Movie Buff-ing

It’s blockbuster season at the cinemas and I’m having my fill with lots of them as of late. This includes Kung Fu Panda 2, The Hangover 2 and Green Lantern.

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Kung Fu Panda 2 scores points for entertainment, both visually and for the laughs, and for some no-nonsense values formation.

Po undergoing some daddy issues resonated with me personally as I have been kind of like the character at some point – I probably still am. I can totally relate.

Family-oriented films - and the 1^st Kung Fu Panda film, in particular - have a way of making you feel good and inspired after you leave the cinemas. The 2^nd part left me feeling the same.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

The Hangover 2 reminds me of my trip to Bangkok some years ago, where we went to the city’s red light district to experience some one-of-a-kind, never-before-seen (to me), exhibition of women doing some nasty stuff with their, er, private parts (think cigarette smoking, shooting dart pins and ping pong balls into the air, among other things).

Only, in the movie, they went to a transvestite club, one of them having had an intimate encounter with a vixen wannabe. This person, this ambiguity of the male breed, threw the audience off after making some brief indecent exposures of his dangling, er, schlong.      

The wolf pack’s love for adventure, however twisted, and their enduring brotherhood, is almost covetous. I wish I have such friends. Theirs is an interesting and funny mix of the good-looking, and the not-so, goofs.

Green Lantern

Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

“In brightest day, in blackest night,

 No evil shall escape my sight

 Let those who worship evil's might,

            Beware my power... Green Lantern's light!”

So goes the oath the Green Lantern recites when charging his ring.

I’ve read a few reviews about this film and the common complaint is that the movie has not been faithful to the comic book version. This is an old tune. Books - and comic books, for that matter - made into film would almost surely render it unfaithful, almost every time. I don’t know what’s up with that.

Well, I'm not a comic book junkie, so there’s nothing I could have benchmarked the movie with. I can only judge it by its own merits.

The movie is a visual treat, that I can say, both with the CGI special effects of the galaxies and the planet Oa and the emerald colored power of the 'will' splashed everywhere; and with the two leading characters who are truly eye candies (I wish to have the same physique as Ryan Reynolds and I love the gorgeously hot Blake Lively).

I kind of expected there would be more substantial conflicts and action-filled fights between the Green Lantern and the possessed professor Hector Hammond. The movie kind of fell short in building the tension between the two, thereby giving a somewhat disappointing, lackluster climax. It also failed to bring the scare out of the audience with its uninspiring and somewhat haphazard portrait of the evil creature Parallax - who is supposed to be a creature of pure fear- but was somewhat turned funnily into a confusing amalgam of dark and shapeless fog and smoke.

Interestingly, as if to make up for its would-be disappointments, prior to the start of the movie we were (in a gesture that can almost be described as pre-emptive) given freebies - one huge bar of Hersheys and a coupon which entitles the bearer to a donut and a cup of coffee at Krispy Kreme.   

Hmm... looks like someone's currying favor, eh.