In general, I prefer the music of Coulton to Paul and Storm (though I like both quite a lot), but in the live shows, Paul and Storm are absolutely hilarious in their between-song banter.  Most of the stuff they had played in their previous shows, but that included favourites like “Nun Fight”, “Live”, and “The Captain’s Wife’s Lament” so it was much appreciated.  They also played a couple of songs I hadn’t heard before, and I very much enjoyed “Frogger! The Frogger Musical”.  By the end of the opening act, my jaw was aching from laughing so much.

Coulton took the stage after a short break, and basically played all of my favourite songs of his.  He also did a few I was less familiar with, although “Sunny Blue Day”, which I first heard at his last show in Toronto, is rapidly becoming another favourite.  An excellent set indeed.

About the only thing I’m unsure of  was the venue.  Previous shows were at the Lula Lounge, which didn’t have assigned seating, but had a friendly and comfortable atmosphere, and felt like a more intimate space.  In contrast, the Enwave Theatre was a bit bigger and a proper theatre, with a stage, balconies, and the like, but it felt… stodgier.  The staff enforced no food/drink/photography rules, when a quick search of YouTube will demonstrate that Coulton is not shy about letting fans record his shows.  And while everyone had a good view thanks to how the seating was arranged, the openness of the theatre space made it feel sort of empty.

(However, that may be an issue unique to me.  My seat was on the balcony nearest the stage—great view, but no one in front of or behind us.  So I didn’t get that feeling of being in a crowd at concert.  During the chorus to “Re: Your Brains” when the audience joins in, I wasn’t surrounded by a horde of singing zombies as I was at the Lula Lounge.  But even down below, the crowd seemed tamer than previous year’s shows.)

Anyway, an excellent show all around.  If you ever get the chance to see either Coulton or Paul and Storm, take it.

First, I’d like to offer an apology to Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman.  I had thought that no two people could have less chemistry on screen than they did in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.  Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, however, have achieved new heights in visible disinterest in each other.  I can’t imagine any two people intoning “I love you” more apathetically than them.

Not that Stewart’s character, Bella, said much more than that.  Most of her dialogue consisted of “Please,”  “Don’t,” “Please don’t,” and “Don’t, please.”  She was completely and utterly useless throughout the entire movie.  When she was dumped, she moped for months.  MONTHS!  This was shown on screen in what felt like real time.  Then she starts leading on a guy who obviously has a crush on her, tries to kill herself a bunch of times so that she can remember her ex, and then runs off to Italy to save his unlife.   By showing up.  Not by doing anything active, god forbid, just by being there.

This movie was boring.  The pacing was slow, and I have no idea how the giant book it was based on still failed to provide any actual content for the movie.  All of the characters are completely stupid, and involved in self-destructive, abusive relationships with equally stupid people.  And nobody does anything—I haven’t seen so many characters going around and asking what they should do since The Matrix Reloaded.

Even the action was boring!  What could have been an awesome fight scene (where a werewolf pack hunted down what was apparently a recurring vampire villain from the first movie) became instead some running and later, a 1-second bit of flashback.

Leaving aside the ridiculous nature of the “world” of Twilight (sparkly, nigh-indestructible vampires with no meaningful consequences to becoming undead), this was more like a bad romantic comedy than a drama—minus any romance or comedy.  The way it was filmed did nothing to improve the source material either—the one scene of vampire Bella and Edward frolicking through the woods in Alice’s vision provoked laughter from everyone in attendance, whether they were buying into the rest of the material or not.

This was just not a good movie.  However, at least I went in with low expectations, and so I still came out less angry than after seeing Transformers 2.  It may have helped that the girlfriend bought the tickets, so I didn’t spend my own money on it.  But honestly, I can barely imagine that the fans of the books could enjoy this movie, much less anyone who has to take it on its own merits.  And still it did huge box office business.  It’s enough to make a guy cry.

It’s the sort of ridiculous, over-the-top movie that I quite enjoy.  It takes most of the well-worn zombie-movie tropes and exploits them to the logical, silly extreme.  It is wall-to-wall funny, but poignant and sweet in places.  It also has a most excellent cameo appearance that I don’t want to ruin for anyone.

That said, while the movie is generally upbeat about life after the end of civilization as we know it, the happy ending is still kind of depressing, because we all know that, really, there’s no happy ending out there.  There’s just not dying and having friends.

One of the bits I did enjoy was Columbus (the male lead) explaining his rules for survival in Zombieland.  The rules themselves were both funny AND sensible, and reminded me of Gibbs’ Rules from NCIS.  Perhaps I’ll try to synthesize them all into my own personal set of rules for living.

Anyway, as long as you don’t mind violence and gore, this movie should entertain.

Against, perhaps, my better judgement, I went to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, some trusty friends in tow.  I had found the last movie passably entertaining, if forgettable, in that it featured giant robots blowing stuff up, and Megan Fox was hot.  I didn’t find the first one very accurate to any of the various Transformers mythologies, or even all that sensible, but, like I said: giant robots blowing stuff up.

Clearly, I have pretty low standards when it comes to enjoying movies—especially summer blockbuster action movies.  And so, despite all the overwhelmingly negative reviews, I figured there was no way Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen could fail to be acceptably entertaining—after all, it featured more giant robots and bigger explosions.  I mean, any movie with robots and explosions has to entertain, right?

No.  No it does not.  This revalation was like discovering incontrovertible proof that there is no God.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was a boring, long, pointless movie that I cared absolutely nothing about.  Even Megan Fox couldn’t make this watchable.  It was like Michael Bay took a can opener, cracked open my skull, scooped out my brain, and took a dump so he could leave a steaming turd where it used to be.

Apart from the many plot problems, the movie just didn’t work on any level.  They introduced a boatload of additional Transformers, but it didn’t matter, because you couldn’t tell any of them apart, or even the difference between the Autobots and Decepticons.  All the action sequences with the robots were blurry, poorly choreographed, shaky-cam style affairs that meant you couldn’t really see what was going on.  So little time was spent with the characters that you didn’t care when they died, and, in fact, you hoped some of them stayed dead (but alas, no, they didn’t).  Comic relief was very poorly shoehorned into the movie, leaving it unfunny and awkward, and the supporting cast was entirely pointless.  I honestly cannot thing of a single redeeming quality of this movie.

Again, let me reiterate the generally low standards I have for movies.  I loved the near-universally panned Speed Racer (though I think that is a very misunderstood film).  I enjoyed the Jackie Chan and Jennifer Love Hewitt movie The Tuxedo.  I even managed to enjoy the awful Jackie Chan flick The Medallion more than this.  Hell, American Pie Presents: Band Camp is on TV as I write this, and I’m enjoying that more than I enjoyed Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

I did not like this movie.

At all.

The movie looks beautiful, the story is fast-paced and fun, and the casting is more solid that anyone could have hoped for.  Karl Urban is rock solid as McCoy, Zachary Quinto—surprisingly—does a good enough job as Spock to make me forget he is also Sylar, and Pine is actually okay as a cocky young Kirk with daddy issues.  The rest of the cast are also solid, although they received much less attention and development than the big three.  (We did get to see Sulu with a sword, which was most excellent.)

The action sequences were also very cool, if cut together a little too quickly and thus making it hard to follow at times.  Having a young cast and a budget for a stunt crew means the action can be more intense and fast-paced than in most of the Trek movies we’ve seen.  It all works together to provide an extremely fun and entertaining movie that sucks you in while you’re watching it. Star Trek is also, I think, accessible to new audiences, while rather cleverly showing a connection to the original series and its spin-offs in a way that explains and justifies the differences.

That said, it doesn’t hold up quite so well once you stop and think about it.  You don’t really notice in the theatre, because the pacing and action and visual excitement keep you off balance, but there are a number of issues that challenge the verisimilitude of the movie and problems with the nature of the story and the common sense of characters.

From here on in, things will get full of spoilers, so I’ve moved that behind the cut.  Before that, I’ll leave you with my mini-summary: Star Trek was a good, fun, summer movie, that I think almost anyone can enjoy on some level.

SPOILER WARNING

So, they really don’t explain any of the backstory—at least, not until much later in the film—but when they do, the villain, Nero, comes across as, well, stupid.  He is (understandably) angry at the destruction of his homeworld, and somehow decides this is the fault of the Vulcans and Federation, so when he finds himself in the past, rather than go and pre-emptively stop the destruction of Romulus, he sets out to get his revenge.  Not the sharpest crayon in the box, apparently.  Even if he planned to save Romulus after getting his revenge (as he had 140 years to work with), it was still stupid to risk pissing off everyone else in the galaxy before doing it.

Also… red matter?  WTF?

Apart from some issues with set design (I heard the engine room of the Enterprise described as having been designed by Willy Wonka), I also question some logistical issues, such as the speed of promotion and fluidity of command.  The Enterprise seemed to have only 4 actual officers on board (Pike, Spock, Sulu, and Chekov) with the rest of the crew consisting of freshly-graduated cadets, one of whom (Kirk) is inexplicably made First Officer, and later Captain—a job he gets to keep at the end of the movie.  I suppose saving the world does grant you some perks, after all.

There were other quibbles—the Phantom Menace-esque monster chase on the ice planet, the heavy coincidences involved in how some people keep running into each other, why a Romulan mining ship is so heavily armed, technological inconsistencies with existing Trek canon—but they didn’t really impact my enjoyment of the movie.

I actually rather enjoyed how they explained the reboot and divergence from the known Trek history—the arrival of the Romulans and Spock from the future must necessarily alter the timeline, and thus create a parallel universe diverging from the original.  This is actually consistent with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, and thus one of the more scientifically-accurate elements of the movie.

It has been brought to my attention that the backstory was more fully explained in a prequel comic series, Countdown, and that some of the more obvious questions (eg. why is a mining ship so heavily armed) are answered there.  This is all well and good, but it doesn’t excuse the movie for being fuzzy on this.

Anyway, I think this Star Trek movie had a tough task to handle—bringing the classic ensemble crew together, trot out some of their history, present an interesting story in and of itself, and set the foundation for a new franchise—and it handled it pretty darn well.  I am hopeful, now that the groundwork is set, that future movies in the franchise can focus on developing the characters and telling tighter, more consistent stories, while still cramming in lots of cool action.  I’m looking forward to seeing if I’m right, but also to seeing the current Star Trek movie again.

So we ended up seeing the movie—in 3D, no less—and it was okay.  The animation was fairly typical for a computer-animated movie, the script was reasonably funny (albeit laden with already-dated jokes and pop-culture references), and the voice actors was fine.  I was entertained.  The 3D did not give me a headache or hurt my eyes.  It doesn’t hold up well in comparison to anything from Pixar, but then, few movies do, and it’s not especially clever.  But it had its moments.

It’s not something you need to rush out and see, and I don’t think the 3D element was so awesome as to make it worth seeing in the theatre.  But, it’s an amusing enough movie, and will likely keep you entertained.

The movie is set in 1998, and focuses on a group of friends who are die-hard Star Wars fans.  When they discover one of them is terminally ill and won’t live long enough to see the release of The Phantom Menace, they decide to road trip to Skywalker Ranch and break in to see an early cut of the movie.  As you might expect, wackiness ensues.

The story has the trappings of a zany road-trip comedy, but has some slightly more mature character arcs than typical, dealing as it does with death, mortality, and growing up.  It also has plenty of slapstick humour, typical jokes about Trekkies and Star Wars fans, and cameo appearances by actors running the range from Seth Rogen, Kevin Smith, and Jason Mewes to Billy Dee Williams, Carrie Fisher, and William Shatner.

The movie has gotten fairly low ratings, but I really liked it.  I may, perhaps, identify a little too closely with the source material, being a die-hard Star Wars fan myself.  And like Hutch, one of the characters in the movie, I used to have a set of all-Rush mixtapes that were the only things to be played in my car.  If you like the classic Star Wars trilogy and know it well enough to get all the references to it, and if you like the slapstick Harold & Kumar/Superbad/American Pie-esque humour, you’ll probably like this movie.

So, I took her to see Dragonball: Evolution, not because I had much hope of it being good, but because I’ve long been a fan of the manga and, to a lesser extent, the anime.  (I rather feel the anime dragged on far too long….)

I had very low expectations going in to this movie, and, thankfully, I was not disappointed.  It was surprisingly faithful to the major story elements from the source material, and was reasonably well-paced and coherent.  The cast was pretty good, too, although Justin Chatwin looked a little too wimpy to be convincing as bad-ass martial artist Goku.  Joon Park absolutely nailed the Yamcha character, though.

I suppose my biggest complaint is that the fighting looked too lightweight.  In the source material, the fighters are shattering boulders and mountains with their attacks, shaking the earth as they gather their power, and unleashing blinding energy attacks.  In the movie, however, the wire stunts made every movement look soft, and even the visual effects for the energy attacks looked wispy and insubstantial.

I know the movie hasn’t done especially well in North America, but they apparently have sequels in mind if it is successful enough.  I wonder whether they will ramp up the carnage as the fighters get stronger.

Anyway, I couldn’t really recommend this to a general audience, nor to a long-standing fan of the manga or anime.  Perhaps the best I can say is that if it happens to be on somewhere, it might reasonably entertain you, but I don’t think it’s worth seeking out.  And yet, I kind of liked it, and hope they make another.

It’s been a few years since I read the graphic novel, so in some ways I was coming to the movie fresh, without remembering a lot of the details.  They also (naturally) had to cut a fair bit to fit the story into an (already long) movie, and they changed some details, to boot, so I feel comfortable in saying that the movie will be accessible to people who haven’t read the comics.

I’m sure there are a zillion plot summaries and descriptions out there already, so I won’t go into much detail.  (Skip the rest of this paragraph if you want no information on the content at all.)  I’ll just say that Watchmen is set in an alternate Earth’s 1985, with Richard Nixon still president and nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union at an all-time high.  There had been a team of superheroes — the Watchmen — that was effectively disbanded by the government passing the Keene Act, which outlawed their activities.  Only two — the Comedian, and Dr. Manhattan, who is the only hero with actual super powers — continued to work, under the auspices of the government.  The Comedian is killed in the opening moments of the movie, setting things into motion.

Now, I’ve heard some complaints of gratuitous violence in this movie, and honestly, I have no idea what the complaints are about.  While there was some unnecessary gore, there didn’t seem to me to be a gratuitious amount of action or violence.  But then, perhaps that’s just the kind of movie I normally watch.  I would agree that this movie is a little more harsh than other comic-based movies we’ve seen, but frankly, so is the source material.  This is a pretty bleak story.

I found two things about the movie a little jarring.  The choice in music — seemingly chosen to evoke the mid-eighties — just came across as a little odd or awkward.  However, the presence of Malin Akerman in the role of Laurie Jupiter disturbed me in perhaps a unique way, as I cannot see her as anyone other than Freakshow’s wife Liane from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle or Tess from 27 Dresses.  She did a fine job in the movie, but it just jarred me out of the narrative a bit.

So, my thoughts here have been all over the place.  Let me try to pull them together.

The movie was well done.  Despite some over-reliance on slow-motion action sequences, it is visually delightful, and has a solid cast.  The script is mostly successful at trimming a graphic novel often touted as “unfilmable” into something coherent and manageable.  I’m not entirely convinced that the changes they made to the ending are as effective as the original, but I’m willing to buy it in the context of the movie they’ve produced.

Perhaps the only real complaint I have is that it never swept me up enough to make me forget that I was watching a movie.  I could appreciate the structure, how the movie is essentially divided into three separate acts.  I enjoyed the visuals.  I appreciated the strong casting.  I noticed the odd musical choices.  Or the fact that there were too many endings.  I enjoyed it, but was always aware I was enjoying it.  Hence my feeling that it was just shy of excellent, though it was — as I said — very, very good, and well worth seeing.

So it was that I found myself heading out to The Opera House — not to be confused with the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts — that evening, venturing into parts of Toronto hitherto unknown to me.  It was easy enough to find, marked as it was by people lined up outside and around the corner down a side street.  I was mildly miffed at this — I was arriving some time after the doors opened, and still there was a line.  In fact, even after I joined the line, it was over twenty minutes before I actually got inside.  That just seems so… inefficient.

At this point, you may have gathered that I am a crotchety old man, and apparently always have been — this is not a new thing since I turned thirty a month ago.  I’ve never been especially happy with these sorts of club shows — too many opening acts that I don’t care about, and the band I actually want to see doesn’t start till late and never plays as long as I’d like.  So I was bracing myself to spend most of the evening in a grumpy mood.  This expectation was further reinforced when I heard there would be two opening acts, not just one.

I was even more disheartened when the first act took the stage, and I saw four guys with guitars (of various kinds) and a drummer.  I am of the mind that four guitars is too many, when they’re the only instruments in a band.  They introduced themselves as The Snips, and, thankfully, were actually all right.  They weren’t all-guitar all the time, and in fact used a trumpet and trombone is some of their more ska-like songs.  In general, they weren’t quite my cup of tea, but unlike many other opening acts I’ve seen at shows and venues like this, they did not fill me with rage.  They played for about 45 minutes, and then ceded the stage to the next act.

The Creepshow (also on Myspace) were on stage next.  I actually quite enjoyed this band, so much so that I bought their CD after.  They stage a good show, play off each other well, and their music was quite catchy.  Also, I have something of a weakness for female vocalists for rock/punk bands.  The audience responded really well to them, throughout their 45 minute set, before they cleared out to set the stage for the main event.

Now, before I get to the Smashers themselves, let me set the stage a bit.  The Opera House is set up in a sort of tiered arrangement.  As you enter from the back, you pass a bar and the merchandise setup, and then step down to a level with a few tables and the soundboard in the middle, and then you can go a couple of steps further and down to the main floor, which takes up maybe half the venue and runs right up to the stage.

For a crotchety old fellow like me, staying in that second level, behind the sound board, was all I was willing to do.  All those (literally) punk kids crowded the main floor, and there was “moshing” or whatever they call it these days.  There were a few stage climbers/divers and crowd surfers throughout the first two acts, but clearly everyone was waiting for the main event.

In anticipation of the Smashers taking the stage, the main floor became even more crowded than before.  This was something of a boon to those of us who were on the middle level, as things eased up around us.

The Planet Smashers took the stage around 11:00 PM, and they were great!  Some bands don’t sound quite so good live as they do on their albums, but the Smashers aren’t one of them.  Right from their first song, the lower level — jam-packed as it was with people — turned into a roiling mass of people: moshing, skanking, crowd surfing, stage diving, bouncing, crashing off each other.  People got hot and sweaty; shirts came off, and not just of the guys.  The venue staff — who had largely been keeping stage divers under control for the opening acts — never quite gave up, but they were definitely losing the battle.

I’m something of a latecomer to The Planet Smashers, so I don’t really know which are their most popular songs, just which ones I like best.  I was quite happy to hear many of my favourites, including “Life of the Party” (which I first heard in an episode of Undergrads), “Missionary’s Downfall”, “Bullets to the Ground”, “I Like Your Girl”, and “Surfin’ in Tofino”.

While happily bopping along as I was, in the second tier, I still had a few crotchety old man moments during their set.  For example, some of the stage divers who got on stage would actually run behind the band as they were playing, and I just thought to myself, “That seems awfully inconsiderate, getting in the way like that.”  See?  Crotchety old man am I.

Anyway, they played a solid hour-long set, or a bit more, and then were lured back out for an encore, where they graced us with three extra songs.  I don’t remember the first of the three, but the second was another of my favourites — and apparently a favourite of everyone else — the delightfully-titled “Super Orgy Porno Party”.  They even called off the stage-minders, and so soon the stage itself was full of skanking fans in an orgy of dance.  They closed the evening out with “Sk8 or die”, leaving us happy and exhausted and still wishing there was more.

I snagged myself a T-shirt, as well as their two CDs I hadn’t been able to find in stores (since they were so cheap), and so I was pretty happy with my haul.  I rode home on the streetcar with a bunch of other concert-goers, many of whom were drunk, or high, or just elated by the concert, but it was one of the more amusing streetcar rides I’ve had as a spectator.

I think I was home before 1:00 AM.  It felt late, even though it was earlier than my normal bedtime, but I’d been on my feet for a while.  Despite all my grumbles here, this was the most enjoyable show at one of these concert halls that I’ve ever been to.  (I’ve always enjoyed the main act, but this was by far the best overall show.)  I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to see The Planet Smashers again, and might even seek out another show by The Creepshow.

Not a bad way to spend a solitary Valentine’s Day, if I do say so myself….