Off To The Movies

I went and saw Eragon in the theaters today with JJ (my brother-in-law). Before you ask, the movie choice was his. Can't say I cared for the movie at all. It felt like someone plagiarized Star Wars and made a fantasy film from the formula. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced the movie plot runs almost identical to Star Wars, but with fantasy elements. The problem is it isn't anywhere as good as Star Wars (not that Star Wars was exceptionally good if you view it now objectively). The pacing of the movie is a bit too fast. Scenes are here and gone in a flash. Some scenes have way too much setup and exposition, while others things are introduced with nary an extra thought. And apparently now it's mandatory if you have a fantasy film that you show people traveling along the ridge top of a mountain (what's the last fantasy film that didn't have this scene somewhere in it). Mind you, these are people on the lam and trying to hide, so let's travel along the top of the mountain. And the movie itself just gets confused. I remember one scene where it's light out, then moments in the same scene it's night, and then suddenly it's dusk and now it's raining. And all this happens within five minutes real time which is condensed down to 30 seconds of film. I heard this is based off of a book. That fact probably explains a lot about why it's trying to cram so much info into the minuscule running time. And don't even get me started on all the cliches and mandatory imagery that's used throughout the film. It's like they built an entire story by jamming together cliches. And since it's based off a book series, that goes a long way towards explaining how the ending is merely setup for a sequel. The best part of the movie is Jeremy Iron's character. It's possible that since he's the only actor I recognize that he's just that much better an actor than everyone else in the cast. Not meaning to imply John Malkovich isn't a good actor or that I don't recognize his name, but in this movie he's relegated to maybe three bit scenes with probably less than a total of 10 speaking lines, and every scene is standard evil dictator type stuff.

The best thing about the Eragon movie was the trailer for Evan Almighty, which apparently is a sequel to Bruce Almighty that's going to star Steve Carell. And today I got to see the first image of the Silver Surfer from the Fantastic Four sequel. While I didn't like the first one, and doubt the second one will be much better, the eye candy for Silver Surfer looks very pretty.