INSOMNIAC SONG
MOVIE AND TELEVISION REVIEWS
FANTASY
The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
Starring: Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bower, Robert Sheehan
Directed by: Harald Zwart
Rating: PG-13
Run time: 130 minutes
Synopsis: When her mother disappears, Clary Fray learns that she descends from a line of warriors who protect our world from demons. She joins forces with others like her and heads into a dangerous alternate New York called Downworld.
People who have read the novel series might be disappointed with this movie. The general buzz was that some characters didn’t look the way fans imagined that they would. Fans of series like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries will like this. The rest of us will find it bogged down in trying to stuff far too much narrative and unraveling plot into a little over two hours. The overall plot was glossed over with so much CGI that the viewer is likely to get lost in the visual mess. There’s little to break up all the heaviness and none of it is caused by the forbidden-love aspect that the novels seemed to hinge on. If you’re really interested in the demon-slayer saga, give the novels a try instead.
Rating: 1.5/5
FANTASY
Vampire Academy
Starring: Zoey Deutch, Lucy Fry, Danila Kozlovsky, Olga Kurylenko, Sarah Hyland
Directed by: Mark Waters
Rating: PG-13
Run time: 104 minutes
Synopsis: Rose Hathaway is a Dhampir, half human-half vampire, a guardian of the Moroi, peaceful, mortal vampires living discreetly within our world. Her calling is to protect the Moroi from bloodthirsty, immortal Vampires, the Strigoi.
Note: Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead
Richelle Mead's vampire book series was released two years after the first novel in the Twilight saga. Despite sharing vampires and teenage girls, there isn't much to compare between either series. The movies also follow this same path. Instead of a love-stricken schoolgirl, Rose is an asskicking Dhampir with a psychic bond to Lissa, her best friend. Lissa also happens to be a Moroi princess and the last in her family's line after a fatal car accident. The girls fled the academy after the accident because Lissa felt safer away from the school. After being captured by other guardians, the girls are sent right back to the school they'd fled. Things don't go smoothly when the other students make it clear that they aren't welcoming the pair back with open arms. Fans of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie will enjoy this film.Twilight fans may not as the romance and angst is balanced by action and sass.
Rating: 2.5/5
FANTASY
The Wolverine
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Will Yun Lee, Tao Okamoto
Directed by: James Mangold
Rating: PG-13
Run time: 126 minutes
Synopsis: When Wolverine is summoned to Japan by an old acquaintance, he is embroiled in a conflict that forces him to confront his own demons.
After the rather disappointing spectacle that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the next outing for the brooding mutant is what amounts to being yet another partial origin story. Picking up where X:Men – The Last Stand left off, we find Logan lamenting Jean’s death and renouncing violence. He’s found by Yukio, who was sent on behalf on Yashida to collect Logan so that Yashida may repay the life debt he owes because Logan saved him during the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. The film quickly becomes a big action production with Logan trying to save Mariko, Yashida’s granddaughter, from the Yakuza. He begins to fall in love with Mariko as they fight to protect her. The thing that was most disappointing to me was the lack of resolution for Logan’s guilt over Jean’s death. What we get is him falling for a new girl and deciding to let go of the old love suddenly. That was seemingly it. Even the mid-credits scene doesn’t really give us much aside from foreshadowing X-Men: Days of Future Past. Where did Yukio go? She did declare herself as Logan’s bodyguard in the last scene of the film, yet she’s not in the mid-credits one. I think that the X-Men series needs to go back to group films rather than focusing on a single mutant.
Rating: 2.5/5
