The Pirate’s Breakfast
Posted on | August 10, 2008 at 4:58 pm | 5 Comments
Movie Review Sunday! I watched two discs yesterday.
The first one was A Dog’s Breakfast. This is a little low-budget comedy made by some of the Stargate Atlantis and SG-1 people during their hiatus from the show. I think I ran across it when Netflixing the new direct-to-DVD Stargate movies. If you look at the Amazon reviews for this thing, it’s obvious it’s the funniest, most entertaining movie ever. Five stars! Well, not really. Obviously there was ballot box stuffing going on there. It’s a cute little flick about an anti-social loner whose life is disrupted when his sister and her new fiancé show up for a visit. He doesn’t much like the new guy marrying his sister, and even hears a phone conversation from the fiancé implying that he means to do his sister harm, so the brother decides to do the guy in. From there, hilarity ensues. Well, not so much hilarity, as some chuckles here and there. It’s a very family friendly movie with all “violence” off screen. If you can’t guess the ending plot “twist” about halfway into the movie, then you’re just not paying attention. (For example, the sister seems totally unconcerned when her fiancé goes missing – hmmm, whatever could that mean?) By the time the detective shows up, you don’t need to be an aficionado of mystery novels like my pal Stockholm Sue to have this one completely figured out. The acting is serviceable, as you would expect from TV veterans. From watching the special features, it sure looks like everyone involved is really, really pleased with themselves and thinks they’ve made a new Citizen Kane or Pink Panther or something. Not really. It wasn’t boring and I don’t regret the time I spent watching it, but I got it from the library (well… N got it for me from the library), so it was a freebie. It’s not something I’d want to add to my DVD collection, if I was still into adding things to my DVD collection.
Then I finally watched a Blu-Ray disc of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the third movie in that increasingly overstuffed franchise. I kind of liked the first movie, although I thought there was a little too much of “now these people go here, now they go there, now some split off and go there and look for this, while these others go back to the first place” type of plotting (plodding?) which drove me crazy. The second movie had even more of that, plus more characters and more places to shuffle between, and more betrayals within betrayals. The third movie ups the plot confusion content even more. After awhile, I didn’t even care that I kept nodding off, because I’m sure it wouldn’t have made any more sense had I been hyper-alert. And at nearly three hours long, there’s plenty of time to snooze away. I noticed a plot inconsistency at one point, where one character was suddenly someplace other than where we had last seen her, with no explanation. I thought I missed something, but I went back and replayed some scenes after it was all over and it still didn’t make sense. Although it’s entirely possible I was asleep during some important point of expository dialog.
The movie of course excels at the acting and the visuals and the exciting action sequences (made all the more spectacular in HD), but that all doesn’t make up for the plot and characterization. Here’s hoping that if they ever revisit this franchise again, they go back to the basics. I don’t want to see Pirates In Space.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Still dealing with character translations in old blog entries/comments… fallout from the WordPress upgrade.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “in this movie aliens control godzilla”. Ummm… I’ll say “What is almost every Godzilla movie ever made”, Alex! Love the way that search was phrased.
Comments
5 Responses to “The Pirate’s Breakfast”
August 10th, 2008 @ 9:43 pm
I’ve had At Worlds End on my DVR for weeks and just haven’t go around to it yet.
August 10th, 2008 @ 11:11 pm
I’d had it rented from NetFlix for over two months, so I can understand not getting around to it! Sure not getting my money’s worth there, although I did watch a lot of other NetFlix movies in that time period. The problem with Pirates is that I knew I was going to have to wait for a long night with a 3- to 4-hour stretch, or watch it broken up over a couple of nights. Seeing as how I kept nodding off, I should’ve gone with the latter…
August 11th, 2008 @ 3:19 am
Blu-ray eh? Well, that’s nothing – we just saw Batman in Imax!!!
The Hong Kong skyline looks great at 1:1 scale. Our favorite character was the one with mental problems.
August 11th, 2008 @ 9:44 pm
Imax eh? Well, that’s nothing – I’m God.
August 12th, 2008 @ 1:09 pm
Our favorite character was the one with mental problems.
Not all of the main characters in The Dark Knight have mental problems.