Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips, Selected Reviews 2014, Volume Two

By Stephen Bourne

Funnier. Smarter. Entertaining-er. 2014 Volume Two is your latest collection of new big screen reviews for movie lovers, from the website of hundreds of reviews enjoyed worldwide since 2002. Find Hollywood blockbusters, Canadian independents and a few surprises well worth checking out. Grab your copy today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Bourne
• Release date: Dec 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780969984351

Stephen Bourne

From moviequips.ca: "Stephen Bourne is just a guy who loves screening movies and writing about them. He has appeared on TV, radio and in print, and is one of Canada's first web-based unaccredited movie reviewers to have simultaneously been a member of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Online Film Critics Society and Rotten Tomatoes, as well as listed on the Internet Movie Database. Weird. Stephen lives in Ottawa, Canada with his wife."

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Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips

Selected Reviews 2014

Volume Two

Copyright Stephen Bourne

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Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips, Selected Reviews 2014, Volume Two, is written, edited, published and copyrighted by Stephen Bourne. All graphics and content of this publication are the property of Stephen Bourne, unless obviously not and/or attributed otherwise. World rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit the author’s Smashwords page and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

First edition ebook. Published December 2014.

ISBN 978-0-9699843-5-1

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Table of Contents

300: Rise Of An Empire

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Divergent

Enemy

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Her

I, Frankenstein

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

The Monuments Men

Muppets Most Wanted

No Clue

The Nut Job

Pompeii

The Raid 2

Robocop

That Awkward Moment

Trailer Park Boys 3: Don't Legalize It

Whitewash

The Wind Rises

About the author

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300: Rise of an Empire (2014)

USA, 102 min

Heroic Athenian general Themistocles (played by Sullivan Stapleton) rallies Greece's armada against Persian god-king Xerxes' (Rodrigo Santoro) formidable naval attack at Artemisium while Spartan king Leonidas' 300 brave suicidal odds against Xerxes' land assault at Thermopylae, in director Noam Murro's clunky, knuckle headed addendum to the far superior, multi-award-winning film, 300 (2006), starring Gerard Butler as Leonidas. SHPARRTAAA!!! Reportedly adapted from Xerxes, comic book legend Frank Miller's as-yet unpublished prequel to his 1998 comic book series, 300, 300: Rise of an Empire co-stars Eva Green, and Lena Headey, as Xerxes' malevolent right hand and naval commander Artemisia, and Leonidas' sharp-tongued widow Queen Gorgo, respectively. Film fans might recognize Stapleton from the Oscar-nominated Aussie gangster drama Animal Kingdom (2010), and Green from Casino Royale (2006) and Dark Shadows (2012).

The closing credits of this feature do state that the events and characters it depicts are fictional, but the battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium did happen in 480 BC, during the Greco-Persian Wars. King Leonidas I (540-480 BC), politician and naval general Themistokles (524-459 BC), and King Xerxes I (518-465 BC) actually were major players in those struggles locking Greece's sovereignty against the world's first superpower: Persia. The Persian Empire stretched across thousands of square kilometres during the reign of Xerxes I, encompassing modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and India. Themistokles' forces did defeat Xerxes' father, King Darius, at the Battle of Marathon ten years before Thermopylae and Artemisium. In a strange twist of fate later on, Themistokles ended up living his last years in exile as a Persian governor. However, because other figures and specific situations presented are fictional within the context of that documented era, 300: Rise of an Empire falls into the genre of historic fantasy. Like Pompeii (2014), or Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

Wow, what a hugely disappointing rehash this much-anticipated sequel turned out to be. Heavily reliant on replays of - and key references to - its wonderfully compelling, visually astounding big screen predecessor, 300: Rise of an Empire is little more than a live-action puppet show of surprisingly dreadful story telling populated by a desperately uninteresting cast. Its starring lead, Sullivan Stapleton, brings absolutely no screen presence to his role as war-tested Greek general Themistokles. Stapleton's character is so macho that even his name looks like it rhymes with testicles, and yet it's a chore noticing he's on-screen in most of his scenes. He's boring! A mouse, far removed from the thunderous gregarity of Leonidas. In contrast, Eva Green's performance as blood-thirsty, perpetually bitchy Persian weapon personified Artemisia is laughably hammy as she flails and gnashes through her nutty, over-the-top dialogue. She's like a younger, armoured and blade-wielding version of Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard (1950), all teeth and crazy eyes, slicing and dicing anyone who gets in the way of her treasured close-up.

The core story this hot mess revolves around is the naval Battle of Artemisium, fought on the Grecian shores of the grey and choppy Aegean Sea, between General Testicles, uh, General Themistokles and his combined militia of half-naked seamen and Xerxes' mighty armada led by hot-tempered killer Artemisia. Hugely out-numbered in men and ships, Themistokles relies on strategic use of the sea and weather in his efforts to stop Persia's invasion as he did a decade earlier. Ships crash and smash apart. Blades and blood fill the air in aching slow motion. Stuff blows up, in aching... slow... motion. Apparently fresh off the set of the recent Pompeii movie, a white horse randomly appears and runs through feiry wreckage. In. Slow. Mo. Yawn. We weep for the glory days when 300 was a new and awesome movie, eight long years ago.

Sure, this is definitely a great-looking sequel, enhanced by a lot of the same camera tricks and micro-attentive slow motion moments of glorified gore seen throughout 300, but Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad's screenplay feels lazy and hollow by comparison. Snyder directed 300, also co-writing it with Johnstad. What happened?! This is more a laurel-resting cash-grab - complete with bare gratuitous boobage. A parody stripped of punch lines, rather than the captivating, high octane actioner it aspires to be.