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Grrips

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Here's a little video I did featuring RE4 and Infant Annihilator. Warning for gore, explicit lyrics, and all that.

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Cars 2 Review

5 min read
So, it's been five years since the original Cars came out.  It's no secret I'm a huge fan of the first, and initially I was confident Pixar would do the sequel justice.  After all, Toy story 2 and 3 were great films, and even Pixar's weaker movies are better than the average animated flic (though Dreamworks is really catching up, but that's a major derail).  I started to grow skeptical when I saw the plot synopsis, and even more skeptical when the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes started to tally up.  Cars 2 is currently at 34%, giving it a very clear rotten rating and making it the worst reviewed Pixar film yet.   Even so, I had to see it, if only for the sake of nostalgia.  So what did I think?

The plot of this movie couldn't be more different from the first.  Without giving too much away, Lightning and his pit crew travel all over the world, competing in different races, while Mater gets involved in an action oriented sub plot in which he's mistaken for a spy.  Did I say sub plot?  While it's not markeded as such, I often found myself thinking Cars 2 should have been titled Mater: the Movie.  I love the tow truck as much as the next Cars fan, but I think the wide array of characters is one of the things that made the first movie so memorable. It would have been nice for him to share the spotlight a little; even Lightning McQueen himself seems like a side character.  And what's with the important message of the movie (other than some vaguely applicable to real life if you squint and tilt your head message about Big Oil or something) being about accepting your friends, even if they have a different background than you?  Um, isn't that what the first movie was about?  Didn't McQueen already learn this valuable lesson?  I didn't buy him being an arsehole merely to move the story along one bit.

I have to admit, the plot for this movie was just flat out bad.   While the first one was a little slow, you were definitely right there with the characters.  Maybe I'm a 12 year old at heart, but the final race possibly had me on the edge of my seat a little bit.  I found myself simply not caring what happened in this movie.  We know Mater is going to save the day with his wacky hijinks.  Instead of character development you just get action scene after action scene.  It just didn't feel like a "Cars" movie at all, more like another one of Mater's tall tales.

I have mixed feelings over this generally being a spy/action film.  While the idea isn't inherently bad, I thought it was poorly executed.  Lots of gadgets that are basically used as plot devices.  I know it's just a cartoon, and this one especially is aimed at children, but the spy cars being able to call at whim just about any kind of disguise or mechanism  really took a lot of the tension out of the film and, in my opinion, was a pretty lazy way out of having to actually be creative with how vehicles would navigate these kinds of situations.

I wasn't terribly fond of the gun use, either, or all the death.  If these kinds of things had been played out in a mature way, I might have been cool with it, but they really weren't.  Deaths were played off as nothing (hey, they're cars, right?), and gun use with little to no consequence was used all the time.  I remember thinking to myself in the scene where Mater has the gattling guns firing from his hood that this really, really isn't what Cars is supposed to be about.

There was one thing I did enjoy about the film, and that was seeing some of our favourite characters from the first one again.  But even then, a lot of them were really left out.  Mack, Sheriff, Lizzie, Ramone and Flo barely got any lines or screen time in the movie. Not a serious nitpick, but I did find it amusing that Doc has passed away, but Lizzie?  STILL ALIVE.

I guess the only thing  I have left to talk about is the animation.  The 3D was great, and the scenery was great, but I wasn't terribly happy with the animation overall, either.  What struck me about the first film was how much like vehicles the characters moved.  They seemed to have weight and they were very believable.  Right away in Cars 2 all of that is thrown out the window.  The characters move like Saturday morning cartoon characters.  The boats could have been very impressive, but they just bobbed around like toys.  The races were not exciting at all, and not nearly as well directed.  The attention to detail that went into the first movie just wasn't there.

So, all in all, I'm going to have to give Cars 2 a big thumbs down.  Even the moments of nostalgia and the few laughs I got at seeing everyone in Radiator Springs again weren't enough to make this Cars fan consider the movie good.  It's a mess.  I'll probably watch my Blu Ray copy of the original again today.
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I've been tagged!  But I'm not tagging anyone, because I don't know many people on DeviantArt other than the people who have already been tagged.

Rules:
1. You must post these rules
2. Each tagged person must list 8 things about themselves in their journal
3. At the end you must list 8 people and their icons of who you want to tag
4. Go to their pages and send them a message that you've tagged them
5. No tag backs!

Eight things about me:

1. My eyes are two different colours.
2. My pinky fingers are bent inward at a sharp angle, making it difficult for me to do delicate things like use a pencil or chopsticks.  I inherited this from my father.
3. I can't stand to touch dishes that have been washed in a dish washer - I'd rather run my nails down a chalk board.
4. I really do not like dogs.
5. I love cats.
6. I lived in the United States for a few years of my life.
7. I'm afraid of ice, but
8. I love the snow
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