one with his instrument and it makes you wonder if he's going to get to "what happened with Karen" or if the show is just going to end with "Carpenter's greatest hits".
Sure enough, the clothing starts to hang, the bones start to show, and Richard brings up a lot of courage to talk about the anorexia and his response to it. In his account of her attempt to get treated, we find a surprising similarity to modern treatment. 25 years later, with all the technology and knowledge we have, it isn't much better than it was in 1982.
Flightplan (2005)
Good movie for showing the wife what heroines are supposed to do
After getting too domesticated in Anna and the King, the 43 year old foster was her usual independence in this one. According to the special features, the script was written in 1999 for a man and revised in 2001 after you-know-what with a heroine. Historicaly, movies with heroines playing parts that were originally written for men are masterpieces. There should be a dictionary of such movies.
Unfortunately, the first hour of this story was on autopilot. Everything that would happen if someone lost their child on an airplane happens exactly as you'd expect it to. There's no imagination, no witty dialog, no screw-ups, no passengers you wouldn't expect to be singled out based on race.
Maybe the writer thought our modern fascination with authority would fill in the excitement as the heroine banged on the cockpit door, harassed the flight attendants, and tried to evade the flight marshals. That might fly with a certain group of people who devour episodes of The West Wing, think everything but leadership should be outsourced, and put up with poverty because they're leaders say they're wealthy, but it falls completely flat if you're the one guy who questions authority.
The only thing that keeps it alive is the premise that the heroine is insane. As long as the heroine is insane, you put up with the homeland security soap opera because you want to find out if she's really right and everyone else is wrong. When it's time for the heroine to be a heroine, she doesn't disappoint. There's no housewife domestication or men coming to the scene to save the day. It's just her vs. the world, and that's a rare thing to get out of a movie.
The Lion (1962)
Heroines, mane hair, and British accents
Supposedly a British accented heroine befriended a lion and now plays with him like a house cat, but despite putting on a show for her ex-father, having a superficial power over animals that comes with a British accent and short hair, the heroine clearly fears the lion and only plays with him because she knows men with guns are standing by.
This lion was more realistic than the CGI lion in Narnia (2005) because it was real. Unfortunately the lion was only in 10 hair raising minutes of it, in which the heroine rode on the lion's back, hugged the lion, and put her hand in his mouth, usually standing behind the lion's head of course. Would be fun to know if the limited screen time for King was due to the danger.
With today's technology, a good movie could be made about a computer animated lion raising a heroine in the wild, with tons of mane footage, but this isn't it. This lion was just a Mcguffin in a story about parents breaking up and British heroines following the wrong path.
E=mc² (2005)
Longest 2 hours about nothing
Maybe it had more substance to someone not educated in science, someone whose never heard of basic physics, or someone from America, but this was 6 minutes of material diluted into 2 hours of endless synthetic dialog, narration, and wide shots of grass. The 2 hour length seems only to boost publicity and could have easily been condensed in to NOVA's normal 60 minute length.
The first 90 minutes are about the unknown scientists behind early physics. There is no mention of Newton, Gallileo, DaVinci, like you expect from these stories. Instead its all about unknown scientists behind things like uranium chemistry. The story is most useful not as a means of learning about Einstein but learning about how the business of science works. A lot of unknown scientists did a lot of hard work only to get wiped out of the history books by historical events and each tiny piece of modern physics represents the entire life work of most of these scientists.
The only reason this movie is staying on the hard drive is because it pays a lot of attention to the heroines behind E=mc2. Heroines who today would be depending on men to win the bread while they drove their kids to soccer games in their husband's SUVs, were making huge discoveries in the 18th and 19th centuries. A good line is when Einstein tells his wife the connection between time and light. She replies, "I'll check your math". Pretty good stuff.
The last 30 minutes switch to autopilot, recounting how E=MC2 was used and is used today. It seemed to overemphasize an insignificant branch of research in USA and neglect the truly mind blowing research being done in CERN.
Evening Magazine (1991)
Mike Rowe's triumph
In the 80's Evening Magazine was a locally produced TV show about bay area trivia. The highlight of the show was the wacky male announcer: Richard Hart. Seem to remember the other host, Jan Yanehiro, being a vindication for the Bay Area. She symbolized the largest population segment in the Bay Area, the Asians, finally breaking into the media.
According to IMDb it was canceled in 1991 and started up again in 1998. Didn't see it again until 2004 when Mike Rowe had arrived on the scene. The Mike Rowe years were the highlight of the show. He was the modern incarnation of the original Richard Hart craziness. He crawled around sewers, stuck his arm in cow vaginae, put his body in unusual and painful positions, and brought in laid back, spontaneous dialog that couldn't have been scripted.
Not surprisingly he lent his voice to the mega hit: American Chopper and eventually got his own show "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel in which he re-enacted a lot of his Evening Magazine stunts. Unfortunately his Dirty Jobs work isn't as spontaneous and light as his Evening Magazine work. The scrutiny and financial risk of a 1 hour cable show simply doesn't allow the same improvisation that he could pull off on a 30 minute local TV show.
When Mike Rowe stopped hosting Evening Magazine in 2004, his replacement was extremely bland and acted more like an engineering manager at a corporation than a light and funny TV host. Not many people want to look at their TV and be reminded of work so shortly after that, Evening Magazine was canceled and replaced by Eye on the Bay.
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
The war on weather
Only saw this because it was free and maybe Dennis Quaid was in it. It wasn't as bad as some disastrous TV disaster movies out there (Locusts), but the endless closeups of American flags, firemen showing up when all hope is lost, droning on and on about "rebuilding", and statue of liberty closeups made my eyes water. Just what are they trying to say? Is there a point to these endless Manhattan skyline shots? We low paid movie renters prefer getting to the point.
It was at once a tirade about global warming and what climactic tragedy could happen if the evil republicans keep getting elected, a tribute to something that happened in New York, and a contest to fit the most American flags on the screen before giving the audience a red, white, and blue sunburn.
Now as for seeing a Dennis Quaid revival, forget it. His only significant acting is the first 5 minutes. The rest is unknown teenage actors fighting impossible dialog and groping around like paraplegics. For crying out loud!!! How hard can it be to close a door before the supersonic blast of subfreezing air wipes out the cast?!?#!!?
And don't forget to save the purse before it is engulfed in a 1000 ft tidal wave. The purse is all that matters.
In Innerspace, Dennis Quaid was good as a low paid, low end, drunk staff scientist who always got into trouble doing things only his bosses were supposed to know. Instead he is now a bureaucrat miles away from the action, giving speeches to diplomats on high level issues, being referenced only in 3rd person by the kids on the ground, then stooping so low as to drive a truck only as a last resort.
As for heroines, forget it. The heroine saved her boyfriend once from frostbite but the rest was all extreme manliness overcoming completely random obstacles.
Joan of Arcadia (2003)
Really boring
What do you expect from a TV serial? A few good episodes and a lot of timeslots to fill in. JOA takes this to the extreme. The first 3 episodes and the last episode were worth it. The other 19 were space fillers.
Started watching it because CBS's Joan of Arc was a good heroine.
There was a publicity photo where Joan looked like she was proposing to her husband, really powerful heroine worshiping stuff. Maybe they would put an equally powerful heroine in JOA. Finally JOA was in HDTV.
Around episode 15 I stopped watching it until the season finale. The only reason it lasted that long was it was in HDTV. The HDTV transfers were really good in that there was no grain.
The plot development, introducing the idea of the heroine seeing God in real life, the heroine solving cases for the cops, the heroine building up the community through acts of heroineism. That worked for a few episodes. Then they seemed to run out of ideas or money and rehashed the same family bonding message until the end of the season. If you wanted the plot, you could have watched episode 6 and ignored the rest since they were all the same.
Combined with the deadend romances, the last 18 episodes played more
like a daytime soap opera than a primetime serial. High school romances don't do it for me because they're temporary. It would have been worth
it if they fast forwarded and showed Joan marrying her high
school boyfriend 10 years later.
Seeing the family eating breakfast in the opening fadein and mom and dad hugging in the closing fadeout over and over and over got boring. It makes you wonder if anyone else in the world made it to the endings or if everyone who watched the show started doing dishes half way through it.
JOA could have kept the inspector gadget formula where the father is an inspector but the daughter always saves the day behind the scenes.
They could have expanded the scope of the heroine's deeds to maybe saving astronauts, ending wars. Maybe the situation could have been varied from just weekdays to weekends and holidays.
Amazons and Gladiators (2001)
Low budget heroine movie
The three forces in the universe, in order of strength, are the force that bonds magnets together, the force that bonds protons together, and the force of heroine warrior worshipping energy you feel while watching Amazons & Gladiators, a film by Beyond Films, MBP films and Drotcroft Ltd. Apparently raising enough money to make a movie about heroine warriors takes 3 studios.
Men have long waited for a movie about the Amazons, a movie which portrays Amazons as independant, intelligent, freedom fighting warriors instead of senile monsters like in Land of the Prehistoric Women. This one has good sights of heroines wielding swords, heroines wearing armor, heroines lifting heavy objects, heroines stabbing abusive dictators. If the same movie was made with Jodie Foster, Demi Moore, Ali Larter, or Radha Mitchell, had a bigger budget, a better script, better lighting, better acting it might have been one of the best heroine movies ever.
Unfortunately, there's only acting in the academic sense. The characters wear costumes, read lines, and sometimes move around.
You're better off watching it with the sound off. All the shots are closeups of a tree, building, or fighting ring. There's no wide shot of the Amazon homeland, a Colosseum, or a palace. The weather is consistently dreary. The production is so bad, you might think anyone sitting through this movie was insane but undoubtedly many flat broke, unmarried, male breadwinning gene deprived, SUV impaired men have watched it over and over.