weekend mega post wrapup and movie review bonanza

So my birthday was Thursday and as a present Stevie agreed to pay my way in a sealed Magic 2010 tournament for this past weekend.

The tourney was on Sunday so I agreed to drive. Steve, and Mike, my friend Joe also attended. The place was way out in Naperville but really it was a very nice comic book store. Great mix of old and new stuff and lots of budget items. Defiantly worth the drive. Oh yeah it was called Graham Cracker Comics. anyways 6 sealed boosters were given out to make a 40 card deck. I got some killer cards and such but ended up making a relatively weak Blue/White deck. None of us got over 1 win per match but hey some nice cards and fun times.

Movie reviews:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Saw this Saturday, and franklyu Half Blood Prince is my favorite of the books. It’s full of Mythology and Pathos and really brings the whole conflict of the entire series together for the final well done conclusion. The movie however is a sappy teen romance with sprinkles of plot strewn about. They spend 20 minutes on a redundant part of the love plot from the book and give the final conflict a total of maybe ten minutes of screen time. Even the actual half-blood prince storyline is barely touched and then it’s finished in blink of an eye. relatively accurate to the book but there was also loads more foreshadowing, cat n mouse and such. When WB first announced that Deathly Hallows would be a 2 parter I questioned why. Deathly hallows isn’t a long book and a large portion of teh middle of it is redundant and adds nothing to the plot or character development it just wastes time because each book as to begin and end around when Hogwarts would be running. Meanwhile Half-blood prince is the longest of the books and layers in a tremendous amount of good stuff that makes the Potter world real. There’s the politic sof teh witch world and the real world dealing with Voldermort, the various deals of voldermort and the death dealers. Numerous death eaters which will serve key roles in the final movie were just shown and never explained.

It wasn’t unwatchable and it was still worth seeing but it really is among the weakest of the movies produced so far. It’s a shame too because the three lerads ahve become great actors and have become the roles. They just spend most of this movie worrying about romances and such when really there’s plenty more going on. As usual the hall of fame British supporting cast delivers some terrific lines and performances.

2.5 busted brooms over my head out of 5.

Hudson Hawk

You know Hudson Hawk is one of the most bewildering crappiest movies I’ve ever seen. Considering I’ve seen the majority of Uwe Boll’s movies that’s quite a fucking statement.

So the gist is Bruce Willis plays a newly freed from jail world class cat burglar named Hudson Hawk. He is immediately blackmailed by his parole officer into stealing a wooden horse scultue Leonardo da Vinci created which holds a clue to a mythical Gold making machine that da Vinci created in the prologue to this brutally odd film. The movie drunkenly swerves from serious noir sendup, to cartoon like fist fights to some pretty brutal gore.

Kevin Smith once talked about his experience shooting Die Hard 4 and working with Bruce Willis. It’s a tremendous tale and you can find it on the DVD “Threevening with Kevin Smith.” Smith speaks about how Bruce pretty much got his way on set and loved having a writer on set so he could come up with something McClane would do instead of what’s in the script. So Kevin ended up rewriting the scene even though he was only there for his acting. The stuff Smith describes in the story sounds exactly what caused this mess of a movie. Willis seemingly coming off the high of Die Hard 2 wants to be a more laid back action hero and decides that he can be funny and cool at the same time. Is it a so bad it’s good movie? No, not really it’s a weird movie to watch if you have any interest is script writing or directing. Because frankly it fails on both fronts.

One lame fucking pun out of five