Watched for the Actionx52 Challenge, #32-Watch a "buddy cop" action film.
Way too long for something so simple with characters that it would be generous to call one dimensional (one brother wears black silk underwear; the other beats his girlfriend; that is about the extent of characterization here). The villains are no more interesting, seeming to have no goal other than not to die. I might be able to live with that if the action was memorable, but it's not.…
Janky in the way pilots often are, this is still better than I remembered. Not quite what the series (one of my favorites) would become, but the seeds are here. If Star Trek is sci-fi by way of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet, Babylon 5 is sci-fi by way of Empire Pictures and the Roger Corman factory (they even share some of the same actors!).
It’s a shame the film for this was destroyed so they can’t remaster it, because it looks pretty bad.
I say this without irony: Gremlins is a fantastic Christmas movie. In many ways a Reagan-era response to It's a Wonderful Life, this film explores what happens to those who for whatever reason are unable to have a Merry Christmas, those who fall through the cracks of '80s capitalism. Marketing and consumerism is everywhere in this film, and it is no surprise that the targets of the gremlins: a gadget-filled middle-class home, a bank, a department store, and a movie…
Guardians of the Galaxy was as awesome as it was billed; very much a cross between The Fifth Element and The Avengers. Speaking of The Fifth Element though, I agree that the villains are pretty lacking here (Again, Marvel) and that what a movie like this really needed was a Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg. I mean, Lee Pace, you're playing a character called Ronan the Accuser in a movie with a talking raccoon and a dude who gets inside more alien…
