You'd never think Prince of Persia was the better movie...

...unless you saw it in a double-feature with Robin Hood. I can't begin to explain what was wrong with Robin Hood without taking at least as long again as that movie was, and I refuse to spend that much time on it. Bad enough I sat through it once. Suffice to say, it was so not enjoyable that it literally sucked all the joy I'd gotten out of laughing at Prince of Persia with my sister and feiran. Credit where it's due: my sister got in the spirit of exaggerating lines from Prince of Persia so they were pick-up lines/innuendo. We were laughing so loud, we got shushed! At a drive-in!

Anyway, Robin Hood. Don't see it. Not only will it make your head hurt with its pretenses of historicity, it will bore you nigh unto death. It should be a crime to make a Robin Hood movie this boring. And if that's a crime, the sentence for it should be capital punishment seeing as how they squandered the talent they had in that movie. Anyone guilty of wasting Cate Blanchett's time that much ought to be stoned.

Prince of Persia, on the other hand, was as delightfully silly as it needed to be for me to enjoy it. Truth be told, I'm actually a little disappointed that it was better than I thought it would be because I wanted desperately to take the mickey out of it, and it managed to have some truly enjoyable-in-its-own-right moments. After seeing the behind-the-scenes and the trailers, I was sure it was going to be almost Spider-Man 3-level of over-the-top camp, but it was merely B-level passable. It was still overly long and needlessly convoluted. I could have done without the thousands of treks across the desert to each destination/set-piece.

On the other hand, one of the other princes--the one who wasn't an amalgam of Jake Gylenhaal and his wig--was played by the guy who was Jeff from Coupling, which was kind of distracting and hilarious all at the same time. Nice to see he's still getting work, though it's a shame he couldn't get more comedic roles. (He kills me as Jeff.) Oh well, at least he'll be Moist von Lipwig soon!

And that was my Memorial Day.

Appropos of my last post

Rotten Tomatoes has a listing of the top 30 or so ranked video game movies, and despite the mediocre reviews, Prince of Persia is #2.

Please consider that your mileage may vary with their rankings--they have no less than four Uwe Boll movies on that list--but it's interesting to look at all the video games that people have tried to make into movies and which have been successful and which have not. I still think Pokemon and Digimon are cheating, though, seeing as they're not putting up video games made into movies so much as they are making movies based on TV shows that happen to also have games associated with them.

Not sure I agree with which film they put at #1. Haters may hate, but I really liked the first Resident Evil movie. I thought it did justice to the games while still doing its own thing.