Crimson Screens wonders, "Which is worse, Miami Vice or Pinata: Survival Island?"...
Crimson Screens wonders, "Which is worse, Miami Vice or Pinata: Survival Island?"...
Hey there! When Miami Vice was originally out on TV, it was considered to be a new cutting edge TV show. I did not watch the original run because I was into other things at the time, but now the first two seasons are available on DVD, and I have become a huge fan of the huge. For some reason I had always though it to be a hokey 80's action tv show, maybe like the Pacific Blue of the 80s. I was wrong though, and while there is some hokiness and silliness, most of the plot lines are great drama and some episodes, like season one's "Evan", even make you a little sad. So obviously, since this movie was announced, I was really excited, since I had recently gotten way into the TV show. I thought the casting was filled with A+ choice and the director couldn't have been a better pick. I saw this the day it opened and I am sad to say that I was highly disappointed.
The plotline loosely follows season one story arc "Smuggler's Blues", but it doesn't follow too closely, so the movie is able to go in it's own direction. Basically, evil drug lords are at work and Crockett and Tubbs set out to find them. And when secret FBI informants are killed, the stakes are raised.
Crockett is played by Colin Farrell I think he does a terrible job. His acting is flat and he has none of the witty talk or character that Don Johnson had in the TV show. Jaimie Foxx plays Tubbs and he is an extremely capable actor and he does an OK job here. I guess I was disappointed because the characters don't seem to interact too well. Cockett just seems all sad and bummed out the whole time. And when the two characters talk, all the livelyhood from the TV series is completely lost in favor of "serious" dialogue. What the fuck?
Michael Mann directed this and I know he is an extremely capable director. But something is missing here. The film opens with a fantastic shootout at a dock, which shows very realistically what a .50 cal bullet does to a human being, but besides that, there is absolutley minimal action until the end shootout. Im not joking either. There is one explosion, which is suspisciously CGI, and then there is a lot of racing around in cool cars, clumsily directed sex scenes and dialogue. I'm not kidding when I say that there was more action in one of the TV series episodes. And the end shootout is a complete disappointment, especially after all the build up. And Michael Mann directed Heat, which had a fnatastic shootout, and this one is just crap compared to that.
A few neat things were spotting people I have seen in other better things. The Russian at the beginning was in a few episodes of NYPD Blue. Dominic Lombardozzo, from OZ and The Wire, has a decetn part as a cop. And Tom Towles, from Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer and NYPD Blue, has a decent role as a mean white supremecist guy.
I had such high hopes for this. But unfortunately the summer action blockbuster of the year fizzles out early on and never regains any steam.
next, we move on to Pinata: Survival Island. This is a horror cheapie about a group of kids who have a party, break open a Pinata and unleash an evil demon who had been trapped in the Pinata. Sound silly? Well, it gets much worse.
The characters spend the first half of the movie trying to figure out what is going on and then when they do figure it out, they spend the rest of the time running away from the creature.
And oh boy, what a creature it is! It looks like a twenty foot tall lava monster and we see some scenes through his eyes in a Predator-esque screen, and he crashes through the woods running after the kids. It makes no sense though. One scene will show the monster, who is huge, hiding behind a tree, growling and making stomping sounds and roaring, and then we see the kids looking for the monster, who is really only five feet away. How the fuck could they not hear that? How come one scene shows one of the characters being strangled by the monster, as he holds him high above his friends, all the time roaring away, sounding like a fleet of trains, and yet, the kids can't hear any of this?!?!?! What the fuck?
The acting is terrible. Even from Jaimie Pressley, who has become somewhat of a respectable acrtess I guess. This is awful. The death scenes are filled with terrible special effects and edited in a quick cut style that is lame and keeps up from seeing what is going on.
The best thing I have read about this mess is that after the movie was completed, the CGI of the monster was added, because the original footage of the monoster, which at the time was a man in a moonster suit, was deemed not scary enough. I would love to see that footage, since they picked this shot over that, the orginal stuff must be comedy gold.
Ok, this is a terrible movie where everything that can be bad about a movie is present and accounted for here.
Next issue, I promise a positve review... Pulse comes out Friday and I have heard good things, but the PG-13 rating leaves me very weary.
And I would like to give note to UtterTrash blog and The Infested Sound podcast for the nice support they give me on this page of mine. Thank you!
Hey there! When Miami Vice was originally out on TV, it was considered to be a new cutting edge TV show. I did not watch the original run because I was into other things at the time, but now the first two seasons are available on DVD, and I have become a huge fan of the huge. For some reason I had always though it to be a hokey 80's action tv show, maybe like the Pacific Blue of the 80s. I was wrong though, and while there is some hokiness and silliness, most of the plot lines are great drama and some episodes, like season one's "Evan", even make you a little sad. So obviously, since this movie was announced, I was really excited, since I had recently gotten way into the TV show. I thought the casting was filled with A+ choice and the director couldn't have been a better pick. I saw this the day it opened and I am sad to say that I was highly disappointed.
The plotline loosely follows season one story arc "Smuggler's Blues", but it doesn't follow too closely, so the movie is able to go in it's own direction. Basically, evil drug lords are at work and Crockett and Tubbs set out to find them. And when secret FBI informants are killed, the stakes are raised.
Crockett is played by Colin Farrell I think he does a terrible job. His acting is flat and he has none of the witty talk or character that Don Johnson had in the TV show. Jaimie Foxx plays Tubbs and he is an extremely capable actor and he does an OK job here. I guess I was disappointed because the characters don't seem to interact too well. Cockett just seems all sad and bummed out the whole time. And when the two characters talk, all the livelyhood from the TV series is completely lost in favor of "serious" dialogue. What the fuck?
Michael Mann directed this and I know he is an extremely capable director. But something is missing here. The film opens with a fantastic shootout at a dock, which shows very realistically what a .50 cal bullet does to a human being, but besides that, there is absolutley minimal action until the end shootout. Im not joking either. There is one explosion, which is suspisciously CGI, and then there is a lot of racing around in cool cars, clumsily directed sex scenes and dialogue. I'm not kidding when I say that there was more action in one of the TV series episodes. And the end shootout is a complete disappointment, especially after all the build up. And Michael Mann directed Heat, which had a fnatastic shootout, and this one is just crap compared to that.
A few neat things were spotting people I have seen in other better things. The Russian at the beginning was in a few episodes of NYPD Blue. Dominic Lombardozzo, from OZ and The Wire, has a decetn part as a cop. And Tom Towles, from Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer and NYPD Blue, has a decent role as a mean white supremecist guy.
I had such high hopes for this. But unfortunately the summer action blockbuster of the year fizzles out early on and never regains any steam.
next, we move on to Pinata: Survival Island. This is a horror cheapie about a group of kids who have a party, break open a Pinata and unleash an evil demon who had been trapped in the Pinata. Sound silly? Well, it gets much worse.
The characters spend the first half of the movie trying to figure out what is going on and then when they do figure it out, they spend the rest of the time running away from the creature.
And oh boy, what a creature it is! It looks like a twenty foot tall lava monster and we see some scenes through his eyes in a Predator-esque screen, and he crashes through the woods running after the kids. It makes no sense though. One scene will show the monster, who is huge, hiding behind a tree, growling and making stomping sounds and roaring, and then we see the kids looking for the monster, who is really only five feet away. How the fuck could they not hear that? How come one scene shows one of the characters being strangled by the monster, as he holds him high above his friends, all the time roaring away, sounding like a fleet of trains, and yet, the kids can't hear any of this?!?!?! What the fuck?
The acting is terrible. Even from Jaimie Pressley, who has become somewhat of a respectable acrtess I guess. This is awful. The death scenes are filled with terrible special effects and edited in a quick cut style that is lame and keeps up from seeing what is going on.
The best thing I have read about this mess is that after the movie was completed, the CGI of the monster was added, because the original footage of the monoster, which at the time was a man in a moonster suit, was deemed not scary enough. I would love to see that footage, since they picked this shot over that, the orginal stuff must be comedy gold.
Ok, this is a terrible movie where everything that can be bad about a movie is present and accounted for here.
Next issue, I promise a positve review... Pulse comes out Friday and I have heard good things, but the PG-13 rating leaves me very weary.
And I would like to give note to UtterTrash blog and The Infested Sound podcast for the nice support they give me on this page of mine. Thank you!
posted by Crimson Screens at 9:24 AM
1 Comments:
Haven't seen 'Miami Vice' yet, but I caught part of 'Pinata' on American Movie Classics on TV. Apparently the standards for "classic" have slipped considerably.
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