Tenchi Forever! (Not Rated)



Apparently the goal of Tenchi Forever was to see how much it could plagiarize from the previous two movies, and how much worse they could do it. So from the first movie you've got Tenchi disappearing and the rest of the crew taking up common lives to find out what's going on, and from the second movie you've got a girl of "childish innocence" and somebody who was in love with Yosho stealing Tenchi away, only with all the intrigue, excitement, and humor stripped away, leaving you with ninety minutes of people doing shit no one cares about. There's creating suspense and mystery, and then there's just having fuck all happen.

The reason I put "childish innocence" in quotes like that is because I think that's what Haruna was supposed to be, but she's not. She's manipulative, jealous, and bitchy, and I was left wondering what Yosho saw in her. Gotta love how Yuzuha, a soul-eating demon, was way more sympathetic than her.

Over in her Capsule Review, FO ripped the ending a new one. Personally, I was just glad when the movie was finally over.

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Hellboy II: The Golden Army (PG-13)



As a whole Hellboy II felt a little disjointed but it has a lot of smaller bits that are well worth watching the movie for, like a patchy forest with some really cool individual trees in it. The architecture is stunning, the humor got more than a few chuckles out of me, the scene with Hellboy panicing over the cat-eating troll is equal parts tense and awesome, and Ron Perlman is always great. Even if it does let its pretty visuals and set pieces stomp all over the story with its stampede of admittedly well choreographed fight scenes. But hey, it's a comic book movie, it's pretty much expected.

I was really getting into the movie, except that I would have enjoyed the fight with the plant god a lot more if they'd ditched the damn baby or replaced it with a basket of kittens like in the first movie, and I found it hard to care about the pregnancy side story. Still, I was prepared to give this three or even 3.5 Skitties until I saw the ending. We have characters doing not one, not two, but three things that would have solved massive problems if they'd been done sooner, and it makes it that much more grating when you know the first two are going to happen. I let Hellboy waiting to challenge the elf prince slide because I know everybody would have felt cheated if they didn't get to see the Golden Army in action. I guess if you really stretch reasoning I can sort of maybe see why the elf princess didn't stop her brother the way she did when he was about to kill their father, although the cynical reason is "we wouldn't have much of a movie, otherwise". The third one left me wondering what the point of the whole movie was, and the final epilogue sealed my disgust with the movie's ending (hey, Hellboy, what about your cats?).

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