Tag Archives: Movie

Rango – Movie Review


Rango starts when a pet chameleon (Johnny Depp), after trying to orchestrate a very fancy looking play with a plastic fish and beheaded doll, gets stranded in the Mojave desert after he falls from his owner’s car. There, the chameleon (who is still nameless at this point), dazed and confused narrowly avoids getting killed by a hawk. Then, the chameleon meets an iguana named Beans (Isla Fisher) who takes him to the desert town: Dirt.

In Dirt, the chameleon finds the opportunity to be whatever he wants. He chooses to be Rango, a westerner marksman, and moments later, when the hawk comes back to terrorize the town, Rango kills him by firing a lucky shot that gets an empty water tower to squash the hawk.

However, soon after their arrival to Dirt, Beans discovers that the water reserves are dangerously low, which prompts her to ask Rango, who gets appointed sheriff, to investigate the matter. Rango undertakes her request and as the movie progresses, you find out the water issue is more complex and twisted than any of them first imagined: control the water and you control everything.

Rango is not your typical animated movie. It is definitely not something for the kids. After all, how many times do you hear the words “prostate exam”, “I’m ready to mate” and so on in a cartoon? The movie is a celebration of everything that is Western. There’s even a Clint Eastwood sort of appearance, just to top it all.

Johnny Depp is brilliant as the voice of Rango. The chameleon who embodies many personalities, depending on how he sees fit, needed an actor as versatile to give him life. And Johnny Depp does not fail at this. He plays well on screen with Isla Fisher, who has come a long way from being a shopaholic, with her impeccable western accent.

Director Gore Verbinski, known mostly for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, strings this movie together as an overall tribute to the western genre. There are hints from many famous western movies in Rango that anyone who’s a fan of the genre would pick up. Add to that the brilliant work of Hans Zimmer on the score, as well as screenwriter John Logan, and the movie becomes a very strong movie overall.

Rango is not a very pretty movie in the sense that animated movies are almost always aimed at providing audiences with a cute looking hero/heroin before anything else. Here, even the good people are cringe-worthy when it comes to the cuteness element, which goes to show how much the creators of Rango did not waver in them wanting to make an animated movie that’s not addressed to a particular audience, but one that fit their vision. Rango is a movie with many firsts. This the animators’ first animated movie and the director’s first animated movie as well. But you don’t feel that it’s a movie of firsts when you watch it because everyone involved gives it their all to make it as good as it could be. And yes, it is good.

The Hangover 2 – Movie Review

Have you seen The Hangover? Odds are you have. Did you like it? Odds are you did. After all, it is a witty comedy aimed at an audience above the age of where thinking that sneaking a drink by you parents is the coolest thing to do.

And naturally, The Hangover was a hit at the box office, grossing more than $280 million, which meant that, in the business world of movies today, a sequel is meant to be.

Is the sequel as good as the first one? Definitely not. Is it an enjoyable movie? In some ways yes, in other ways no. Will you enjoy it? It depends.

Take Vegas out of the equation and insert Bangkok, take out the regular prostitute and insert a transsexual, take out the tiger and insert the monkey and keep the amount of f-words used the same and you get the Hangover 2.

Is it a funny movie? Yes. After all, seeing a guy realize that he slept with a “girl who has a penis” is funny – and the jokes that come out of that are spot-on as well. But overall, while watching The Hangover 2, you feel that you’ve seen all of this before – even if you don’t really remember the details of the first one. They keep on reminding you of them, actually.

One of the guys is getting married to a Thai-American girl whose dad wants to have a traditional Thai wedding. There, they have one last celebratory shindig with the bride’s brother. They wake up the next day at a hotel, far away from the resort they’re having the wedding at, not knowing how they got there. The groom has his face tattooed. One of them has his head shaven and, most importantly, the bride’s brother is missing while his cut finger is with them in the room. And they don’t remember anything of what happened the night before.

Then it becomes your turn to fill in the blanks from The Hangover – even up till the final scene (hint: it’s exactly the same as the first movie). The movie features the same actors and actresses as the first one in exactly the same attitude they had in the first movie as well.

So yeah, I did not really fancy The Hangover 2. When it comes to sequels, if the only thing you’re going to offer an audience is an exact rehash of the original movie, just don’t do it – for the sake of the franchise’s name. After all, the only thing The Hangover 2 is offering is a very bad rep for the first movie, which everyone liked. I hope they don’t have a third one in the making since part 2 is making a lot of money as well.

Monster (Single Review) – Paramore

Monster is the new single by Paramore that will serve as the lead single of their upcoming album as well as the single off the new Transformers movie.

It is also the first single by Paramore since the group’s founders, the Faro brothers, decided to leave them due to “irreconcilable differences” with lead vocalist Hayley Williams. And the song is all about that.

The Faro brothers have had many statements issued regarding their departures, portraying Hayley Williams as a person who made the whole band revolve around her and turning their sound into a music label product. Monster is Hayley’s way of firing back. And she is firing with an automatic.

The song opens up: “You were my conscience, so solid, now you’re like water” to set the tone for the dying relationship before she ends the first verse with “I let my heart go…. But I’ll get a new one and come back for the hope that you’ve stolen.”

And then she starts singing the chorus:

“I’ll stop the whole world, I’ll stop the whole world
From turning into a monster and eating us alive
Don’t you ever wonder how we survive?
Well now that you’re gone, the world is ours”

And in case the previous lyrics were not enough, the second verse is only there to let the doubters know that this, in fact, is Hayley’s manifesto against the Faro brothers: “I’m only human, I’ve got a skeleton in me
but I’m not the villain, despite what you’re always preaching.”

I have found the song to be absolutely brilliant. You can’t even discern the fact that Paramore are two members less when you hear the scorching electric guitar on some parts of the song. And since the lyrics are so personal to her, Hayley’s delivery is impeccable. I have always been a fan of her vocals and this song only fortifies that. Monster is the song that you’d expect from Paramore as their lead single: guitars and drums and the rock style they’ve come to be known for. Some people are saying that their isn’t much innovation in their sound with their song. And I agree. But the question is: does an artist constantly need to innovate to stay relevant? Absolutely not. That doesn’t mean that an artist should rehash the same stuff that made him/her popular in the first place, but that doesn’t mean that whenever an artist becomes popular, he’s not allowed to follow the formula of what caused that popularity in the first place. Besides, it’s not like Paramore have singles constantly being overplayed on radio for them to establish a “sound” that becomes glued to listeners’ ear. Yes, I’m looking at you Ke$ha.

Paramore is a band that will have the stigma of being a “teenager” punk-rock band, constantly stuck with it. Why? because that is how it started. Monster is the first step in the direction of them going the more “adult” route because the topic being discussed, while applicable to teenagers and their lives (the song is about love and loss after all), is quite mature. And not only is Monster a great leading single with meaning, but it’s also insanely catchy. Try not to get the line “I’ll stop the whole world from turning into a monster” stuck in your head and then get back to me.

All in all, I absolutely love this. Call it guilty pleasure or simply music that I like, but Paramore is one of those rare bands whose songs just click for me, without being grating on my nerves. And Monster is a good, very good song.

Listen up:

The Allure Of Free

There’s a response that is, I believe, inherent to human nature, transcending boundaries – almost unanimous. And it is the response to something that is free.

If I tell you I’m willing to give you something for free, what would be the first thing that comes to your head? Yes, there it is… “What’s the catch?” And what do you do? You don’t take the thing.

My cousin was telling me earlier today about her dilemma in Australia. She works at a leading TV station and is often given tickets to movie premieres. We’re talking about the star-studded events, involving red carpets and bling, not the excitement we feel when we watch the first screening of a movie on its release day. And more often than not, she can’t go to those premieres so she usually asks around if someone wants those tickets, only discovering that giving this tickets away for nothing is harder than her actual job.

And it happened to me when I was at AUB outdoors. There was some guy offering free hugs and the moment I saw him, the second idea the crossed my mind (the first one being how weird it was) was that there was definitely a catch somehow in those hugs.

But why do we have such a response to free stuff? Why is it that most people would take the premiere tickets from my cousin if she had asked for an insignificant amount of money but refrain from doing so if she was handing them for nothing in return?

Our mentality is apparently wired to go away from things that are too good to be true. Even for things that are not totally free. If you find a bargain online, you are as skeptical.
But in the world of today, do not underestimate the power of “free.” I am most definitely not an economy expert but with most things getting cheaper and cheaper because of competition, offering things for free has become a way for some companies to topple others. Offering things for free is also a way for those companies to introduce services.

When I started buying stuff off amazon, I was offered a free trial of “amazon prime” in their attempt to hook me on speedier deliveries. And if I had been living in the US, I would have totally gone for it. Amazon redid a similar thing with Lady Gaga’s latest album: they sold the mp3 version for $0.99 along with a free trial of their newly introduced “cloud” service, as a way to get ahead of Apple before they introduce their own version of cloud services, probably later this year.

According to Chris Anderson, “free” is the future of prices. He wrote his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price on a $250 netbook, running a free version of Linux, free Google Docs, which offer him free backup and on-the-go access and then he offered the work for free on iTunes. He argues that billion dollar industries are being formed today around the price of “zero dollars and zero cents.” And if you think about it, isn’t Google one of the leading companies in the world today and it gives almost everything for free? So don’t freak out when you’re offered something for free. Odds are, someone, somewhere, is making money off of it somehow – with no catch to you.

Where Do We Go Now? – New Nadine Labaki Lebanese Movie

Brilliant Lebanese director/actress Nadine Labaki is set to debut her new movie, Where Do We Go Now? (و هلّأ لوين؟) at Cannes this week. And it is starting off to good reviews.

After the 2007 hit Caramel, Labaki returns with another movie she’s directing. Set in a religiously mixed village, the movie is about a group of people trying to preserve their town in the midst of inter-religious tension. The town’s location is never mentioned, probably wanting to make the movie apply to anywhere in the Middle East where you have diversity.

Labaki has said about the movie, “It’s not a story about war; on the contrary, it’s about how to avoid war. You can’t live in Lebanon without feeling this threat, which ends up coloring what we do and our ways of expression.”

I think the topic looks like a typical Lebanese storyline, sort of like Caramel, which should make the movie quite relatable. And after all, Nadine Labaki is a very good director so I believe she will pull it off. Will this be as big as Caramel, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Check out a scene from the movie:

Check out my review of Where Do We Go Now.