2012

I have just finished watching the movie called "2012". While this movie did seem to have a large budget and was written well, it was just another 'end of the world' type of movie. I am filing this on the shelf with movies like "Armageddon" and "The Day After Tomorrow". It was very intriguing to watch disaster after disaster - many of which had spectacular theatrics. I was especially wowed with the scene of the tiny plane flying around a crumbling southern California. The other scene that stands out in my mind is the almost literal explosion of Yellowstone park. However, most of the movie was scene after scene of the same type of thing.

The mini-plots weaved into the movie were quite well done. Many of them were emotional and heart-wrenching. You can expect families being torn apart, massive well done speeches done by world leaders and other ethical aspects. What this movie severally lacks though is any relation to it's origin - The Mayans. There was a brief scene in which the Mayans were mentioned and the date of 12-21-2012. Everything surrounding this less then one minute scene was more the same theatrics that Hollywood is so famous for. Every disaster movie derives its suspense from trying to guess which of the characters will survive and which will expire. One of the disappointments of "2012" is how predictable the crash-and-burn list turns out to be. As in many of these epics, the characters who have committed some kind of extramarital transgression are the ones marked for death.

 Directed by: Roland Emmerich

Produced by: Harald Kloser

Cinematography: Dean Semler

Distributed by: Columbia Pictures

Running time: 158 minutes

Country: Canada, United States

Language: English

Budget: $200 million[1]

Box office: $769,679,473[2

Balls of Fury

 The first movie I saw upon my return was Balls of Fury, about a short, stubby loser who seeks glory in the world of competitive Ping-Pong. Its like I never left! And while I have nothing against either film aside from the fact that theyre both terrible  I do have one request. Can summer please be over now? Balls of Fury  is raunchier and somewhat more imaginative than Hot Rod, and it will be must viewing for Christopher Walken completists who have mislaid their special collectors edition DVD of The Country Bears. Mr. Walken plays a super-villain named Feng, who dresses in red brocade and whose passions are Ping-Pong and having people killed with poison darts shot from a blowgun. I will forgo plot summary, since it would take me longer to recount the story than it took the screenwriters, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, to come up with it. Dan Fogler, looking like the love child of Jack Black and the pornographic-film star Ron Jeremy, plays Randy Daytona, a former Olympic Ping-Pong prodigy who comes out of retirement to avenge his father’s death and help an F.B.I. agent (George Lopez) catch Feng.

Along the way, Balls of Fury shambles through a checklist of lowbrow comedy conventions. Theres borderline-offensive ethnic humor (Asians talk funny! They eat strange food and speak a different language!), a few bouts of queasily self-conscious homophobic humor, and of course a gorgeous babe in short shorts (Maggie Q), who falls in love with our nebbishy, hygienically challenged hero. As usual, the gags and jokes are hit (mainly in the testicles, with Ping-Pong paddles) and miss. Mr. Garant, who directed, does manage to approximate the grungy texture of old Hong Kong action movies, and to execute the Ping-Pong sequences with some panache. But the movie seems to exist mainly so that some critic might say: If you see just one table tennis martial arts parody this year, make it Balls of Fury. Im afraid I can’t go that far.

Directed by Robert Ben Garant; written by Thomas Lennon and Mr. Ben Garant; director of photography, Thomas Ackerman; edited by John Refoua; music by Randy Edelman; production designer, Jeff Knipp; produced by Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber, Jonathan Glickman and Mr. Lennon; released by Rogue Pictures. Running time: 90 minutes.