Review: MIB3 Travles Back In Time To When It Was Actually Good!

MEN IN BLACK 3: B+

Hey, that was pretty darn good. When I entered the theater I was expecting a movie that wasn’t going to be very good. I didn’t have very high expectations for the film and thought that it would probably be as bad as the second. My theory proved wrong, it was very, very entertaining and worth seeing, that is if you liked the first (otherwise you probably wont get it.) It’s not very emotional but oddly enough you feel for the characters. The movie’s villian is gross and do expect to see a weird alien spider crawl into his odd teethed hand. If you don’t have a problem with that enjoy the movie. It’s not really worth seeing in 3d since it was converted and only one scene really needs it. The effects are much better then the first and the idea of time travel in this movie is oddly complex in a way. The acting isn’t really good until you see Josh Brolin. Josh Brolin enteres the movie as a younger Tommy Lee Jones and basicaly makes the movie. The voice is perfect, his drollness in delightful, and he manages to be funny and serious at the same time. A lot of cute jokes are made including that Andy Warhole is a MIB agent which sort of makes sense. Josh Brolin is actually very engaged in the movie and he acts well, there are a few twists. Like “The Avengers” it’s not high quality cinema but it’s pretty good and I was impressed. Don’t be fooled by the second movie, MIB has travled back in time to when it was good and made an entertaining, suprisingly good movie. See it.

Reveiw: The Avengers Acheives The Goal of Fun But Some Characters Lack Depth, Hunger Games Leaves You Hungry For A Better Film.

THE AVENGERS: B+

When you go see “The Avengers” don’t expect great cinema. It’s supposed to be fun and it achieves that goal. With the best actor far and away being Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, you will expect some witty banter that in my opinion is the best point in the film. Joss Whedon has done a pretty good job of not letting the fact that you are seeing 6 superheros fight at the same time get overwhelming. The action sequences though are overdone and can be regrettably “Tranformers” like at times. One scene has a giant metal worm emerging from a hole in the sky that was opened by a beam (reminds you a lot of Transformers doesn’t it?) Action sequences are not a high point of the film but take up about half of the movie.  They can be fun at times though. Despite the witty humor and Robert Downey Jr.’s witty Iron Man some other characters lack depth. Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury, the militaristic head of S.H.E.I.L.D. can just have you saying to yourself, what a jerk! The scenes with him seem often too long and boring. Luckily, he is not the main spotlight of the film. Unfortanetly, they do spend a lot of screen time on Captain America who just seems like too much of a goodie tooshues.  He doesn’t seem to be that in to saving Earth but making sure that Iron Man doesn’t say any rude remarks. Captain America has obviously been reading too much Jane Austen. “The Avengers” does leave a cliffhanger at the end of the credits that leads into “Avengers 2.” Jeremy Renner does not get enough screen time with a promising looking character if they had just gave him some of Captain America’s screen time instead. Mark Ruffalo pleases as yet another actor playing the Hulk, except this time it looks like he’ll stay the Hulk. His character of course is more interesting when he’s not a raging green monster but when he’s a monster, it’s still fun. In one pleasurable scene, Captain America turns to the Hulk and says “Hulk Smash!” The Hulk smiles, jumps up and bashes every single thing in sight. So I’d say if your looking for fun, see “The Avengers.”

THE HUNGER GAMES: B-

I am a big fan of the books, not that much of the movie. One of the many problems about the Hunger Games is that it never captures the spirit of the book or gets the point across. It almost seems like it’s been censored so that nothing the book wanted to say is there. It’s not gritty, it’s not violent enough, and it’s too slow in the beginning. It takes too long for them to get out and then the training is tedious. Haymitch, potrayed by Woody Harrylson is supposed to be a mean drunkard but in the movie he is too nice  and you actually like him. Once you get into the games, the action sequences are way too short and the good parts are not long enough. For instance, the freinship between Rue and Katniss only lasts about 15 minutes of the movie. Stanly Tucci’s Ceaser Flickerman has too much screentime taking away time from other characters. Your never really into it or excited exept for one jump out of your seat moment.. They forget elements and the movie has cut out any perhaps slightly gross parts. All and all, the movie lacks a creative director and the movie turns out rather pedestrian. A big dissapointment. If you havn’t read the books don’t bother seeing it, you might get the wrong idea.

MOVIES NOT REVEIWED:

BATTLESHIP: A loud noisy, unnecisary big budget cheese not worth your eyes.

THE DICTATOR: Sacha Baron Choen makes gross jokes and degrades people for fun.

DARK SHADOWS: Big budjet movie remake of the 1960′s soap opra that looked promising but apparently lacks teeth.

It’s All About the Rueben

    https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=010babeb54&view=att&th=1362dbd3d5f79c4e&attid=0.1&disp=thd&zw

 

This  is a reuben from Milos city cafe, a resturuant on the eastside on broadway in Portland. You can get this sandwich at lunch and it is a good reuben and that is important since this marks the start of my on going reuben poll rating reubens around Portland. The meat is not to heavy and that is good. The balance of flavors goes well. This is better then the one at Kenney and Zukes which is a mediocre resturuant.

I will be back with more information soon.

Thank you

Going to Machu Picchu

People of the world, do not despair but I am leaving on a trip to Machu Picchu and shall return in two weeks. Not only willl I have many different cool stories to tell but I shall be even more experienced with foreign politics! Wait… what? Oh well, like I said I’m going to Machu Picchu and I will be back to write amazing posts in two weeks.

Story Time: No Explanation!

No Explanation

By Lukas Gordon

 

I really can’t understand why people make things seem so much bigger. Why didn’t Romeo just marry Juliet? Why did Ben Kenobi need to keep fighting Darth Vader? Why didn’t he just make a run for it and attack Vader some other time? It’s always why did and why didn’t. Why can’t it just be he did or she did? I do what I think is right, I just do what I want. Well I used to but now well… my story begins here. I was walking down the road to a seven eleven to get some potato chips. When I walked in I grabbed some barbecue lays like usual because down here everything you eat is garbage. The way I saw it was why travel 3 miles to get some gourmet natural potato chips when you can get something really cheap here. As I was ordering, I noticed that my bag was already opened but had been slightly resealed. Obviously the person who had opened it had done a bad job resealing it. I took it thinking that the person couldn’t have done too much to a bag of junk food and left the store. When I got home I poured the chips into a bowl and a curious sight met my eyes. It was a note. I took it out and read it and this is what it said:

67 SW Clinton St. 3:00 Am.

That was really weird! I thought at first maybe it was an advertisement but then another thing caught my eyes, OR ELSE! Man I thought, the advertizing business must be getting serious. Then I thought, maybe it wasn’t an advertisement but I’m not the nosy type, so I ate the potato chips. That night I couldn’t help but keep getting an urge to discover what that note meant, so my urge won against my common sense and at 3:00 Am I drove to 67 SW Clinton St. When I got there I discovered that I was right next to a dark alley. It wasn’t exactly my kind of place. Gas reeked through the area. I walked around the corner and what a sight to meet my eyes but… a cheery looking guy shouting “Congratulations you’ve won a tour Lay’s factory!” he said. I was disappointed; I thought I had closed in on a case or something. The guy gave me a card and said to arrive at Lay’s factory at 5:00 Pm. I got home and threw out the card. I don’t eat potato chips just so I can win a stupid tour to Lay’s factory. Then I had a thought, if I had not been so curious and over excited the possibilities I might never have gotten a free tour of Lay’s! Sometimes over exaggerating things is useful. The next day I tried something I had never done before, I entered the lottery. Chances of winning the lottery are definitely not very likely. I looked to see if I’d won the next day and I didn’t. It’s the thought that counts. With this new found ability I started to take advantage of it. I bought a beach house, watched a Shakespeare play which I had never done before, and I drove three miles just to get a gourmet bag of potato chips. I will never watch Hamlet again. It was possibly the most boring play I have ever seen in my life and that’s an accomplishment! What I realized is that life is a whole lot more fun when you don’t just do things with no explanation. That’s when I drove out to my beach house. I was going to take a break from the city life. Since I didn’t have experience with this sort of thing it turns out it was vacation time for everybody and there was no moment of peace on that beach for me. That’s why I spent most of my time in my beach house but it got loud there to. I decided to over exaggerate and microphone. I walked out to the beach, stood on a chair, and yelled into the microphone:

“Are you guys familiar with the term peace, do you have respect for anybody? I swear if I hear one more yelp, cry, or annoying sound I will bomb this beach and leave a smoldering crater in replacement!”

From then on I had the beach all to myself. One day after I had gotten back I was walking when a man pulled out a gun and said

“This is a stick up”

I didn’t have any money with me so I told him simply

“Sorry I don’t have any money”

Well, he didn’t believe me exactly so he put the gun to my head and told me that if I didn’t hand over the money at the count of 3 then he’d kill me. I used my over exaggerating. Hopefully this would work.

“If you shoot me then you will go to jail for life and your family, if you have one will perish. My ghost will haunt you and you will die alone in agony. You will be hated. Everybody will remember you as a liar, a murderer, a cheat, and a criminal. I suggest you take that gun away from my head” I said. Sure enough he ran away and the next day I learned he turned himself over to the police. Guess what, I got a reward for capturing him too. Turns out he was the NO.1 wanted criminal and I got 1,000 dollars just for scaring him. Can’t say I complained. I then decided to move away from the city and moved to Hawaii where I got an awesome house on the beach next to a pineapple tree. I entered the lottery and won 1,000 dollars more and guess what I did. I bought a personal airplane and named it The Exaggeration which was the best name I could think of. Basically because exaggerating was what had got me all this awesome stuff. I flew to New York and got on American Idol. I told the judges that if they didn’t let me into the finales contest I would scream at the top of my lungs and put them in jail for bribing. It didn’t really make sense but who cares, it worked. The only problem was that I couldn’t sing and that was bad. I decided to enter America’s funniest home videos with me trying to sing! So when I didn’t win American Idol I had a video of I failing and I entered it. Guess what? I won 3,000 dollars for entering a stupid video. Sometimes you wonder about why people get 3,000 dollars just by taking a video of them hitting themselves the head with a pole? Makes you wonder doesn’t it. Well who cares I won 3,000 dollars. Now I’m just deciding what to do with it. It was next day on the news that I heard a tsunami was coming. I saw the satellite pictures, I saw the reports, and I saw proof. I tried to get an airplane trip back to Chicago but my pilot had already made a run for it… with my plane. Now I was trapped, there were no airplane tickets, and I was right on the water. Every day it got closer and a sense of doom grew every day. I couldn’t sleep at night. I kept thinking I was going to die. Plus the word came out that I bribed the American Idol judges and no one liked me for that. 7 hours were left and finally realized what I needed to do. There were thousands of families trapped here and they needed to get out. There life was more worthwhile then mine. I used my money to buy helicopters and planes to get people out. I shipped about 2,000 people left behind off the island to safety. Then it came to 10 minutes. I watched the clock count down. TICK TOCK TICK TOCK!  Then the time was out. I lay there in fear. I knew my hour was up. Then suddenly a broadcast came over that it was a false alarm and that there was no tsunami after all. I couldn’t believe it; I did all that for nothing. I was shocked. I gasped but no biggie. I was alone on the beach. I sat in my beach chair and I sipped my tropical smoothie. Ahhh life is good but I still need to get my 3,000 dollars back.

 

BLOG POST: Made in China

So I’m writing my post heare in my hometown of Portland OR. Portland’s full of writers and other talented people. They use things that are made by people. I use a PC laptop to write my blog. It works well. Since I’m 12, I have some toys and they’re nice too. Man, USA makes good things. No, because I bet if I looked on the back of a lot of my toy cars then I’d see MADE IN CHINA on the back. China? Why China, we can make our own toys. And the unemployed? They would have a job. A job? Yes, not the best one in the world but a job, so that all those poor workers in China could enjoy their own toys and not be treated like slaves. They’re are smart people out there who don’t get the chance to work and those people running those factories in China don’t give a flying you know what. Their well off sitting in their chairs with their feet on their desks. Why don’t we ever see MADE IN U.S.A.? For all I know they would be better quality and safer. Don’t we have the competence to make some of the items we use everyday? Phones! That’s a big one, APPLE has factories dishing out iPad’s, and iPhones every single day in big numbers. Take Oregon’s own Tillamook Cheese for instance. Made from cows in Oregon! Guess what they did? They decided to make their cheese in Wisconsin and Pendleton. They closed their major packing plant causing a huge number of people in Tillamook to lose their jobs and it’s ruined people’s lives. Now they’res no use for Tillamook Cheese to be Tillamook! Now they ship the cows (WONDERFUL IDEA!) boycott Tillamook Cheese. I guess it’s that if you realize how these things being MADE IN CHINA is affecting us and the unemployment rate then we could have things be made in the U.S.A.  The sad thing is that people don’t care and we need to change it. It’s one of those sad things that makes the U.S. have problems. So I’m proud to say that my blog in MADE IN THE U.S.A.

Well… the oscars are over.

Yep, the Oscars are over. The awards have been given and I’m happy to say most of my predictions were correct. Yes, Jean Dujardin did win best actor, and Bource won best original score for “The Artist.” “The Descendants” won best screenplay, Octavia Spencer won best supporting actress for “The Help” and what do you know, Christopher Plummer won best supporting actor for “Begginers.” Wait a minute… Meryll Streep won best actress!!!??? OKay, first of all, everybody thought that the oscar was going to Viola Davis for “The Help.” Though I have not seen the movie, I hear she is amazing. Not only is she not that well-known an actress but the movie was supposed to be better anyway! So why did Meryll Streep win? Was her character intresting? Last time I heard “The Iron Lady” wasn’t supposed to be that good and plus they were saying that Meyrll Streep was really good but that the movie and characters were not that interesting. I disagree with this award. Of course the Oscars are all about politics and she’s the famous actress. On another note, Adam Sandler has set the record for the most Razzie awards. For you who don’t know what the Razzies are, they are the Oscars for the worst performances and movies. congratulations Adam Sandler, you have made a heck of a lot of bad movies. Billy Crystal was funny so he completed his job.  “The Artist” won best picture, so I was right about that too. Man, “Hugo” kicked butt in the earlier parts of the Oscars. I’d say the Oscars were good this year so good job and happy post Oscars!

Same Comic, Same Day

People were slightly confused when all three of these comic strips came out at the same time. Then people realized the real reason. Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Darby Connely (Get Fuzzy), and Bill Amend (Foxtrot) planned to do the same strip as an April Fools joke. Pretty good one too.

Houdini’s Dangerous Journey

Houdini was locked inside this giant half turtle that washed up on shore. Probably came from the deepest parts of the ocean.  Houdini asked to be shackled up inside of it. To make matters worse he was sewn in. In the theater people watched with suspense. Inside the monster, Houdini was struggling with the toxic fumes. With them it was extremely hard to breath and he was choking. Amazingly he escaped the shackles. Nobody knows how he did it, but he escaped… alive. This is the only remaining photograph of the so-called “What-is-it.” Houdini went on to do many more daring acts and venture into dangerous territory that he should not have entered. Houdini was extremely egotistic and thought he should be the only man shocking people on stage. He sought to prove spiritualists frauds. His subject was a lady named Mina Crandon who claimed to have a spirit named Walter who cussed and knocked down furniture. Houdini was constantly trying to debunk her but she kept getting away. One day Walter cursed after Houdini,

“Houdini you ******! You will die within a year!”

Houdini finally thought he had exposed her methods when he discovered that Mina was using sleight of hand to knock down the furniture and was probably doing a low voice carry for Walter. He was kicked off stage by Mina and “Walter.” Most people belive Houdini was right but some don’t and his death was purely because of him. He died more than after a year had passed but not that far away! Houdini suffered four crushing blows to the abdomen and had internal bleeding. He ignored it, after all he was the invincible Houdini (or so he thought) One day he was too weak to pick up a fish bowl for his act. It was suspended. Then it got worse. He collapsed and was rushed to the hospital and learned he would not live. He died hours later but no one will ever forget him. Houdini lives on and always will!

Hey, a video I made! It’s funny too!

http://youtu.be/9snrPYUDLKE 

Check this video out, I made it and trust me, it’s awesome. It’s got Mr. T in it. Also the Big Lebowski!