Being a kid in the late 80s, one of my favorite TV shows was Charles In Charge starring Scott Baio. Actually, I'm a big fan of 80s-90s sit-com, but I really liked Charles In Charge primarily because Nicole Eggert. Being a teenager at that time, she was such a hottie. I kinda liked her a bit more than Alyssa Milano, but I'll write about my love for Who's The Boss? in another blog. What I love about the 80s-90s sit-com is that it was such clean and wholesome programming. When the show is done, you have this happy feeling afterwards. Check out the intro:
Though Nicole Eggert was my teenage crush, the overall show was great. The comedic chemistry between Scott Baio and Willie Aames (who played the best friend, Buddy) was hilarious. In real life, they were good friends and so them two being silly together played well on screen. But what I always found weird about this show is that Charles (Scott Baio) lived first with the Pembrokes and then the Powells because he was the college student that needed a cheap place to stay, so he was hired as a live-in babysitter and housekeeper in exchange for room and board. Who does that? And then, he becomes the older paternal figure fixing the kids problems. What? And why did his best friend, Buddy, get stupider and stupider every season? Shouldn't that have been the other way around as people tend to mature in college?
After watching the intro of Charles in Charge, I never realized how big sweaters were in the 1980s. Watch the intro again, and check out all the sweaters. Of course, sweaters is a timeless attire, but in 80s, I guess it was more of a fashion statement than for necessity. I just never noticed that before.
Check out this pre-boob job Pamela Anderson clip:
Well, if you have any thoughts on Charles In Charge, leave a comment. I look foward to read what you guys think.
Columbiana is your typical guy movie with the twist being
that the main character is a female instead of a male. I didn’t go into this movie expecting
and neither did I leave the movie feeling anything. The producer of this movie is Luc Besson who directed movies
like Kiss of the Dragon, The Transporter series, and From Paris with Love. If you enjoyed those movies, then
you’ll enjoy this movie. If you
didn’t care too much for those movies, then you’ll pretty much feel the same
for this movie. It wasn’t great
but
I was surfing Youtube this past weekend and came across a lot of boyband videos. As cheesy as the 90s Boy Band era was with little girls screaming and going crazy over them, you have to love all the slow songs that they produced. The beautiful thing about a good song is that you can hear it at any stage in your life and still love it. Those songs are called classics.
The song that I want to share is All-4-One’s Not Ready of Goodbye. Check it out.
I really loved this song. It stirs up emotions about the one who got a way. Though the group never shot a video for this song, thanks to fans like one who made the Youtube video, we can enjoy the song over and over again. If you really like it, you can download it on Itunes.
Currently, the band is still together and tour all over the world in small venues.
The current release of Conan The Barbarian is a remake of the character from the Conan The Barbarian created by Robert E. Howard. It’s not really a remake of the 1982 movie, but instead a retelling of the myth of Conan The Barbarian. This was a good move for the movie producers because the story of the 1982 movie has been long forgotten for many people. The only legacy that remains with the people who remember the 1982 version is the actor who played the title role who was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now was this 2011 movie any good?
There’s a show that I stumbled upon on Youtube that has been long forgotten by many adults and are not known by anyone born after 1980, but has such a timeless humor that even after hearing the title, many adults can recall how much they loved that show, and that show is Welcome Back, Kotter.
For those of you who do not know Welcome Back, Kotter, just watch his Youtube video:
What I loved about Welcome Back, Kotter was that even though the Sweat Hogs were the school “gang” of remedial students,
It’s been a while since I watched a good romance comedy where I liked all the characters, the story, and minor story, so watching Crazy, Stupid, Love was such a treat to watch. The movie reminds of a John Hughes 80’s movie with touch of the movie Love Actually, so if you’re a fan of those movies, you will really like Crazy, Stupid, Love.
The main plot of the story of the movie is about a man named Cal (played by Steve Carrell) whose wife named Emily (played by Julianne Moore) divorces him, so
Cowboys and Aliens is a sci-fi western set in a small mid-west town that is attacked by aliens. When some of their town folk gets taken by the aliens, the small band of men (plus a woman and a kid) work together to get them back. Sounds like possibly good movie, right? WRONG. This movie was terrible. I can’t believe I spent my money watching a movie like this in the theater. So why did I watch it? Well, for the life of me, I can’t remember watching an alien invasion movie based in the Old West, so I told myself, why not? Ugh, after watching this movie,
Larry Crowne was a breath of fresh air in summer movie season filled with green rings, magical children, comic book superheroes, a western sci-fi, etc. This movie is another example that you don’t need millions of dollars in special effects in order to make a good movie. Sometimes, we can get overloaded with all the visual effects that are in the summer blockbuster movies and we just need a movie-detox
I’m kind of on the fence with Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I liked the story. I liked the special effects. My problem was the characters. I did a great job in explaining the origins of the original Planet of the Apes, but for movies like this to seem plausible, it requires dumb main characters making dumb decisions. It was these dumb decisions, which annoyed me enough to not like the movie as much as I would like to like it. Let me break it down.
The story. Was it a good story? For Planet of the Apes fans, it was a great story. For non-Planet of the Apes fans, it was ok. One of the best approaches of this movie was humanizing the monkeys. It told a great story of how this genetically enhanced intelligent monkey came to existence and why in the future, the monkey’s dominated the earth, and the humans eventually became extinct. The monkey side of the story was the best part of this movie. The writers took cues from the past regarding slavery and mistreatment, which eventually became the monkey’s angst toward human beings. As time went on, the monkey’s unite, escape their shelter-like prison, and find refuge in the redwood forest. The other side of the story is the humans who used monkey’s as guinea pigs with kind hearted scientist that wanted cure mankind of Alzheimer’s disease. It was the human part of the story and the stupid decisions they made which is why this movie was ridiculous. Mesh the two together, you have a great monkey movie with stupid humans.
The characters. Did I like the characters? The main character is Ceasar, a born-intelligently-enhanced chimp who was born by a mother chimp on whom the scientist experimented. The special effects used to create this monkey were amazing. The filmmakers used the Avatar computer generated technique whereas they used an actual human (played by Andy Serkis) to create the movements and facial movements of the CGI-monkey. Him and the other monkeys out-acted the humans. The scientist played by James Franco was stupid. The girl-friend played by Freida Pinto was a pointless character that did nothing. The CEO of the drug company was stupid. Practically all the human roles were stupid people. Further explanation on this will be in my Chazztastic Thoughts. But I understood why they had to be stupid with stupid decisions, but because if they made the correct decision, the apes would never had risen.
The special effects. Though special effects were the best part of the movie, I don’t think it was more cool than fighting robots, magical children, or an American superhero icon. As cool as these intelligent monkey’s looked, acted, and moved, one problem I had with the special effects is trying to keep the size and scale of the monkeys consistent. Sometimes they looked bigger and sometimes they looked smaller. Unlike fighting robots whereas as long as they are as big as houses and buildings, they will look real, but the intelligent monkeys can’t realistically be taller than humans (except for the gorilla). And, to me, how big and small they were when compared to humans had some inconsistency. Why does that matter? Because consistency in a movie adds to the plausibility of the movie which I look for in movies like this.
Now for some Chazztastic Thoughts:
• The Scientist. The scientist was played by James Franco. Did he ever look like a scientist to get this role?
• The Veternarian. His love interest was played by Freida Pinto. Besides the 2-min where we see her as a veternarian, did her character even matter in the story?
• The Lab Assistant. He gets sick. He works for a multi-million dollar drug research facility. You know he has health insurance. Why didn’t you just go to the doctor?
• The CEO. Did bother any of you that the CEO of DRUG research facility was a black man?
• The Neighbor. If you were really scared for you children that a monkey was living next door, why didn’t you just constantly complain to Animal Control to get the intelligent monkey taken away? If he did that while the intelligent monkey was young, the movie would’ve been done a long time ago.
• The Intelligent Monkeys. The drug they were exposed to was for intelligence. Why did they eventually have super strength and near-invulnerability?
• The Police. Now, if you get 911 calls of monkeys running wild in the city, wouldn’t first reaction be that they must be rabid, a threat to humanity, and should be killed on site.
• Where were the news helicopters?
I can keep going on with my Chazztastic Thoughts. Like I mentioned earlier, I’m really on the fence with this movie. Though I liked the special effects and was ok with the story, the characters in the story was too stupid for me which was an insult to my intellect. On that note, I rate the movie: BlueRay rental or HD Cable TV. As for paying for it on the movie theaters, if there’s nothing else to watch and you really want to watch a movie, then it’s watchable. But the feeling you get from the movie theater is the exact same feeling as if you watched it on Blue Ray/HD Cable.
Captain America: The First Avenger – I loved it. One of the major problems that movie companies had until the 2000s was how to make comic book fighting sequences look realistic. Take a look at the 80s version of Captain America, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Man. Just Youtube some of their clips and you’ll see how hilarious these characters looked, acted, and fought. If you would throw those characters in the middle of Compton trying to pull off their superhero antics, they would die. But that was the limitation of film making back then. In comic books, though the action is a literal freeze frame, your imagination went wild on how they fought the enemy. Now fast forward to the present. Because of CGI, chromakeying, and other advancements of technology, filmmakers are no longer limited to what they can do, and when it came to Captain America, they put their creativity all on the table for the audience to enjoy.
Before I continue on, we should first understand that there are no novels (and even, graphic novels) that can translate perfectly to film. Plus, with different Marvel comic book storylines, Captain America’s history has always been slight tweaked on how Steve Rogers became Captain America. The movie did a great job in picking the best parts of Captain America’s history to make the most coherent story for all the characters involved. For true comic book purists, they may have caught all the discrepancies between the comic book and the movies, but when looking at the whole cast, every big and small character had the right size part and screen time to make you believe that this story could have actually happened.
The special effects were amazing. Everyone who watched Chris Evans in the Fantastic Four knows that that boy got a fit, yoked body (no homo, guys), but when you see the pre-transformed Steve Rogers with a Chris Evans face, it looked real. Even in the trailers, you can see the little runt Steve Rogers trying to fight the bully, and you’re thinking, “Is that really Chris Evans? How did they do that?” Back in the 80s and 90s, the only way filmmakers could pull this off would be to get a smaller Chris Evans look-a-like, and then after the transformation, change him to the real Chris Evans. Now, if they did that with this movie, I probably would have not liked the movie as much, but they didn’t. They used current technology to make Chris Evans look puny and it looked real. And when it came to the action scenes, Captain America moved just like you would imagine as he did in the comic book. Jumping around, throwing his shield, and beating up the bad guys looked like a comic book story pane came to life.
One of the awesome surprises that I didn’t notice in the trailer was the appearance of the Howling Commandos. In Marvel Universe folklore, the Howling Commandos were the original Nick Fury’s special team to fight the Nazi’s. I admit I had to Wikipedia to further learn about the Howling Commandos, but when I watched the movie, I started to remember that there was a special WWII combat team that Marvel created, but I never remembered that that team was with Captain America. After some research, lo and behold, it was the Howling Commandos. I thought that it was cool for the producers to include them in the movie. Another cool thing was that one of the Howling Commando’s was ASIAN-AMERICAN, and he was from FRESNO. How often in white America do you see a film showing an Asian-American playing a role in defeating the Nazis? Me being a Filipino born in America, I found that to be great!
Now for some Chazztastic Thoughts:
• Why is it that after all Captain America has done, he never got promoted? Wouldn’t you think that after defeating the bad guys, he would’ve had some accommodations and be promoted in rank?
• I was never in the military, but isn’t it that when you get promoted, you get a raise in pay? So, he did all he did and still got the same pay as other Captains? WTH?
• Since the military refers to the personnel with title and then last name (like General MacArthur), does the Captain America have a first name? I think his first name is called White.
• Now at the end when the plane goes down and he “dies”, did anyone realize that he died a virgin? His whole story is being the small fry that sucked with the women. As Captain America, it’s implied that he still sucked with the women. So when he went down with the airplane and “died”, he apparently died without knowing the love of a beautiful woman!
So, who do I rate this movie? I rate this movie: Movie Theater and 3D. It was well worth the money.
I'm not a big Harry Potter fan. I watched the first 3 movies, skipped the next the next 4, and since Harry Potter and the Death Hallows - Part 2 is the very last movie ever to be made about Harry Potter (unless the series follows the Star Trek saga and Star Wars saga where fanatics and business people want to do a spin-off series because MONEY TALKS), I decided to watch it... then again, nothing else was on the theaters that I haven't already watched. So what did I think? Overall, I liked it. Not knowing much history than what I've watched in the first 3 movies, it was nice to have seen that the little boy has grown to become a young man, more wise than his peers as well as a strong leader rallying up the troops against the eminent evil that is to take over the magical world.
The movie was a fun roller coaster. It had the race against time, the cloak and dagger of getting behind the lines, the major battle between good and evil, and I enjoyed every moment of it. I love special effects that feel realistic to me. When they battle with their "stick" (yah, I know it's called a wand), it really felt like energy really flowed out of it. When they fly through the air on their broom or when Harry holding on to the One Whose Name Should Never Be Spoken and flying through the air, I really felt like I was a part of the action. And in the end when Good defeated Evil, you have this happy feeling that good finally prevailed. It was a good movie for family and friends.
Now it wouldn't be a Chazztastic blog without giving my Chazztastic Thoughts. Here they are:
Is it just me or does a story about killing little children just feel wrong?
Do they ever learn stuff like Math or Economics at that school?
What kind of job do they have when their students graduate?
If you can create anything out of nothing, then is there such thing as a poor wizard?
If 19 years passed by, then why do they still use a old steam driven train?
Can't they just magically appear at the school?
These are just mere Chazztastic Thoughts that make you go... HMMMM?
Well, if you want to go out and watch a good movie, then Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 will not disappoint you.
I rate this movie: 3D-Movie Theater! (if you follow this blog, you'll discover how I rate movies)
