Blog Entry #7 Whip It

Bliss Cavender (Ellen Page) is a girl living anything but a blissful life. While she has everything she needs to lead a comfortable life, she is stuck living the life her mother, Brook Cavender (Marcia Harden,) wants her to live. Her mother is a beauty pageant-crazy woman that believes that such pageants are the only way a woman can get anywhere in life. Bliss, on the other hand, cares nothing about the stereotypical ideas of beauty and wants to find herself in the way that she sees fit. The answer is unclear until she becomes interested in a contact sport known as Roller Derby, where two teams of girls roller skate around a ring in an effort to gain points. Bliss, who becomes Babe Ruthless, must face the challenges of competing in a sport as a legally underage player and showing her mother that the life she had picked out for her is not the one she wants to live.

Despite being a teenage feel-good movie, I really enjoyed this film. The lighting was very nice throughout the film and was even used as a cool element to separate the differences between Bliss and her mother's beliefs. The pageants were always very brightly lit and the settings often looked like those from films using the old high-class British style of living. The derby and party scenes, on the other hand, were more like what you would expect to see when you attend a concert. The names were fun, the action was exciting, and I felt like I learned something new from the film since I had never heard of the sport previously.

Blog Entry #6 Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Percy Jackson is your average troubled kid in a private school. or that's what he thought until his substitute teacher transformed into a nasty creature known as a Fury from Greek mythology and accused him of stealing Zeus's lightning bolt, the single most destructive weapon unknown to man. With the very skies and seas warring, Percy has 14 days to prove his innocence and return the bolt to its rightful owner.

This film was nice to look at; the lighting was great, the CG was done well, and it had an interesting variety of shots that kept the movie visually pleasing. Unfortunately, the movie suffered a pretty big lack of character development and rushed plot. The movie was mostly a composition of the main action scenes from the book it was based on and enough story to keep the flow in between. That being the case, the viewer never truly gets to experience what they expect to from the book. While this is a pretty big downfall, Columbus makes up for it by keeping us laughing with a clever soundtrack and fun one-liners the whole family can enjoy.

The Lightning Thief, directed by Chris Columbus, falls pretty nicely into the genre of fantasy. Its no surprise that Columbus is the director of this film, as he also directed the first three Harry Potter films, Night at the Museum and its sequel, and The Goonies 1 and 2.