Patton

Patton interested me because it was the story of the famous World War II general George Patton. My friends are huge fans of the general. He is lass vulgar in the film than he was in real life. Other things that I did not like about the film include the setting for the opening. Patton gets up in front of a giant American flag as a slightly low angled camera take just one long shot of Patton addressing a crowd behind the camera. At one point he talks about how he does not want his troops holding their position. My copy of the book the Art of War has that exact quote. “The only goddamn thing you should be holding onto is the enemy’s balls!” However the movie character said “we want to grab the enemy by the nose and kick them in the teeth.” I did not like the director toning down on the cursing even when the movie was already rated R.
One of the best parts of the movie happens in the beginning when Patton has a showdown at high noon with one of Rommel’s tank columns in North Africa. It is suspenseful in the beginning when the shots switch from showing the close-ups of Patton and his officers and the advancing battalion. The long shot of the landscape along with an officer saying “they could be anywhere” builds the suspense by showing just how many different directions the tanks could come from. Then the camera goes back and fourth. Each shot progressively gets closer to the advancing panzers and shows more and more of what they have. The suspense ends when the gunfire starts. The winner of the battle turns out to be… (Why should I take away the suspense?)
The battle of the bulge montage was also interesting. It plays shot ping pong again. The shots go back and forth between Patton in his office “strategerizing” and the Germans starting their last offensive. Patton talks about how it is impossible for the Germans to mount an offensive strike in the winter for a while. Then the camera cuts to the shot of a few panzers rolling into a small town as this intense military overture music plays. Then the camera cuts back to Patton talking about more “strategery.” It switches off like that until Patton finally says, “the Germans have never been able to mount a winter offensive since some medieval guy, and that is why we should expect one now.” I heard that Patton was better prepared for the battle of the bulge and more informed than Ike, so that montage confused me until the end when he said that.
The movie is insanely long. That is my only compliant. It has an intermission, but it is not like in Lord of the Rings where there are parts that still should have been cutout for the extended edition DVD. All of it was entertaining even though it takes three sittings to get through.

no new ideas in movies!

What is with all of these remakes of movies. Horror movies have especialy gotten unoriginal. The Invasion - Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Disturbia - Rearwindow, Vacancy - who knows probably public domain, Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1975ish. You are more likely to die from a heart attack than in a cool way like getting hacked limb from limb by a guy in a hockey mask. If you want to see a true horror film, watch Modern Marvels: deadlies weapons or WMDs on the History channel (that is where I learned that the Russians sold Death Star plans to Al Queda). That Al Gore doomsday movie was also a real seat soiler. I became an opsesive light switcher offer after I saw that. Inspiration is not just something that is gone from the horror movies but action movies also do not have any it seems. Bourne 3, Die Hard 4 and Transformers were some of the new ones. That means sequil to sequil, sequil to sequil to sequil and was a kids show were some of the most original thoughts that these people could come up with. At least it is a step up from past war movies or adapted from books. The worst one is Resident evil 3. A sequil to a sequil of a movie named after a video game. Have we run out of Ideas?

Reveiw of Die Hard IV review

Review of Die Hard IV review
Kyle Smith in his review said he hated Die Hard IV. The entire plot was cheesy and unoriginal. Some of the one-liners that I did not notice when I saw the film seemed to bug him, but the ones I do remember help to get a sense of what the characters are like. A Die Hard movie is not a Die Hard movie without senator McClain saying “yippee cay ye mo fo! ” I also enjoyed the French terrorists, but this reviewer though that the film should have wasted time on creating a back story for the French thugs. They are nameless thugs that happen to be French; that is all the biography that I need. Another thing that he did not like about the film was,
“The average Mac [in the film] contained a secret cache of TNT waiting to be detonated by just the right code sequence.”
Again would a “1337 h4ck20r” or “elite hacker” use the “average Mac?” no! The reviewer also thinks that a truck is unable to outmaneuver a jet, but some jets have turn radiuses of up to half a mile. It is funny to think about the fact that the many missiles that were shot at the truck wily-Nelly each cost tens of thousands of dollars more than the truck.
I do agree with the reviewer that saying this “virtual terrorism plot” is not that scary. A terrorist destroying our technology does not sound that bad. If the escalator at the mall breaks down, then I will not wait for rescue. The same type of thing would happen if I developed an allergic reaction to the BS that the blog thing threw out, I would fall back on better technology to publish my texts. In the movie the hackers hack into the traffic center in Washington DC and make all the stop lights turn green. I think all the traffic lights in D.C. turning green would not be a problem if they went back to traffic cops. I also like the reviewer bad mouthing mission impossible three. The super spies talk about Tom Cruises’ marriage as they are getting in a firefight. Lame! MI3 sucked big time, yet he compared it to Die Hard. Blasphemy!
There are other things that I find funny about Die hard films that this guy did not mention. Like how John McCain would have died many times if there was falling damage in Die Hard. Why do the villains need to kill the guards after the guards let them into a place and have no suspicions or any idea on what to look for? Heroes always have aim hacks. Aim hacks are when you alter a videogame in a way so you always hit other players even when you are off by 180 degrees. I find those goofs in movies to be funny and make me like the movie more. It is like the free fall animation in a video game happening when a character gets wedged between two rocks. Fractured physics and impossible bullet dodging make it even more fun.
I thought Die Hard four was the best Die Hard since the first one. The thing that really helped was that the fourth one did not mention the events of the other three movies. It was also good because it was made in a different generation from the first one and could not leech off the popularity of the first one. Die Hard four was the first Die Hard that I saw, and that is what got me to watch the other three.

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