Movie Review: Bridge To Terabithia

I watched this movie first at the theatre with my girlfriend at the time, and thought that it was a wonderful movie, so I thought I would rewatch it and write a review of it, now that I'm a couple of years older, and more bitter.
Oh, also, be warned, there will be spoilers.

When I first watched the trailers for this movie, I went in expecting some big fantasy epic, as a few of those had been coming out at the time, and are still coming out. What I ended up with, though, was something completely different. Not to say that this was a bad thing, as I did enjoy the movie, but it just wasn't as I expected.
Bridge To Terabithia follows a tale of a Jess, a young boy, who lives with his parents and four sisters. His family isn't very well off, as is shown at the start of the movie when he is duct taping his sneakers together. He is bullied at school, and just seems to not enjoy himself very much, except in drawing and painting. A new girl, Leslie, starts at his school, who he ignores to begin with, but then warms up to her and they become fast friends.
Over the course of the movie, she shows him how to open his mind, so to speak, unleashing his full imagination. They travel over a stream via a rope swing to the magical land of Terabithia, please note, the rope swing is important. Over in Terabithia there is all sorts of magical beings and the such, but they aren't really important, this isn't a movie about the fantastical, it's a movie about friendship.

Ok, at this point, if you haven't seen the movie and just glossed over the part earlier where I said that there would be spoilers, please think carefully before reading any further. This movie is a good movie, and I recommend you go and watch it before having the plot laid out fully for you.

If you've seen this movie, you know what comes next. I'm going to describe how I felt briefly through this movie. First, this movie started to gently reach into my chest, and took a nice gentle hold of my heart, of course, I was thinking 'WTF are you doing?', to which the movie responded with 'It's OK, this is going to be all right, I'm just going to warm your heart nicely, everything will be fine.'. I thought this was alright, so I let it continue, and warm my heart it did. Then, suddenly, without warning, my heart is being violently ripped out of my chest and stabbed repeatedly. They killed off Leslie. THEY KILLED HER!
Here's how it happened, Jess gets a call from one of his teachers, Ms. Edmunds, played by Zooey Deschanel, whom he has a crush on, and don't get me wrong, who wouldn't have a crush on their teacher if she looked like Zooey Deschanel, and she invites him to go to a museum with her and her nephews, so go along he does. What happened to her nephews, noone knows, but they're nowhere to be seen, but that's not important, but it bothered me none the less, anyway, while Jess is at the museum, Leslie heads off to Terabithia, via the rope swing, which breaks and drops her onto a rock to subsequently drown in the river. He doesn't find out about this until he gets back from the museum, and is sent into a pit of despair.
Of course, the point of the movie is to show him moving past the grief, and remembering her in a happier way, and that he does. It ends on a high note of him taking his sister to Terabithia and showing her how to imagine it all.
So, overall, it's a good movie, I think. It really tugs at the heart strings though, and made me shed a tear or two (dozen) when Leslie dies. I think that any movie that evokes that sort of strong emotion is a good movie.
I probably wouldn't recommend this for children, or at least, not young young children, I'd not let anyone under about 10-12 see it. There is minor violence in the movie, but that's not why I'd restrict the watching, but rather because of the death of one of the very major characters. I don't think children would really understand the necessity of it for the learning purpose of the movie.

Hmm, this review has been kind of disjointed and crappy, but I'm kind of tired and feeling sad because I just watched the movie.

In closing. Watch the movie, even if you read through the spoilers here without seeing the movie previously (Yes, I'm talking to YOU!) still go and watch it, it's good.

Thank you all for reading, Hopefully my next post won't be as crappy as this one has been.

Movie Review: Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day.

So I've decided to try my hand at doing a movie review, and maybe this will become a weekly thing, like my weekly PSAs. This review won't be the greatest, as I only watched the movie once, and have since vowed to never put myself through that torture again, but yeah, here's an attempt at a review.

I watched Boondock Saints a long time ago, at the insistence of one of my flatmates at the time. He pestered me to watch it, and even played me a scene from the movie to show how awesome it was, and he was right. Boondock Saints was one of the best movies that I have seen. It has action, it has comedy. It is brilliant. So, of course, when I heard that Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day was being made, I awaited this movie with eager anticipation. Being the pirate that I am, I procured myself a copy from a friends harddrive, and sat myself down to watch it.

I'm going to pause here for a second and let this all sink in for you. I had watched an awesome movie, and was sitting down ready to watch what I had only hoped would be an awesome sequel. This could've possibly been the biggest let down since I found out that Santa Claus wasn't real and that the Easter Bunny doesn't really lay chocolate eggs, he just hides them, by the way, he has the eggs mass produced in China.

I really tried to enjoy it, I did. There were points in the movie where I just wanted to turn it off, I couldn't bear to watch, but I decided to soldier on and power through it. It had to get better, didn't it?
It didn't. To me, it seemed as though the plot was written by a fat fanboy, sitting in his mothers basement, where he inserted himself into the story as the bumbling, yet wise cracking, sidekick. It was weak.
The acting was... Well, let me put it this way, somehow, in the 10 years between the making of the two movies, almost every single actor who reprised his role lost their acting talent. About the only acting talent left in the movie was left to the big names. The three detectives were just horrible, it was like they'd taken acting lessons from long term out of work stage actors. Rocco makes an appearance in a dream sequence, and my God has the actor gotten fat. I'd imagine that he has spent the time between the two movies doing nothing but eating. They try to disguise, and fail, his weight gain by putting him in a trench coat, but it only serves to point out how much of a fat ass he's become. I seriously don't know what the fuck Troy Duffy was smoking when he wrote the script, or directed the movie, but that must've been some powerful shit.

There were points where it was similar to the first, but at some points it was too similar. It was almost a bad recreation of the first movie, like a reimagining, so to speak. A horrible reimagining, created in the mind of a mentally retarded chimpanzee.

This is how I remember the movie going. It starts off with a priest being murdered, in the same fashion as The Saints would do it, but it was only a hit to lure The Saints out of hiding so that the Yakavetta family could take their revenge on them for killing their leader fellow in Boondock Saints. The Saints travel back to Boston to avenge the priest, and on the way pick up a bumbling, yet wise cracking, Mexican sidekick. They take out an Asian gang, you have to make sure to get all those minorities in there, and mess up due to bad planning, as happened with every single hit in the first movie, apart from the very last one in the court house. The three stupid detectives are assigned to the case and immediately realize that The Saints are back in town. A new FBI detective is introduced, and she is Smeckers protege, who has since been killed off in between the two movies, and she also immediately notes that The Saints are back as well. There's a little bit of misinformation going on between the new FBI lady and the three detectives, they are both on the side of The Saints, but the detectives don't realize that the FBI lady is. It's supposed to make for comic relief, but it doesn't really work. More bad guys get killed, blah blah. Ok, I kind of tuned out to the story at this point. It was boring me, and it was just a bad movie. One of the detectives gets killed off, of course, El Duce comes back to Boston as well, of course. He has a whole back story right throughout the movie. I didn't pay much attention to it as it seemed as though it was tacked on at the last second to add some sort of sense to the stupid plot that was already there. Essentially it turns out that the big bad guy in this movie was a friend of El Duce from back when they were young adults. He had El Duce put in prison. In the end, El Duce gets killed, The Saints get arrested and put in jail. The two remaining detectives break them out with the help of the FBI lady. Sorry, I haven't put many names as I didn't care enough to learn them properly. Smecker was still alive all this time, and has a cameo at the end.

It's all just stupid, he has set it up for a third movie, but I really hope that a third movie never happens. This one was bad enough, I'd hate to see how much more he could screw things up with a third movie.
So, in my opinion, don't watch this movie, don't let your friends watch this movie. If you think you might enjoy this movie, then you may be brain damaged and you should seek medical attention.

Sorry, this review has just ended with me rambling. It was such a crappy movie that even writing a review of it is putting me to sleep.
Thanks for reading.