Saturday, February 13, 2010

Percy Jackson: The Movie Vlog

Otherwise known as, XiXi dies of a coughing fit on screen. Also, it took FOREVER to process this video, so I'm never, ever making a video this long again. It's so hideously late night that it's actually early morning. In the worst possible way, as in, the sun is probably going to wake me up the minute I go to bed.

Lame that I get even less sleep on weekends than I do on weekdays. Anyway, ignoring my personal insomniatic woes:



4 comments:

  1. This vlog is amazing, maybe in large part because you did it way late at night & with a cough. I hope you get better soon!

    Okay, so I KIND OF LOVED THE MOVIE, but I think it's because I went into it with low expectations, and not gonna lie, Percy Jackson is not my Harry Potter, so I think I cared less about how faithful the movie was to the books. Also, we heard the movie is supposed to be "based on" the books but not actually a full-on adaptation like the HP book-to-movies. So I expected it to kinda be like the Ella Enchanted movie, which I thought was rather funny and clever for the most part as a movie, but it was a pretty terrible adaptation of the book (which I also loved).

    That said, for some reason, my friends and I also thought the movie was INCREDIBLY funny and not even in a LULZY-THIS-IS-AWESOMELY-BAD kind of way. We genuinely thought a lot of it was funny, had too many weird inside-jokes/references during the movie, and maybe we just really liked Logan's WHAT-IS-GOING-ON-I'M-SO-CONFUSED acting. We were totally those horrible annoying people in the theater because we kept giggling and laughing and snerking through most of the movie. I felt bad because I didn't want to ruin the movie for people, but uh, we might've. :(

    So we really really enjoyed it, but upon deeper thought, someone could've made this a better movie. (Truth be told, Chris Columbus' Harry Potter movies were my least favorite.) Your sticking points about the omission of the pact and the addition of that law are the same as mine. I think those things bothered me the most. I get that they had to leave out big plot things because they didn't know if this movie would be successful enough for sequels, but keeping the pact in and showing the gods for the kind of parents they really are wouldn't have affected that. At first, I thought they tried to make the gods seem like better parents because of the whole "oh our main audience is young-ish kids" thing, but then I thought, that's BS. This same age group is reading the books where the gods are crappy, non-present parents, and they can handle it! The Underworld = hell kind of bothered me too, but I think it bothered me more that Persephone was such a sultry vixen because that's really one of the farthest things I'd think of in relation to Persephone.

    I liked Grover, which I wasn't expecting. From what we'd seen in promo stuff, my sister and I were afraid he's be like "too cool" in the movies since in the books he's kind of wimpy and somewhat incompetent (hence comic relief) though still a great friend. We thought they did a pretty good re-interpretation of him for the movie, where he's kind of more badass but is still kinda dorky. He and Percy seemed more like friends, whereas in the book, I sort of got the feeling that Percy was friends with him a little bit out of pity and because Percy's a nice guy (kind of like how he ends up looking out for Tyson - because he felt bad for him).

    Annabeth was pretty annoying at first but got better, but she was rather useless in the movie. She didn't really show how she was a daughter of Athena. I think her big ego problem is that they basically combined her character with Clarisse. It's a bit weird that she's not blonde, BUT I'm actually glad they didn't do a wig because a bad wig can really make things awkward. Like the blond wigs in Twilight - god, those were awkward. Granted, this movie looks like it had a bigger budget than Twilight, but I feel like most of that budget went to the intense amounts of CGI (as it should because ugly, obvious CGI is also awkward) and so they would've skimped on the wig and it would've been ugly and awkward.

    Okay, I'm too food coma-ing from New Year's food to think of anything else, and this is getting to be a long comment. I'm calling it a night. Happy New Year! :D

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  2. I don't have time to watch the whole thing yet, but I love your vlog thus far. ^_^ My little sister was kind of underwhelmed by the movie when she saw it, too. Every time I passed by the poster for the movie in French, I tried to take a picture with my phone for you, but the lighting always stunk and then the poster was removed. : (

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  3. Krispy - wow, I love your comments; they always make me happy! :-) No, it seems like a lot of people really enjoyed the movie, so that's great. I agree with you on the Persephone thing! I think I'm in the minority, but I don't know, Persephone just doesn't strike me as a hey-look-at-my-boobs-popping-out-of-my-dress kind of goddess. Meh. Oh, and Chris Columbus was absolutely pushing his HP credentials in every part of the movie. The CGI for the Hydra basically looked like five basilisks fused into one.

    Jessica - I had no idea it would already be opening in France so soon. Well, book to movie adaptions are usually not that great (except for LotR, which is the most amazing thing ever). That's okay. The next Camp Half-Blood series comes out fall of this year! :D

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  4. Glad I'm amusing! Haha. But seriously, we're the minority on Persephone? It really does strike me as odd for her to be super sultry; maybe it's supposed to be like a good-girl-gone-bad thing since she's Queen of the Underworld? But I don't know. She's always described in relation to her MOM for one, and she's like the goddess of spring and flowers. So I associate her more with the princess-fair-maiden-pretty-girl type than as the look-at-my-boobs-rawr (as you so aptly put it) type. But ooooookay...

    Ditto on the HP credentials push. So much similar cinematography and effects. You know what surprised me? I thought I was going to hate Medusa, but I liked it. Very different from the book, but still creepy.

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