Dante's Inferno Craziness

I actually enjoyed the film adaptation of Dante's Inferno quite a bit, so I'm not going to pick it to death, but I thought I'd point out two things that I found humourously puzzling.

This is the man that Dante meets at the gates of hell. He announces that he lived in the time of the false gods, and Dante takes a random shot in the dark as to the man's identity - is he the epic poet Virgil? Amazingly, that's exactly who he is.

Somehow, neither man is surprised at how well that guessing went.

The second thing is an animation error that makes absolutely no sense to me.

Check out the man's shackles at fifty-seven minutes into the film. Now let's check in on them one second later.

Suddenly the chain is gone and his arms are overlapping the shackles. This one is just baffling to me. How do you even make a mistake like this? There barely any movement on the screen, and the chain was a simple overlay. This is Bakshi's Spider-man level of weird.

Other than that, however, perfectly fun film.

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Dead Space: Downfall Edition

It's already a prequel. More than half of the audience going to the movie are going to know full well that it's about monsters making zombies on a space ship. Despite this, the filmmakers felt it was a good idea to open the movie with this:

A character announcing that the slaughter has already taken place, and that she's the only survivor. The very next scene involves a rip-off of Alien, as mining surveyors walk through a warren of chasms-

Until discovering a bizarre monolith.

Which, naturally, turns everyone who comes near to it into a monster.

There are two types of people watching this movie - 1: People who have played the game, and 2: People who haven't.

The first group know what the Marker is and the effects it will have on people, so they don't need its spoiled. The second don't, and are therefore capable of being surprised by the twists and turns of the story. Except the filmmakers make it absolutely clear right off that they have no interest in any of that, and would rather we go into the proceedings knowing as much as possible, completely certain of the redhead's safety and everyone else's expendability, so that there will be no chance of us getting attached to any of them, nor any chance of us fearing for her fate, at least until after she's left that message.

This is like opening The Thing with Macready and Childs sitting around a fire in a destroyed camp, reminiscing about how crazy it was when that alien killed everyone.

It's a sad day when the videogame featured better storytelling than the movie prequel.

Army of Two is the Gayest Thing I've Ever Seen

And I've seen 300. Sure, you could make the argument that since that was about gay soldiers, and Army of Two moves the homosexual themes of its protagonists into the realm of subtext, that 300 is the gayer of the two, but you would be wrong.

The primary reason for this is that while the Spartans were literally having sex with one another all the damn time, they actually took the whole 'war' thing seriously, and are remembered primarily for their fighting acumen, and secondarily for their child molestation.

Compare this to the main characters from the game Army of Two:

While I'm not saying that writing the word 'Merc' across the codpiece of your body armour is necessarily an advertisement for your services as a male prostitute, it certainly makes a persuasive impression in that direction, and I haven't seen anything in the game to suggest another interpretation.