Hangover: Part 2 Review

Directed By: Todd Phillips

Produced By: Todd Phillips, Daniel Goldberg

Written By: Todd Phillips, Scot Armstrong, Craig Mazin

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis 

Edited By: Debra Neil-Fisher, Mike Sale

Music By: Christophe Beck

Distributed By: Warner Bros.

Runtime: 102 minutes

Rating: R for "pervasive language, strong sexual content, including graphic nudity, drug use and brief violent language"

4.5/10.0

Director Todd Phillips not wanting to mess with the winning formula (thinking if it ain't broke, don't fix it) reintroduces the same characters and the very same scenario that made The Hangover a box office hit. This time around it’s Stu (Ed Helms) getting married; not to the lovely stripper with the heart of gold from Part I (which personally made me sad after all the bonding that went on at the end of the first film) but to some random girl named Lauren (Jamie Chung) who basically says hi and then bye; which is the most character development you get out of her or any of the other women in the cast. The wedding and the overall setting takes place in the exotic local of Thailand in an effort to appease Ed’s Thai in-laws to be. Cautious from the hellish series of events that took place in Las Vegas two years prior, Stu even decides to play it safe with just an IHOP brunch. However not even ten movie minutes later, he is convinced that one beer bottle toast wouldn’t hurt and BAM let the games begin. Lo and behold, the “Wolf Pack” is back at it again. 


Spoilers after the break!

Coming to a Theatre Near You…

Spiderman.  The Lion King.  Shrek.  Billy Elliot.  Legally Blonde.  All movies, seemingly disconnected, correct? Wrong.  All five, as well as countless others are in fact musicals that at one time or another have graced the Broadway stage in New York. 

HTTProfiiles: House, Season 1

With it being announced that the TV series House is ending next year after an 8 season run, I decided to write an article on what I think the show means and other various things. We’ll start from Season 1 and continue on until we hit the end of Season 7, in a series of articles.

Top Five Antagonist of Films that you Can’t Help but Love.

This is a list of the top five antagonist in films made form the 90s to the present that you can’t help but love. The meaning behind that is that these antagonist are not your run of the mill bad guy. These antagonist are different, whether it be just great writing on part of the writer that makes this villain a step above the rest or the actor who plays this antagonist or both. These five antagonist are just simply known for equal or in some aspect more likeable than their protagonist counter parts. Lets start the show.

Movie Marketing Part I: Going Viral

Friday marked the opening of the viral campaign for Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, and already it shows itself to be something to follow. The viral campaign for The Dark Knight remains, in my opinion, the best ever marketed by a studio, so I am very excited about following Nolan's 2012 production along these coming months. In light what's to come, I've decided to start a new multi-part series. In this new age of constant journalism, internet rumors, spoilers, and leaks, keeping secrets in the movie business is harder than ever, especially when working on such highly publicized productions like superhero movies. Hundreds of websites and blogs across the internet are dedicated to movie rumors (including my favorite: SuperHeroHype), along with those internet followers who are always willing to leak anything they can just to show dominance.

Chris Nolan, Jim Cameron, JJ Abrams, and Zach Snyder are all noted for their notoriously tight-lipped productions, but this series will focus less on the people and more on the styles through which studios market films. The mystery behind a project is, after all, one of film's greatest allures. More often than not, though, this marketing campaign is the product of the studio rather than the director. One of the newest forms of movie marketing came along with the rapid expansion of the internet in the past half decade by way of viral marketing, made even more prominent in the past few years with social networking media. It amazes me the extent to which a studio can go to get people involved with the marketing of a film, all as a way of both giving in to their demands to be kept informed while also distracting them from the real rumors. Nearly all movies nowadays create Facebook pages and Twitter trends and Tumblrs as a way of spreading themselves around the internet, but none have taken the possibilities to the extend of Nolan's Batman trilogy, led by the company 42 Entertainment (at least for TDK - DKR's company has not been made public).

--Be advised that an official promotional photo of Bane is shown after the break and is considered a LOW-LEVEL SPOILER--

Top five TV shows and Why I Love Them

What is the greatest thing that an artist can do?

Is it create a masterpiece that survives the times? Is it to inspire hope in desolate times? Or is it to show a side of something that no one ever considered?

Personally, I think the greatest thing an artist can do is create.

Create? Isn’t that the entirety of an artists job description? Isn’t that what they do anyways, regardless of the quality of the creation?

Talking Animals in Film

I recently watched the Zach Snyder film Legend of the Guardians: Owls of Ga'Hoole and found myself fascinated not by the movie so much as by audience's ability to make non-human characters so human...so lifelike, in an odd turn of phrase. It's an animated family film in all sense of the phrase, and I wasn't expecting much from it. The main reason I was watching it at all was because I'm a Snyder fan and felt the need to see even his strange picks of direction. As can probably be expected since I'm writing this post, it was a surprisingly good movie. There wasn't anything groundbreaking in it, from the typical three-act narrative and redemption plot of the young owl Soren (voiced by Jim Sturgess of 21 and Across the Universe) as he seeks to find the ancient Guardians and save the land. Everything is quite predictable, but that didn't stop me from being entertained.