underworld: rise of the lycans, weekend, stanley cup

[rwx]

A friend and I watched Underworld: Rise of the Lycans Saturday night. It's a surprisingly good movie, with relatively strong performances from a number of actors. Significantly, most of these characters were the good actors from the first movie who mostly died tragically or nobly or whatever. They weren't in the second movie, which was basically suck.

So, basically, you take all the good actors in a franchise, you put them in an earlier version of the story, and let fly. It was pretty good, and more than made up for the second. They could make a fourth movie following the third and I'd watch it, but it appears that the fourth will probably follow on from the second -- Kate Beckinsale is a good actress as such things go, but she's left without a significant supporting cast.

The weird thing that kept distracting us while watching this movie was the lead actress, Rhona Mitra. She used to play Lara Croft live (and actually somewhat resembles laragoth, but with a bigger nose), but Mitra had had collagen implants in her lips just prior to screening this film and it made her somewhat odd looking.

Odd looking to the extent that we had to keep rewinding closeup scenes to watch the weird biomechanics of her cheek muscles moving with the collagen. It was causing strange deformations in her cheeks not usually seen in nature. It looked like a special effect at first, but then we realized (thanks to imdb) that it was done before the movie was filmed and has been slowly receding since.

So, yeah, that was distracting in what was otherwise a great B-movie. It was really bizarre to have to stop and replay face deformations over and over again like we were detecting replicants, but that's apparently how we roll around here after a couple of shots of bourbon.

Aside from that, it's been a pretty relaxed weekend. Lots of randomly running into friends and hanging out, but also lots of resting and random nonsense. The redwings losing on friday made me pretty unhappy, but largely because they made it all the way to the end only to fall prey to injury and exhaustion. I fear that next year might be a rebuilding year, but certainly this current lot has had a pretty good run and the upcoming noobs have kicked ass.

Comments

[reddheart.livejournal.com]

The weird thing that kept distracting us while watching this movie was the lead actress, Rhona Mitra. She used to play Lara Croft live (and actually somewhat resembles laragoth, but with a bigger nose), but Mitra had had collagen implants in her lips just prior to screening this film and it made her somewhat odd looking.

She was the first "official" Lara Croft model, I believe. The first of many :)

I must investigate this similarity. I never noticed it. ;D

[wisn.livejournal.com]

I liked both teams and was glad that both of them made it to the finals. Although I was rooting for the Red Wings in the series so the last two games were hard to watch.

[peglegpete.livejournal.com]

Dammit, you're making me want to watch this movie, even though I'm convinced it's a trap.

[madcap-allie.livejournal.com]

I bought Rise of the Lycans because I have the other Underworld movies, even though I hadn't seen it -- it's got vampires, and I always liked Lucien, anyway. Trying to pull off the medieval thing was a good idea, but there were enough jarring elements that keep it squarely a B movie. (Yes, I know I'm complaining about the lack of realism in a movie with vampires and werewolves. I have standards.)

I'm just going to be staring at Mitra's face the entire time I watch it next, and it's all your fault.