Last movie you watched and your critique of it

[Iceglow]

Shiny, I'm going to have to say that unless you happen to shack up with former convicts on a regular basis, living with or otherwise I think you don't particularly have a damn clue what the hell you're on about. Regardless of whether you think Aaron Paul's character would have been ass raped in prison is irrelevant, he's about the same build as Charlie Hunnam who plays Jax in Sons of Anarchy and does he get ass raped in prison?

Anyhow, this past week I have seen the new Godzilla, which I felt did ok, it could have been worse though it was unnecessarily dark, lighting wise in my opinion (though it is understandable when the MUTO (Mothra) is abound because he emits an EMP knocking out electricity it was also too dark and gloomy when he wasn't in many scenes). Aside from questionable choices about lighting the film was pretty good as monster-beatdown fare goes. On this outing Godzilla returns to the traditional shape and build which kind of does and does not work well as whilst the original was a man in a suit this is all CGI and so having this classic but biologically wrong shape to it is both great if you watched the original Japanese Godzilla movies but also one of the worst aspect if you think of how it should look as a bipedal amphibious lizard scientifically speaking. I wasn't as impressed with this though as Pacific Rim so whilst it is a good film if you're a traditional Godzilla fan it's not as good as other recent entries in the genre. Rating out of 10? I'd say that this was a fairly solid 8/10 (Pacific Rim would have gotten a 9 if I'd rated it myself)

The other film I saw this past few days was the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I'll use some spoiler tags because some of you may be planning on seeing it for yourselves. Yes, it's Michael Bay, yes it has Megan Fox in it, and yes, there were a few unnecessary explosions. I went in to this with some reservations, the original cartoon was great, the old live action films were a big part of my childhood, which I have had the common sense not to revisit because I know that the movies were actually pretty terrible. So how did this do? Well, as there will be spoilers ahead lets mask from here on out... read at your own risk:

(SPOILER) First of all I was relieved that the origins story that was going through the gossip train (aka the Internet) the one where Michael Bay supposedly made them all aliens wasn't true. Essentially the origins story was pretty true to the cartoon with a few notable differences. Such as the fact that Splinter wasn't a human prior to becoming a rat, he was a rat all along given the same mutagen as the turtles. April O'Neill's father was a scientist working on the mutagen at a firm, he finds out Shredder is behind it and the plan for it so tries to destroy the work to prevent this. He's killed as he burns down the lab. April somehow is in the lab at the time of the fire, manages to save the turtles who are normal baby turtles at that point in time and shredder who was a rat and releases them in to the sewers so they can live. Though, quite how she fails to remember the fact that her Dad's former boss is the one who shot and killed him is beyond me.

They upgraded Shredder's armour for this movie in a big way, in fact it's slightly ridiculous as it adds like 3 feet to his natural height and he's got about 9 samurai blades on each hand and can fire them as micro missiles recalling them at will, if you think of the armour worn by the final big bad in The Wolverine, you'd be along the right lines. It's like they took the idea of Shredder and mixed in a little Kang. Likewise, Donatello's Bo Staff is now technologically upgraded to have an extender feature meaning he can use it to do silly stuff like flip an entire Humvee, despite the staff only being a few inches round and made of wood (presumably hollow too to allow for the collapse/extending system).

The films a fairly predictable plot and doesn't break the mold. Raphael's independence has been updated to give him a fairly atrocious attitude problem however, which sucked as in the original cartoon he was a badass and very independent but didn't have such an overstated attitude issue. He does go it solo in one segment of the plot to rescue the other turtles from the bad guys lair however, he quickly runs in to Shredder who kicks his ass in no time at all which again kind of ruined the fact that it happened at all.

Sad to say, that this film tries to be quite funny but whilst my 12 year old nephew did laugh, it never managed to crack so much as a wry grin out of me hell even Megan Fox bouncing on a trampoline failed.

On the rating system I'd have to give this a mere 5/10 in the fact that I was pretty ambivalent about it. I didn't particularly feel it hit any of the right buttons to make an excellent movie but it did have good solid filming angles, lighting and special effects which made it OK to watch with my nephew in tow.