As the usual weekend routine dictates, Friday and/or Saturday nights are movie nights. This week Chrys and I rented Valiant and X-Men 3: The Last Stand on Saturday (since my grandparents were in town and we spent all Friday night in Maple Ridge visiting).
I woke up later than I was wanting to (1:00pm-ish) and had to run to the store right away to pick up wine, beer and various other goodies for drinking and making Irish buffalo stew. Got home, got the stew going, finished off the left over 1/2 bottle of wine, 1/2 can of guiness, grabbed a beer and flopped onto the couch to watch movies while the stew cooked away in the slow cooker. Which leads up to this weeks movie review:
Valiant:
Rating: 3/5
Valiant is an animated classic underdog steps up the challenge and prevails in the end style movie, ala Rudy. Valiant is a tiny little pigeon, much smaller than the average pigeon, but he has a dream and nothing will stop him from making it come true. He leaves his home and mommy pigeon and flies to London in the hopes of joining the RHPS (Royal Homing Pigeon Service) to fight for queen and country against the evil Falcon forces. The movie is set in 1944, the end of WWII, and the RHPS is given the task of retreiving a critical message from the French Mouse Resistance, one that will change the course of the war.
The entire story revolves around the premise of the little pigeon that could, Valiant, trying to fight his way through the RHPS and battle the evil Falcons to retreive and return this critical message to his superiors in London. The animation is sub-par when compared to Monsters Inc. and movies of that sort, the story line has been used way to much and the movie is just barely over 1hr long. Overall, it was slightly entertaining, had a couple remotely funny spots and killed some time while waiting for Irish buffalo stew. Nothing to write home about, but not bad for killing an hour.
Official Valiant Website
The irish buffalo stew had been stewing away for a while before the movie and all the way through the movie and STILL wasn’t even bubbling (this was around 8:00pm), so we decided to stick the second movie in and give the stew another 2 or so hours. Which brings us to the second movie of the night:
X-Men 3: The Last Stand
Rating: 2.5/5
X-Men 3: The Last Stand, is the third movie in the illustrious X-Men series and, in my opinion, is the worst of the three. One of my main reasons for wanting to see all of the X-Men movies, besides the fact that I loved the TV show as a kid, is that they are all filmed in Vancouver and on Vancounver Islands, and I love being able to pick out where certain scenes were filmed. This one especially interested me filming wise, as I actually saw them filming the protest scenes downtown outside the Sheraton Wall Centre and two churchs across the street. It was really cool to watch, which is more than I can say for the movie.
Only a short time into the movie two of the main characters, Professor Charles Xavier and Scott “Cyclops” Summers, are killed off. I was incredibly happy they finally offed Cyclops, I couldn’t stand his whiney bitch of a character, but it came as a bit of a surprise that they would kill off Professor Xavier, but as a friend pointed out in his review “I guess because his power isn’t action oriented, writers just don’t know what the hell to do with him, so best to knock him out of the majority of a story.” Which is a very valid point.
The story line of X-Men 3 is based on the fact that a pharmaceutical company, through the use of a miracle child, has developed a “cure” for the mutant gene sequence, which will revert any mutant back to a human state. Naturally, Magneto, played by Eric Lensherr, doesn’t like that idea at all and assembles an army of mutants to attack the pharmaceutical company and destroy the cure and miracle boy. But before he can manage to achieve his goal, he has to convince the alter-ego Jean Grey character Phoenix to join his forces. Phoenix is one of my all time favorite X-Men characters from the old show and they did a terrible job adapting her to the movie, her character is nothing like it was in the TV show and is a horribly bastardized version of the original. I was incredibly disappointed by the lack of a roll that Phoenix played, even though she’s supposed to be one of the strongest mutants to have ever existed.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I knew phoenix appeared in this movie and I knew it was filmed in Vancouver, I probably wouldn’t have been terribly interested in seeing it. I thought the story was a great idea, but wholey under developed and terribly acted. If it weren’t for the coolness factor of this being filmed in Vancouver and the fact that phoenix at least appears, this wouldn’t have even got a 2.5 rating. Another steaming pile of crap from renowned underwhelming director Brett Ratner, good work chum.
Offical X-Men 3: The Last Stand Website
The worst part about X-Men 3 is the fact that the damn Irish buffalo stew STILL wasn’t done when the movie finished, had to kill time by watching TV for a while before it was finally good to go. We didn’t end up eating until about midnight last night, but it didn’t turn out to bad at least. Note to self: Allow a lot more time when cooking stew in a SLOW COOKER, hence the name of the device used to make the dish, dumb ass.
