Yasashii's Good, Bad and Ugly Reviews

Welcome to my review thread!

Comments are appreciated. I need to get better.



Edit: I've decided to "borrow" the idea from Rodent and add images to my ratings. They are as follows:






Let's kick off with something most people skip when looking for a good animated movie:





The kindest thing I can say about this movie is that it was rather disappointing. It wouldn't have been if it was just some obscure animation made by some company who nobody heard about before but this was done by DreamWorks. And it had a pretty good cast too. It had Hugh Laurie and Seth Rogen! This should have been a brilliant flick... but it wasn't.

Why? Where do I begin... I know: the main character (Susan). It's a woman presumably in her thirties or at least in late twenties. She's getting married and her biggest dream is a normal life with her husband. Doesn't sound like a main character from a movie for children? There's more where that came from. Every once in a while the movie just stops so that she can have her moment to fantasize about her dream life and her fiance who later turns out to be a selfish jerk. It's a noble effort from the movie to add some depth and meaning. It's a missed shot though. Kids just don't really care about complicated life stuff.

All the other characters are better trimmed for this kind of movie but they are still far from being good. Mainly because they are based on stereotypes. We have a mad scientist, a dumb guy and a hardcore-wannabe. That's all there is to say about them. That makes them two-dimensional but easy to follow for kids. Then again kids can handle a little more challenge so again - miss.

The story, though, is where the biggest disappointment is. It's very simple. You can easily guess what's gonna happen next. Also, it has so many cliches in it, it's practically put together from them. That makes it quite bland and forgettable.

Another problem is that the movie feels like it hasn't been thought through very well. You can see it most clearly in the villain character. His desire is to retrieve quantonium which is the most powerful substance in the universe and apparently the reason for Susan's "condition". Well, he achieves it in approximately 3/4 of the movie. The writer must have gone: "hmm... now what?" because from that moment on the villain wants to take over the Earth. Because he just felt like it. What a cheap excuse.

The movie isn't horrible though, despite all that. It does have redeeming values. For example some of the jokes are quite funny, the action is fun to watch and there's loads of references to classic alien and monster movies which is a very nice touch.

All in all, Monsters vs. Aliens is an ok way to spend your time and money. But it could and should have been so much more than that. It's a missed opportunity and that's just sad.

My niece likes this, but then she's 6.

As for the cast, I've still to work out why anyone gives a crap who talks over a cartoon.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Well, you might have a point. For some animated movies it barely has any significance but this one had Hugh Laurie. And I was excited to hear him in this movie because he's a really brilliant voice actor in my opinion. He can speak like an american redneck one second and like a russian soldier the other and you could never tell that normally he sounds like the queen of England.

It doesn't make sense to use Hollywood stars to voice characters. Instead they should have used professional voice actors who can successfully transmit emotions through their voices (as occurs in Japan). However, since the US animation industry doesn't take itself seriously they use famous actors in the hopes that their recognizable voices will attract audiences.

Overall, I though Monsters versus Aliens was better than Toy Story 3. Both movies are trash, of course, but Monsters vs Aliens at least knew it was trash and succeeded in entertaining me while T.S.3 was trying to hard to be (sort of) serious without the complexity and originality required. My ratings for both movies would be and , respectively.

I agree with the voice actors part but then some companies (namely Disney Pixar) use the same voice actors all the time which does get old after a while even if they are great.

As for the Toy Story 3 part:

Actually it was sort of serious because it tackled a single issue which may not be the most serious one you will encounter in your life but nonetheless something that matters: Everyone has to say goodbye to their toys at some point.

Because for most people (me included) it's a very nostalgic and kind of sad moment, the movie thrived on those emotions and it did it perfectly in my opinion. So it wasn't really trying to be complex, it was trying to embrace not-so-complex emotions and it succeeded. As for originality: it's a third movie of a series. What kind of originality can you expect?

Unless Morgan Freeman is voicing of course

You'd give a movie you consider "trash" a ?

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I agree with Yasashii. I think Toy Story 3 was a very fitting ending to a much-loved trilogy. Maybe it wasn't entirely original, but it was pretty clever at times. Especially concerning the toys at the daycare.


Monsters vs. Aliens was practically a waste of a movie. It had very few moments worth watching. I'd give it a D and Toy Story 3 a B-.

This bit here confuses me. I'm not sure why you expected more from Dreamworks. Are you not familiar with their films?

Yeah Dreamworks sometimes makes some pretty great movies, but they're also incredibly inconsistent in the quality of the films they make. Their animated movies range from great to downright painful to watch (speaking of painful, ever seen Bee Movie? It's about a bee that sues the honey industry). I'd say Monsters Vs. Aliens falls somewhere in the middle. Not bad but not great. I'd also say that Toy Story 3 is a far superior film.

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I expected more from DreamWorks because even if they are inconsistent they do have a lot of potential for making good stuff and this really was a setup for a good movie. You have a great cast, good idea that provides you with limitless possibilities. What could possibly go wrong?

...and yet it did.

But you do have a point. Maybe I expected too much from them. After all they did ruin their biggest franchise (Shrek) with pointless and crappy sequels.

I know why Hollywood does it, I just don't understand why anyone would go to see a film where they hear someone they like. I don't even own the Drew Barrymore animated films... Except Olive, The Other Reindeer, of course, but that's great in its own right.

Maybe it's just an inevitability with the dominance of celebrity culture?

I see nothing wrong with using Hollywood stars for the roles. I feel like, most of the time, casting directors for animated films choose their voice actors the same way someone would for a regular movie: firstly, according to who would best fit the role and secondly, of course, according to who agrees to accept it. Also it gives the moviemakers the opportunity to work with a particular actor they may have admired for a long time.

Have I seen an animated movie just because of who voiced it? I can think of one instance of it, yes: Brother Bear. Had Phoenix not been the "star" of that movie, I probably wouldn't have seen it but that has more to do with the fact that it's a traditional style of animation rather than CG. Not that I have anything against that style of animation in and of itself, but with Disney it usually means you're in for an animated musical.

I'm back and ready to review again! Yay!

I know I'm bumping an old thread but since this is a review thread, I don't think there's a point in making another one.



Anyway, let's cut to the chase: I'm a space kid. I've always looked up at the sky and wondered if there's anybody else out there, so it stands to reason that I would fuel my obsession with movies about space, exploration and extraterrestrials. I've reached a point in which I need to look for quite a while to find a decent space movie that I haven't seen yet. I spent about an hour browsing through various "top 10 space movies of all time" lists until I found Contact listed as an honorable mention on one of those lists.


The movie shows a story of an astronomer (Ellie Arroway) struggling her entire life to find a proof of extraterrestrial life. She's facing obstacles every step of the way but doesn't give up and those very obstacles are the thing that matters the most in this picture.

The fact of the matter is, Contact is not as much about space exploration and aliens and such, as it is about the search for aliens and the process of exploration itself. Throughout the movie one has a feeling that eventually they are going to see something similar either to Independence Day or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Nothing of the kind happens, however.

No, the movie would rather have the viewer observe and analyse how different people deal with the situation of having a solid proof of extraterrestrial intelligent life. It shows a strictly scientific approach through the main character and her friends, and a religious approach in form of Ellie's lover, thousands of protesters and one terrorist.

When I realized that the movie is going to attempt to make a comment on science and religion I wasn't sure how to feel. I thought that it's going to show one of the sides in a better light than the other. That is not what this movie did and that is exactly what makes this movie great. From my experience, if you put a religious person and a strict scientist in an argument against each other, compromise is an unlikely outcome. Neither side will abandon their beliefs and it appears that the makers of Contact were aware of that.

They didn't just say: "religion is the right way to go" and they didn't say: "religion is crazy and science is great" either. What they did is show that fighting over that is ridiculous. There's no proof that either one of those is better after all and so, until there is, both sides should coexist peacefully and search for the truth together.

The movie takes the viewer on a journey not through space but through their own beliefs and philosophies and makes them realize certain things. Movies that achieve this sort of thing are rare and are usually critically acclaimed. This one, however... well, 63% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.3 on IMDb. It's been a while since I've seen a movie this underrated.

I say that it deserves more than this. I say this deserves a spot right next to 2001: a space odyssey. Then again, maybe I misinterpreted the movie completely. Maybe it doesn't really matter if I did. Perhaps the only thing that matters is what you carry out of the experience. See for yourself.

Hmm. I know I've seen this movie at some point, but barely remember it. I guess that means I wouldn't rate it five stars.

It's a great movie. I would rate it as +, very memorable and had a quite substantial emotional impact on me.

Indeed. In Brazil we use the soup opera stars to voice animated movies and dubbs, since our soup operas are huge here and everybody watches these series. We have our own very well developed celebrity culture like the US.

I'd give it a -, it was a pretty good film, and it successfully got me irritated at moments (e.g. the religous fanatics). I can't say it moved me by the end, but there was a lot of talent going into this film.

Tonight, I decided to look back at my past as a movie enthusiast. Back in 2003, a movie came out that spoke directly to my young, naive mind. A movie about honor, bravery and sacrifice:





The plot of the movie follows the story of Nathan Algren, an American captain (loosly based on the French Cpt. Julies Brunet), woven into the period of the Meiji Restoration and Satsuma Rebellion in Japan, the events by which the movie was inspired. Because of his past experiences at war, Algren becomes a self-hating drunk. One night he accepts an offer to train Japanese soldiers for a substantial amount of money. A series of events leads to him being held captive by Katsumoto (based on Saigō Takamori). He then learns the ways of the samurai and eventually becomes one himself. From that point on, he will fight against the reformation and protect the traditional Japanese lifestyle, which he came to love.

The Last Samurai is filled with stunningly beautiful visuals, great special effects and great performances. The viewer is able to absorb some of the climate unique to the Japanese tradition. Many insights into a typical day of a warrior paired with a properly explained historical background paint a picture of Japan of those days.

As far as the acting goes, I think I should mention that there is an exception to the aforementioned great performances: Tom Cruise. I admit that I find that choice for the main character a perplexing one. His previous roles engraved a certain image in my mind: an action movie hotshot. Not exactly a perfect fit for a character with such depth and charisma as Nathan Algren, but perhaps that is only my opinion. Nonetheless: one can see that he did try to depict the captain best to his abilities. The problem is, he still came off slightly bland, in my opinion at least.

With that out of the way, I can now move on to one of the biggest virtues of the movie: the special effects in battles. They may not be the best I have ever seen, since there are some sharp edges one can easily spot: soldiers falling without getting hit, soldiers getting out of the way after being slain and soldiers getting hit and not reacting. Still though, they feel real. It is quite apparent that there was either no green screen or very little green screen use at the main battles. All felt realistic. It was like watching a proper, professional reenactment, only with movie editing and soundtrack. Not something one can experience with movies like 300 or even such masterpieces as The Lord of the Rings series.

Another thing worth mentioning as the movie's big virtue is the soundtrack. I have always found Hans Zimmer's work to be very good but with this movie, he really excelled. It was styled to sound a bit like Japanese traditional music in some parts, while being purely symphonic in others, which overlays perfectly onto the plot of the movie, which is ultimately about the mixing of the Japanese and western cultures.

As one could suspect, there is a "but" coming. And the "but" is, that The Last Samurai, while being very entertaining, is historically naive. That is a major disadvantage when taking under consideration that the movie was inspired by true events and thus history is very important in this picture. Why is it naive? Because the movie would have the viewer believe that the modernization of Japan was a bad thing. It wants to shove down the viewers throat, that because of the reforms, the spirit and traditions of Japan were killed by the oh so cruel and horrible western civilizations. As my history teacher pointed out to me, if it wasn't for Meiji's reforms, Japan would still be considerably behind compared to other countries in terms of technology and most likely it wouldn't have evolved into the high-tech capital of the world it is today. The samurai fought the reformation not just because it was transforming the culture but it also meant reduction of their social status and putting them in a considerably worse financial situation.

And as it turns out, the movie's depiction of the samurai is also inaccurate. The simple fact is, many of them were aggressive, pompous people who had the right to kill anyone without any consequences and they would sometimes use that right when they were even mildly offended. Actually, there was a scene depicting such an incident but it was left out of the final cut to show the warriors in a better light.

Well, of course, one could argue that since The Last Samurai is not based on true events, but simply inspired by them, it can get away with that. While that may be true, for me personally, that is still a major spoiler.

All things considered, The Last Samurai is a movie capable of squeezing tears out of one's eyes, filled with mesmerizing visuals, great battle scenes and well-developed characters. While the historical inaccuracies are like stains on a white shirt, with a proper attitude, the movie can still be a very enjoyable experience, and one to remember.

I don't think Toy Story 3 was "trying too hard" to do anything. This was a well thought out and planned movie. You have to remember that this is a family movie, so they can't go extremely in depth with the themes (kids sill have to somewhat understand them), but they were quite deep for American animation. The furnace scene, for example.

Anyways, great reviews Yasashii!

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Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's a straw, you see? You watching?. And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake... I... drink... your... milkshake!
-Daniel, There Will Be Blood

I like movies which make me feel like a kid again. You know, those wholesome, colorful, innocent ones. Call me immature but I enjoy a blast of childhood nostalgia every now and then. I thought this would be one of those movies. Boy, was I wrong...





The story is based on the popular illustrated novel by Jeff Kinney. It's about a kid desperately trying to become popular in middle school. He fails miserably every time he tries to achieve that goal and eventually finds himself in the position of being even less popular than the biggest misfits and weirdos around him.

I haven't read the book so I don't know how faithful the movie is to the source material so let me just point out that when I say this movie is bad (which it is), I mean the movie and the movie alone.

So what's wrong with the movie? Where do I begin? Ok, the acting - I should imagine it's not easy to make a movie when almost all of the characters are little kids so let's just let it slide with the children's acting. The adults, however, were horrible. No effort was made to make the characters a bit more realistic. the unimaginative acting made all the characters look like artificial cutouts from the book of stereotypes. In some cases not even the right ones. For example I could swear that the dad, played by Steve Zahn, is a mental hospital escapee rather than your typical family man.

And now, for the biggest problem without which Diary of a Wimpy Kid would have actually been an enjoyable flick: The main character is a complete douche. I'm sorry. There's just really not a kind way of saying that. He wants to be popular in middle school - alright, who doesn't? But the thing is he's willing to go to extreme measures to achieve that goal, hurting his friends along the way. Being popular is apparently the only thing that matters to him and that's all there seems to be to his personality. Every time he tries to gain popularity he ends up alienating himself more and more. He doesn't learn the lesson, though. He actually continues until he can't fall any lower. And only when he's finally gotten to the very bottom, does he make a speech about popularity not being important and expects everybody to listen to his wisdom. What a phony!

The movie would have given me the childhood nostalgia I was looking for if I could actually get immersed in the story. Instead, I couldn't stop thinking about how much I hate the main character. I actually found myself smiling while bad things were happening to him. That made me feel bad for enjoying watching a kid suffer. As a result I don't just consider Diary of a Wimpy Kid a waste of time. I feel dirty on the inside for having watched it and that's something not just any bad movie can achieve.

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Check out my blog: Yasashii's Retro Game Playground

In the age when animation is still considered by many to be little kids' stuff, it is not easy to come up with something original which would grab people's attention, something different, something deep. Yet, every now and then such a movie is made. It takes a lot of thought, a lot of effort... and then everybody forgets about it as soon as the new Pixar movie comes out.

Such is the fate of 9, an animated movie which despite being animated, is not necessarily one to be most adored by those of us who have seen less than, say, 14 winters. There is a very good reason for that. You see, Tim Burton is the producer of this flick and that alone is a promise of something that might be mentally damaging to the young or weak-hearted.

Alright, I admit I may have gone a bit too far with that statement but the point remains that pretty much everything Tim Burton has been involved in will be at least weird and 9 is no exception. A quick look at the poster should demonstrate my point.






The story develops around a group of steampunk-style puppets (they have mechanical skeletons inside). Our main character, the number 9 puppet, wakes up in a laboratory with a dead scientist lying on the floor. As he walks outside he begins to discover that there are quite a few other puppets just like him in the post-apocalyptic world that surrounds him and that there is a very important device which has the potential of either altering their fate in a positive way or leading them to their doom. Giving away any more than this would be a disservice to those of you who might want to see the movie so I will abstain from doing so.

The world itself is, in my view, the most impressive thing about the movie. It's clearly based on the 40's as we know them but it assumes a vastly faster technological progress. In that world robots were roaming the streets, fighting wars and building other deadly machines. Of course, that lead to the extinction of mankind and every other species on the planet, which is the movie's biggest disadvantage, but more on that later. The landscapes consist of piles of rubble, rusty cars, and dead bodies. Above all that there is a dark, cloudy sky full of poisoned air. Our characters are tiny and rely on whatever mechanical stuff they can find in the streets so the viewers get to see every small detail of this alternative 40's technology. All that gives the movie a very interesting atmosphere which is either to be admired or detested but definitely not ignored.

Also, even though this is not a Pixar movie and definitely not anywhere near it as far as animation is concerned, it's not too shabby at all. The characters move about naturally, they are properly flexible, the mechanical villains look very impressive and as a result the action scenes have enough flair to make you go: “Oooohh! Aaaahh!”. When the movie has a quiet moment, though, you start to notice that the fabric on the puppets required more effort. The textures stretch unnaturally here and there and some of them should have been done in higher resolution. The animation and the models are, if good on the overall, somewhat inconsistent. In some scenes, they are highly detailed, in others, somewhat boxy. Sloppiness also shows in the movie's audio department (there are one or two glitches) but let's not dwell on that for too long.

As I had said, the movie has a fatal flaw and that's the message it's trying to put across. It's trying to shove down our throats that mankind will become too greedy in the pursuit of technological progress and the very machines which we will design in hopes of making our lives better shall be the ultimate cause of our doom. There will be a master machine with an advanced AI which will go evil and blah, blah, blah... It's been done! It's been done many times, in fact! I'm so sick and tired of hearing about how machines are deadly and horrible and heartless. I've seen AI, I've seen RoboCop, I've seen Wall-E, I've seen I Robot and I've seen Kubrick's 2001. I get the point! Movie makers, get over it already!

So as you have probably deducted by now, the movie seriously lacks in originality of the story. That is its downfall. There were some big names working on this thing, there was an interesting world, the character designs were interesting and the animation, though inconsistent, was pretty impressive at times. There was potential for a truly great movie, one to really stand out but that potential was thrown down the toilet by the overused, pretentious main theme. What a waste!

Overall, the movie is still worthwhile if you are willing to accept the fact that you will not go off the beaten track as far as the story goes. Also, you will have to tolerate the fact that the movie wants to be somewhat high-brow with its style and message which comes off as pretentious and quite annoying considering what the message is. Then again, an argument has to be made that just for the gripping atmosphere created by this alternative, post-apocalyptic, highly-advanced 40's world, those things can be forgiven. Of course, I'm sure that in some movie, book or TV show, a world just like that has already been portrayed but just because you've eaten some delicious strawberries in your life, it doesn't mean that you should never have any again. It's too bad, though, that this is pretty much the only reason why you should see the movie and therefore, what had the makings of something great, ended up being just ok.