Thirst review

(2009 Korean film)

This is one of the oddest vampire movies I’ve ever seen. The cover they have for it on Unaccountable Red streaming makes it look like normal horror fare, but it’s not. It’s a dark comedy hidden inside a drama with horror elements.

The basic setup is that a do-gooder priest defies the Catholic church in order to have an experimental procedure tested on him in the hopes that having the procedure tested on a healthy person will lead to a cure for unhealthy people. He’s infected with an illness that can’t be cured and is fatal in a very short period of time.

He experiences the fatal effects and appears to die. He is the sole survivor of the illness, but is physically deformed by the disease. His vampirism comes on slowly, much like in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (book, not movie; I haven’t seen the movie yet). He accidentally discovers that drinking blood makes him beautiful again.

However, he’s still a good person. Still a priest. How can he survive as a vampire who doesn’t want to leech off innocents? And how will he deal with the strange new desires he has?

And that’s just a vague outline of the first half. This is an excellent movie.

Warning: there are a few sex scenes. There’s also some gruesome violence.

My score: 90/100

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Airbender Review

I really wanted to like this one. I love the show and made sure to watch all of season one before the movie came out so I could enjoy it properly.

I’m ok with an adaptation changing details. I understand a two hour movie based on 20+ twenty minute episodes is going to lose something. The problem is when what you lose is the point of the story. M. Night Shyamalan turned a lighthearted action adventure into an utter gloomfest.

The episodes they chose to draw the plots from were well chosen but some detail changes which weakened the story. Having the Earthbender prisoners imprisoned on a camp on ground damaged the emotional credibility of the scene.

M. Night Shyamalan turned a lighthearted action adventure into an utter gloomfest.

Making Aang learn pacifism from scratch was fine (though a bit half-hearted). The personality change from playful/serious dichotomy to emo monotony was not ok. Aang isn’t Aang without the playful/serious split.

In Depth

The casting was almost universally bad. Dev Patel as Prince Zuko was the only one cast well. Aasif Mandvi could have done well as Zhao if directed properly. The racial complaints on casting are overblown, but the casting was horrid regardless.

Why the frell did they screw up the frelling pronunciations so badly? I cringed every time they said Sakko’s name. Aang’s name uses a short English A, not aaaahhhhhnng.

And how do you mispronounce Avatar that badly? Avatar didn’t need a new pronunciation to differentiate it from the Blue People movie. Sheesh.

The racial complaints on casting are overblown, but the casting was horrid regardless.

The dialogue was pretty poorly written. The voiceover and exposition were heavy-handed and clumsy. However, if you haven’t seen the show, you may enjoy this quite a bit despite the issues which are apparent even without being a fan of the original.

Eye-Candy

The special effects were pretty good for the most part. Firebending was pretty believable all the way through, waterbending had a few issues, and Appa looked fine from a distance. The northern water tribe’s city felt accurate, the fire nation’s siege of the city looked right.

Due to most of Aang’s personality being stripped away, they didn’t bother including Aang’s airball scooter thing. Disappointing, but not as disappointing as stripping away most of Aang’s personality.

Scores

Fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender series: 10/100
Newcomers to Avatar: 50/100

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A-Team Review

Holy crap, people. This movie was awesome. It’s the greatest adaptation since ever.

The cast was absolutely stand up perfect. The only thing that wasn’t absolutely perfect on that front was that Liam Neeson as Hannibal wasn’t quite as much of a smart ass as he should have been. The guy they got to play Murdock was absolutely hilarious. The movie won me over early when Murdock grabbed onto the blades of an off-helicopter and spun it around singing “you spin me right round, baby, right round.” Rampage did great as BA. Face was badass without completely removing Face from his wussy nature from the original series.

They start the movie off 8-10 years before the principle plot and show how the A-Team gets together, and it’s absolutely phenomenal. It’s kind of like an Opening Gambit from MacGyver rather than the House, MD opening that the original A-Team series did. It’s fun as hell and develops the characters without muddying up the main plot.

I kept worrying that they were going to do something crappy with the characters, but they didn’t. The movie is set near the theoretical withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, which was an interesting choice but I think ultimately a good one. It allowed us to see that, yes, the A-Team are real soldiers and they really do shoot people, but they are heroes because they avoid it when they can and thus are legitimately liked by the Iraqis.

They have got to make more A-Team movies with this cast.

There were a few parts where the special effects weren’t absolutely perfect, but it’s kind of like in Indiana Jones where you can tell it’s a movie, but it’s not enough to take you out of the never-slowing awesome.

Final note on this movie: I was amused that they brought up the subject of Gandhi, but somewhat less amused that they took a kind of “Well, I’m over that now, back to shooting people” take on it. Gandhi accepted that sometimes violence is a necessity, and the character that was struggling with that problem ran into a situation where Gandhi wouldn’t have disapproved of what the character ended up doing. That’s a perfect reason to continue pacifism, not put it on the top shelf.

My score: 99/100
Guess for other people: 85/100

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