How To Catch An Extraterrestrial With A Lasso...

When i first started this blog I was planning on only writing about movies and series which I personally loved but then i thought...why?
Moderate or even bad movies deserve some credit too, even if it is negative credit.
So the other day I went to see such a movie called Cowboys & Aliens.
I knew in advance that I wasn't going to be too fond of this one but I like some action and massive FX too from time to time.
Anyways let's get to the point shall we?

The plot: Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the middle of the dessert not knowing where he is or even who he is. The first thing he notices is this weird, big, metal bracelet around his wrist which he can't get off and he also notices a big messy wound on his abdomen. He picks hisself up, dust hisself off and follows a track back to a little mining town called absolution. While getting his wound treated by a local preacher (Clancy Brown) guns start going off outside. The preacher and Jake go outside to take a look and find out it's just a drunk looking for trouble and of cource the big hero of the movie takes care of him by knocking him down. But what he doesn't know is that the drunk is the son of one of the most powerful people in the Wild West called Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). In the meanwhile the sheriff finds out that there's a thousand dollar bounty on Jake's head if he's delivered to a federal marshall. While in imprisonement waiting for the federal marshalls some strange explosions take place outside. Again, Jake being the hero, he escapes and saves the town by using his bracelet (which turns out to be an alien weapon) to take a spaceship down and scaring the aliens away.
But a dozen towns people are taken by the aliens so the men who are left from a posse to find the alien hideout and save the people who have been kidnapped by them. And so the journey starts with a lot of complications on the road from ambushes by other gangs to multipal alien attacks.

I can say that this was a pretty fun movie to watch in the theather with adreanline rushing trough your vains thanks to the explosive scenes and loud thriller music in the background but if you didn't get the chance to watch it on the big screen don't bother renting or buying it unless you're a big sci-fi and/or western fan. Otherwise you will most probably be dissapointed. The script is pretty dull and cliché, the scenes are poorly allined making you feel like this was meant to be a four hour movie crammed into 120 minutes of ups and down (mostly downs) making your head spin in a bad, non-pulp fiction way which is a good kind of head spinning. You start off pretty excited when you sit down with you popcorn and soda but when the film is finally over you wonder why in the world you payed full price for something like that.
But you can't always get what you want and there has to be a couple of poorly execited movies to make the big hits of the year seem even more epic.

The Verdict: I think it's pretty clear by now that Cowboys & Aliens wasn't my kind of movie.
I don't see the use of thinking of even more arguments to make my point.
The movie was simply too hollywoodized (yes I just made that up).
But because Daniel Craigs preformance wasn't too bad and the animated FX was pretty awesome, the score isn't as low as you might think...
So Cowboys & Aliens, you still got a D with 5.2/10
Hey, stiffen up that upper lip...it could have been worse ;)

A Very Special Story...

How I your mother (or HIMYM for short) has been of the most popular sitcoms of the past six years, especially stateside.
For some reason it never really got a solid grip on the Belgian television viewers...but it did on me.
This sitcom is without a doubt my favorite sitcom so far, altough it has gradually gotten worse for the past two seasons.
Don't ask me why I like it because I really don't know, aside from the fact that it's hilarious of course!
Maybe one of the reasons is the fact that the main characters remind me a bit of me and my own friends and how we get along and interact with each other. 
anyway...
If you want you can leave a comment below and explain why you love/hate HIMYM ;)

The Plot: Ted (Josh Radnor) has always wished for one thing...to find the love of his life. But as it turns out, it's not so easy to simply bump into that one special person. The story is told by the older voice of Ted (Bob Saget) to his children and the story is visualised on screen so the entire show is actually one really...reaaaaally long flashback of Ted's adventures. And together with his friends Ted finds himself in the most comical situations constantly thinking his current girlfriend is the one for him but so far it never is. So Ted's conquests have been rolling on to the screen for six seasons now and a seventh season premiering today. 


If HIMYM is known for one thing it's Barney's (Neil Patrick Harris) endless self-made expressions.
Here's a short video of just a couple of those expressions.

The Verdict: Since this has been my favorite sitcom for over three years it's not a big surprise that my rating is going to be a little higher then most sitcoms deserve, cause let's face it...sitcoms have - no matter how fun they are to watch - a pretty low standard of comedy. But not HIMYM, somehow it can always make me laugh no matter how down I'm feeling at the moment and a sitcom that can make something like that happen is a damn good one!


So here's the final decision...HIMYM has set an exellent score of 8.7/10 in my book!

Let's start with a big bang...

And by big bang I'm not talking about the big bang theory (although I might write something about that in the future). What I actually wanted to talk about is, in my opinion, one of the greatest movies of all time and arguably THE best movies of the past year or so.
You all know which movie i'm talking about...Inception!
No? You don't??
In that case stop reading right now and...buzz off will you? This is a serious blog and it's not meant for amateur movie 'enthusiats'.

Now for the rest of you, let's continue.
The reason that I descided to start with Inception is because it's simply the best movie I've seen in a while. It's got everything a great movie needs: an excellent story, a solid cast, gives you a lot to think about (no really it might even be a bit too much), great FX, amazing music, superb...
I think I've made my point :p
Though there are some people who think that inception is overrated I would say that those people don't have the brains to understand the plot.

The plot: now before I begin telling the plot you should know that there's a lot more to it then I'm going to tell, but it's just too much to type it all down.

Domenic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a master thief and con artist who has lost his family due to the suicide of his wife Mal Cobb (Marion Cotillard) which forced him to run away and become a fugitive since the police thinks he is responsible for the death of his wife.
Ever since then he has travelled the world working as an extractor of ideas for multinational companies.
This is achieved by entering the targets (or subject as they're called in the movie)  dreams through a device without the subject himself knowing he's dreaming.
This way Cobb can extract ideas and thoughts of the subject through is subconsciousnes ans deliver them to the cliënt who has hired him and his team.
 
But one day, Cobb is hired to preform an extraction on a owner of a major company named Saito (Ken Watanabe), and everything goes wrong when Cobb's desceased wife enters the dream through Cobb's subconsiousness and ruins there plan. After this Saito offers to make a deal with Cobb to get back at the corporation that hired him in the first place in return for his life and a clean criminal record so that he can go back to the US and see his children again.
But there's a catch...Saito doesn't want Cobb to preform extraction but inception.
So instead of stealing an idea from someones mind, he has to plant one.
Altough this is believed to be impossible and Cobb's right hand man refuses to do the job at first, Cobb claims he has done it before.
And so the journey starts along with heart pounding action, a couple of emotional scenes and huge brain farts throughout the entire movie due a matrix style philosophy about the dreaming world.

I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone who has enough smarts to understand the entire matrix trilogy to see this one, and to the others: there's a bunch of thrilling action and special effects scenes which allready make the movie a must watch.

 If you're still not convinced to go see this masterpiece of the decade in the movie industry, here's a trailer that might give you that extra edge to watch it.

The Verdict: As I said in the beginning, inception is one of the greatest movies of all time and therefore I'm going to give it a rating which is probably going to be one of the highest ratings that I'm going to give in my entire blog.

So I hereby grant inception a 9.2/10