Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

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Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Avengers: Age of Ultron is basically what you want it to be: an entertaining movie based on comic books that has exciting action and fun Joss Whedon dialogue. The movie delivers on all those promises and that’s enough for an enjoyable comic book movie for me. It doesn’t go that extra step that Guardians of the Galaxy went, but on the other hand it has a much more fascinating villain and a more coherent plot overall. The character interactions are fun and this, unlike the first movie, every character gets enough opportunities to shine. It is amazing to see how many actors these movies are able to gather. It’s hard for me to tell how much fun such a movie is without having the background knowledge of the comics, but as a comic reader it is hard to deny how much fun it is to see those characters come alive and do their thing. Not everything makes complete sense and, just to be clear, this is no masterpiece of moviemaking (despite some great shots). It’s a fun movie, a million times better than the dreadful Man of Steel, proving (likes Guardians) that comic book movies are not all alike. It was mostly what I wanted it to be.

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Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

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Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

Birdemic: Shock and Terror has exactly that title, so you might think I don’t have to explain that this is not a good movie. But even if you know bad movies, you have no idea what you’re getting into with this one. It’s not just cheap or poorly made, it’s really the worst made movie I have ever seen. Take a video with your phone of anything right now and it probably looks better than 99% of this movie. Seriously. Anyway, it’s still a lot of fun since you simply can’t believe what you’re seeing most of the time. It consists of scenes that show completely mundane things for minutes on end (driving in a car, buying gas, walking from one place to another, people clapping). If you’d cut the actual plot parts of the movie together, you’d probably end up with a 30-minute movie. Let’s not even talk about the visual effects of the attacking birds because… let’s just not talk about it. It’s a perfect laugh-out-loud bad movie that delivers one insane scene with ridiculous dialogue, bad editing, amateur camera movements, terrible sound and inexplicable plot developments after another. Maybe you need three minutes of driving around in a car to process the absurdity of everything else.

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