Just as good as Peanut Butter Cup, but not quite as good as rival Haagen Dazs’ simple Chocolate.
Weird fact — there is nothing Scandinavian about Haagen Dazs; that’s just misleading marketing. The company was founded in the Bronx.
Tag Archives: Eric Robert Nolan
A tiny review of “The Strain” Season 2 Premiere.
“The Strain” hissed and clawed its way back into our hearts and veins on Sunday; the season 2 premiere of FX’s vampire series deserves an 8 out of 10.
It was great. It had everything that made the show unique and fun in Season 1. We’ve got frightening, truly disgusting vampires that don’t disappoint us by being “sexy” or “charming,” and we’ve got an ambitious script that takes a stab at depicting an expansive story, complete with a historical context and a decent modern apocalyptic conspiracy. We’ve got fantastic bad guys that chew the scenery, portrayed by top-shelf actors. And the scares are there! I actually jumped during one attack, and there’s a new subplot toward the end that might’ve been dreamed up by Satan himself. (Yeesh.)
Unfortunately, we do also appear to have the same irritating one-note stock characters as good guys. Their thin dialogue includes little indication that they’re affected by the horrific events around them. And the acting among our heroes is not great across the board. These guys might’ve been cooked up by a high school creative writing class.
Also … there’s an occasional plot contrivance here and there, but we’ll forgive those.
Still, fans will not be disappointed!
A short review of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012).
I actually really liked “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012). I’d give it an 8 out of 10. And that’s even with my own admitted possible bias, as I am not a huge fan of traditional fantasy. I certainly can’t claim to be a fan of the original books, because [downcast eyes], I’ve never read them. I tried “The Silmarillion” once, because I thought that was supposed to come first in J.R.R. Tolkien’s chronology … and I just couldn’t stay with it. So I guess my take on this movie is that of an outsider, as it was with Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
But this was enjoyable movie for anyone, I thought. It’s a total immersion into an incredibly beautifully rendered fantasy world. I thought the sets and backgrounds were more detailed than the first films, for example. It’s a gorgeous movie to look at. The acting is uniformly excellent throughout. And the continuity is just great; there are well crafted segues into subplots that will eventually lead to the original trilogy.
I think the only thing that hampered my enjoyment was that it felt so much like a children’s story. (I believe I read once that Tolkien actually began his novel as a bedtime story for his children, while his subsequent “Rings” epic was intended for adult, mainstream readers.)
Peter Jackson had his creative sensibilities planted firmly in childhood fairy tale when constructing this movie. For an outsider, this seems like a standard (and sometimes predictable) quest movie. We have a tremendous deus ex machina at the end that a child might not recognize, but this adult did.
The dialogue, monsters and action were often too cartoonish for me. As a fan of creature features, I found the monsters were often too silly to be credible. (I had this small quibble, as well, with the original film trilogy.) With the outstanding exceptions of the Warg and the White Orc, they often seemed like CGI-rendered cartoons. The three trolls who want to cook the dwarves, for example, were like something out of a silly Hanna-Barbera cartoon. If this film was supposed to engage adult viewers, this creative approach was a pretty big misfire.
But I recommend this, even to people who don’t typically enjoy sword-and-sorcery fantasies.
Seriously, though … that deus ex machina at the end … if such an option is available to our heroes, why not employ it from the start of the movie? Hell, why not employ it throughout the entire “Rings” trilogy?
“Fright Night 2” was an average night.
I submit that the direct-to-video “Fright Night 2” (2013) is the paragon of average horror movies. It is neither great nor terrible. You don’t immediately call your friends to recommend it, but you don’t bemoan its $1 rental price at Redbox either. I’d give it a 6 out of 10.
The movie suffers greatly from an insufferably irritating iteration of protagonist Charlie Brewster. He’s uncharismatic in every scene, including those showing his weaselly entreaties to the girlfriend who left him after he cheated on her. (He is played blandly by Will Payne; she is played rather well by Sacha Parkinson.) Entirely absent is the charm and likable innocence that Anton Yelchin brought to the role in 2011’s “Fright Night.” (Kyle Reese fought vampires in 2011, then aided John Connor in the future to fight terminators, evidently.)
The lackluster Charlie here is compensated for by a terrific villain. Jaime Murray is a fantastic female equivalent of Dracula. She’s a strong actress, she’s a quite tall brunette who looks the part, and she knows how to both sex it up and scare us. I love her as a bad guy (gal). I’d love to see her play a conspirator on one of the nerd community’s most anticipated upcoming revivals: “24” or “The X Files.” I’m told she has a role on that … medieval show that people watch. “Shame of Thrones?” “Dame of Thrones?” I’ve never seen an episode.
“Fright Night 2” benefits from Romania as a wonderful shooting location, and it’s captured nicely by the talented eye of director Eduardo Rodriguez. What is the deal with average or mediocre horror films being filmed on location in Romania? Is it just really cheap to shoot there, like Prague?
Anyway, this movie’s title is a misnomer. This movie isn’t a sequel to the terrific 2011 film. It is actually a remake — we again meet Charlie Brewster and Peter Vincent (the very cool Sean Power) for the first time. It’s confusing. I’m guessing that this was a rejected script for the 2011 film that they decided to shoot anyway?
And here is my requisite exposition to silence the pedants in advance — of course we are all aware that this is a “remake of a remake.” The 2011 film is a nice update of the 80’s classic. (And wasn’t that fun flick the talk of the neighborhood back in the day?)
Sooooo, seeing how average this film was, I really can’t recommend that you ether watch it or skip it. I guess I can just offer a neutral “hmm.” I’d suggest that it is acceptable fare if you’re an especially ardent vampire movie fan who has already viewed the classics that are easily available.
Reviews of my poetry
Hey, if you enjoyed my poem that was published by Dead Snakes yesterday, do remember that nearly all of my published work can be linked to from my website. [EDIT: Man, that preceding sentence was awkward!]
From time to time, I’m capable of writing more than dirty limericks, and I’ve been lucky enough to occasionally receive some positive attention from editors. Check out a few reviews right here:
Oh! The photo credit here should go to the classiest lady who ever graduated from Mary Washington College, Janet Walbroehl Winston. Depicted is the Mary Washington College Amphitheater.
We DIDN’T evolve from you.
We both evolved separately from a common ancestor.
Asshole.
“American First, Irish Always”
Publication Notice: Dead Snakes features “hens staring upward.”
Well, here is some nice news today — the good folks over at Dead Snakes have published my latest poem, “hens staring upward.” (I know that its whimsical sounding title suggests another one of my joke poems, but this is definitely a darker piece, and does contain some disturbing imagery.)
Here’s the link:
“hens staring upward,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Thanks to Editor Stephen Jarrell Williams for graciously allowing me to share my voice once again over at Dead Snakes!
“Terminator Genisys” Terminated My Boredom!
There. You see that truly sucky play on words that I employed in the headline for this blog post? That should give you a sense of the quality of this film’s script. I’m serious. When one character expresses their desire to rule the world, another character shouts “Rule THIS!” before blasting the former with a laser. Because the future is a long, looooong way from Tennessee Williams, Baby.
But hold up. Believe it or not, this will actually be a positive review of “Terminator Genisys” (2015). I’d reluctantly give it an 8 out of 10, because it was a fun summer popcorn movie, despite its flaws.
And there are flaws. It isn’t high art, and it can’t even approach the pathos, drama, characters, rich themes and great old fashioned movie thrills of the true terminator classics: the 1984 original and James Cameron’s astonishingly superior sequel in 1991.
The dialogue for “Terminator Genisys” is terrible in many places. The story’s most important character, Sarah Connor, falls flat. She’s scripted as a chipper, upbeat, 20’ish “It Girl” who utterly fails to win viewer loyalty, as Linda Hamilton’s traumatized crusader did so beautifully in 1991. I also humbly opine that Emilia Clarke did poorly with the role. This is the first time I’ve ever seen her perform — I’ve heard that she’s actually considered a very good actress playing a queen on … that TV show. “Game of Bones?” “Crones?” Or something? People like that show, right?
A lackluster Sarah Connor might be a serious transgression in the fan community. For a kid who learned to love science fiction movies in the 80’s and 90’s, Ellen Ripley will always be the paradigmatic heroine, but Sarah Connor was second. No, no one can equal Hamilton’s performance, but others can still perform the role quite well when it is competently scripted. Just see Lena Heady’s inspired turn in television’s “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (2008).
The “timey-wimey” stuff lost me early on. Seriously — the time travel story elements confused and annoyed me as soon as Kyle Reese (Jesus, I almost wrote Corporal Hicks) entered the time machine and began having inexplicable memories of another timestream.
Who is sending multiple terminators on multiple missions? Are they from various timelines and various iterations of Skynet, or are they from a single future? Our heroes have an unknown benefactor with access to time machines? A T-1000 attacks people on a rowboat? Does it … float, then? Walk on water? It seems to me that hopping on a boat would be a rather ingenius way of escaping an unstoppable robot, unless he commandeers his own vehicle … Hell, it’s something I’d never thought of, and I am precisely the sort of weirdo who thinks about things like that. (Is it any worse than when other people have zombie contingency plans?)
I’m not even sure I understand the motives of the story’s antagonist who we see the most. Is this character on nobody’s side, exactly? If this character is a superior model composed of nanobots, shouldn’t Skynet be manufacturing and deploying dozens, instead of just one? For that matter … why do individual terminators each have an individual consciousness and point of view? Can Skynet simply download its own single collective consciousness to every unit?
I felt a little embarrassed at first, but the Internet reassures me that most, if not all viewers, are puzzled about these things. The wonderful io9.com, for example, has an excellent tongue-in-cheek “FAQ” pointing out this movie’s surprising multitude of unanswered questions. Warning: SPOILERS.
http://io9.com/terminator-genisys-the-spoilyr-faq-1716548070
Also … I really disliked this movie’s central plot twist.
Still, I have to give this movie a free pass. I simply can’t give a negative review to a film during which I laughed and smiled throughout. This is a fun summer event-movie. It’s a fast-paced, sci-fi actioner with fantastic special effects, the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and tons of fan service and Easter eggs. (Recreating the 1984 film’s sequences shot-for-shot? C’mon! That was just cool and fun.)
We’ve got nanobaddies, liquid metal terminators (made of mimetic polyalloy, to those of us in the know), aging T-800’s with stiff joints, time machines, terminators arriving in multiple decades, Bot-on-Bot violence, a schoolbus flipping over on the Golden Gate Bridge and … somebody does something totally sweet with an oxygen tank. They really threw in everything but the kitchen sink for this movie. The result is only kid stuff, but it’s still a good time. If you see this movie, and you don’t smile when a T-1000 emerges from a police car windshield, then you have never been a 10-year-old boy.
This year’s “Jurassic World” had none of the earmarks of a great film, but it still entertained. I gave that a positive review, so I’m going to go head and recommend this as well.
Internal E-mails, “Terminator Genisys” Marketing Division, Paramount Pictures
Art Department: Okay, so we have a movie about killer cyborgs, killer robots and embattled human resistance fighters, all time-traveling from a nightmarish dystopian future in which human beings are nearly eradicated. Would you like imagery focused on warfare raging across a scorched future earth? Or maybe a detailed image of the liquid metal terminator attacking the heroes in 1984 New York?
Management: You know what? Just place an image of the actress’ caboose front and center.
Art Department: The actress’ what?
Management: CABOOSE. BACKSIDE. Get your head out of your comic books. Also, hold off on the title script. We’re thinking of renaming this movie “Backside To The Future.”
Art Department: Well, should we also show a future battle occurring around her?
Management: Put her in a god damn wheat field.
Art Department: What?
Management: Send more coke to our office.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 