An offer you can't refuse

Hey guys, how are you since our last post? Still soaked? Don’t worry; we won’t go down the drain, unless you don’t do what we ask… An irrefutable offer, right?

This week’s theme was Fallen Angels and after hours of reflection and three mojitos, we reached a decision: The Godfather (yeah, we really thought about cutting the “fallen” part and talk about the Victoria Secret's Angels, but Sara Sampaio said she wouldn’t give us an interview, so we just forgot it, and cried a lot).

Before you ask us why the hell is The Godfather related to the metaphor of The Fallen Angel, we just want to give you a little kind of synopsis:

This incredible old movie (it’s from 1972), based on Mario Puzo’s books and directed by Francis Ford Coppola (which surely is not the reason for having his daughter, Sofia Coppola, acting on the third movie, yeah, SURELY…), tells the story of the Corleone’s, a family leaded by the one the world calls The Godfather (aka The Don or just Vito for his friends), Don Vito Corleone (the ex-Vito Andolini – we know, it seems a good name for a pizzeria, but it’s probably already taken).

First of all, this guy, Vito, had a really sad youth: all of his family was killed by the local mafia, in their homeland, Italy, when he was young, and he was forced to leave the country – he went to the US – and to change is identity – he changed his name for Vito Corleone (actually the name of the village in which he was born) – and he starts stealing and delivering “stuff” for a criminal web – ok, it was just one guy (we thought it would sound better if it was a big web)… but a really thug one!

So, one day, like every young man, he gets tired of his boss and decides to shoot him in the middle of the street during a parade (correction: every young Italian), and starts making favors for people (if there is someone like him in your neighborhood stay away from him, he will demand you pay him another favor, probably you will be asked to kill someone; so, yeah, run for your life) and expanding his criminal web. Everybody loves him and he gets the nickname of The Godfather. He marries an Italian immigrant called Carmela, in 1914, and they have 3 boys and 1 girl: Sonny (a really thug, but too angry man, yeah, SONNY ISN’T THE GIRL!), Fredo (a thin and weak dude), Michael (who fought in the World War II and turns to be the clever one) and Connie (the one that has no access to the decisions of the family). Their “family business” grows and, suddenly, his family turns one of the five most important families of the New York Mafia (cool name for a band)!

Like bad boys use to say “this city is too small for you and me” (then they start beating the small kid), but in this case there are 5 families fighting for the command of New York. The Corleone’s grow so much that they can’t grow anymore, the other families get angry and the war starts:

The Don gets shot 5 times in his back! Inexplicably he survives… He goes to the hospital, but there are 2 attempts to kill him (intercepted by his younger son, Michael, considered by the other families a civilian) and he gets his jaw broken by a corrupt cop (ok this is not relevant for the synopsis, but still shows the Fall of the Angel, in this case, the Fall of the Don – I told you it had something to do with fallen angels!). The war keeps going on, vendetta after vendetta, Sonny gets ambushed on the road, in a toll (and dies – sorry for the SPOILER!), Michael goes to Sicilia to be safe (after killing the corrupt cop).

After a long time, Michael comes back to the US and marries his old girlfriend, Kay Adams. Vito leaves the command of the family and Michael takes his position on the Family Business (he promises Kay he would make everything legal in 5 years). Vito dies (WE TOLD YOU – THE FALLEN ANGEL), the family begins to fall and the story goes on… but we are almost reaching the end, so we won’t spoil you anymore! The movie is absolutely amazing and we hope you get the chance to see it! Everything in it is great: the soundtrack by Nino Rota, the direction and the production, the effects (for the year in which it was made), the acting, the argument (I read 5 books written by Mario Puzo, so yeah I love him (SIG Rodrigo))!

For us, it deserves a really consistent 9 (or if you want to, a 9,0000000001). It is very interesting and the 3 Oscars it received are totally justified.
        We hope you enjoyed this post, and that you keep on following our blog!

P.S: If you don’t you might wake up with your horse’s head laying on your bed with a lot of blood around. We told you, an irrefutable offer…

What if New York got wrecked by a TSUNAMI?

Hey guys, what's going on? Today, your favourite guys, here at The Popcorner, bring you another kind/attempt of a film review!

Before you start wondering what's the movie that we are going to be speaking of, we would like to tell you what our theme was: WAVES!

Yeah, there are a lot of things we could do about waves, such as talking about the waves of globalization, the waves of industrialization, or even the waves of zombies (which would be a terrible excuse to talk about World War Z), but we decided to go to its literal meaning (We know, right? Awful idea! Smells like a bad mark coming...), so we decided to write you about a movie that is actually related to waves.

No, it isn't Happy Feet or Surf's Up (even though the baby penguins are cute as hell!), because the main characters are horrible and both of us hate both of the movies... And it isn't either about The Life of Pi, 'cause, even though it is a good movie, we couldn't write a whole post about a guy in a boat (sorry for the discrimination against you, zebra, koala and Mr. Tiger! And we are also sorry for making you, the reader, watch it all again to find a koala!)... So...

We decided to write about The Day After Tomorrow, a movie in which NYC gets wrecked by a huge TSUNAMI* (yeah, we know that a Tsunami is already huge, otherwise it would only be a big wave, but we decided to give it some emphasis!)!

In the beginning of the movie Jack Hall, the father of the main character, Sam Hall, is at an expedition in Antarctica with his two partners. Together they find evidences that global warming is changing the climate as we are used to see it! This theory is disapproved by the vice-president of the US, who considers him crazy, although another scientist believes in Jack, and starts to study the exact same subject, and finally concluding that he was right (yeah, after all, Jack isn’t nuts!). When he decides to contact Jack, they discuss their studies and just discover that a new Ice age may be upon them.

At the same time, violent storms all around the world are causing a massive destruction, with tornados and super-hurricanes (yes, it looks like Speedy Gonzalez has been running in circles all over Earth!), with temperatures so close that freezes anything it comes in contact with (although that wouldn’t be a problem for us, ‘cause we are hot as hell!). In Manhattan, where Sam (not Frodo’s friend) is, the rain hasn’t stopped for three days, causing floods.

As the storm gets worse a massive giant super huge WAVE (yes, don’t forget this post is about waves…) hits the island of Manhattan, forcing Sam and his friends (yes, it is possible for a son of a scientist to have friends) to take refuge in the New York Public Library, where they just stay ‘till the end of the movie (with a dog!).

As the movie goes by, we start to notice that Sam has a little big crush on his friend, Laura (he just keeps staring at her like a freak!), who is sheltered with him in the library, and in the end we kind of see that she’s also into him (only in movies…).

In the middle of the movie, when NYC is the eye of the storm, Sam and a few group of people are the only ones who stood at the library, saved from the low temperatures. When the eye is upon New York, Sam’s dad gets there, and has to hide, to avoid being frozen. Jack is going to get his son, once when Sam got to the library (in the beginning of the movie) he calls his parents and, as a heroic father, Jack promises Sam that he would get him (so, our guy, Jack not only isn’t crazy, as he is also an hero! Keep surprising us, Jack!).

SPOILER ALERT (STOP READING THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T HAD THE CHANCE TO WATCH THE MOVIE!!!!): After this, a rescue-team goes to rescue them and realizes that there were more survivors, just standing in the roofs of the sky-scrapers, waiting to be saved too. From this experience, the human kind found out that they need to stop polluting the environment and start cooperating with one another to guarantee the world’s sustainability.

So, now we can tell you our opinion: we loved this movie (otherwise we wouldn't choose it) and we hope we never get the chance to experiment this in real life (thanks a lot for creating computer games, God!). In a scale from 0 to 10, we would certainly give this a 8,376543210!

We hope you've enjoyed this post and that you keep following us, and please feel free to tells us what you would do if such an harmful catastrophe destroyed your town (we are sorry if you ever experiencied this!)

*we are not talking about the track of DVBBS and Borgeous, you EDM lovers! (For those who didn't understand this: "EDM" = Electronic Dance Music; and "DVBBS & Borgeous - Tsunami" = http://youtu.be/I41CX0RdmPQ )

Text that does actually have nothing to do with our blog.

Hey guys, how are you, nice? Good! :D

So, before we start this post that, honestly, has nothing to do with our blog, we want to wish you a Happy New Year and we hope you had nice Christmas Holidays, if you didn't have holidays at all, we are sorry to hear that! And we are also sorry for not writing a lot in the last few weeks, but we got an interruption of our classes, do you really think we would spend it on a blog? We had many more things to do… Such as sleeping, eating, watching TV, stalking you on Facebook (oh, you weren’t supposed to know this…), gaming, gambling (yeah, I almost lost my home for a koala… but he was caught cheating, so never mind...) or even be looking for hours to an empty wall.

Moving on, the last classes of the 1^st term were given to our class, to present group project works about specific and different themes, our, for instance, was MTV and its influence on globalization, and our teacher told us we had to choose one of the assignments presented by our classmates, the one we think it had the best presentation and content, and talk about it in our blog.

We just hated them all (kidding), but we chose the assignment on Dracula, once it was, for us, the best oral presentation. Actually it was presented by five girls (Hey girls, we swear we are not doing this to get your attention!), and that might be an unconscious reason for our choice. At least it wasn’t boring like many others (sorry guys, you can do better next time). We think this was the best one, not only because all the group members knew the entire presentation, all the themes discussed, who says which part, which made them able to succor one another, but also because of the easiness with which they spoke to us, the way they spoke was easily understandable, and they weren’t boring at all in the way they exposed their themes, although sometimes the themes didn’t help, for instance who the hell cares about what’s good and evil about Dracula? At least we don’t… And that’s why we chose MTV.
But nothing is perfect, and so wasn’t their presentation: in fact, sometimes they got really nervous and some members were reading their papers too much (we won’t say any names… it’s a kind of a “you-know-who”, but the difference is that all of them actually have noses and we don’t picture them as “the Dark Ladies”, but if they are we don’t want to find it by ourselves…). Other negative aspect of their presentation was the fact that it wasn’t that well distributed: for instance, Maria was the one who spoke the least of her group… Anyway, we won’t focus on any other negative aspect, once we don’t want to suffer from the anger of the possible Dark Ladies…

Nonetheless, in spite of all of this, it managed to be the best one (we are just saying this because we couldn’t choose our own… but yeah, thank you teacher for not letting us be narcissist, for not letting us show our true essence… L) and we want to congratulate them for their effort: Congratulations, girls! Oh, and don’t forget we are still single…

Now we have to say good bye (this is getting to big for a text about school projects…), so, yeah, Good Bye!!! :D

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Hello fellows, here we are once again and this time we’ll be talking about the HOBBIT (we know, guess what? WE LOVE IT TOO!).

OK, before you start asking yourself “Why Hobbit?”, this week we had two options, OK three, but one was instantly put aside, the other option, besides The Hobbit, was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, although we also like Harry Potter, we are major fans of Tolkien’s work, and so we decided to write about the first movie (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey). António was with high expectations about this movie, since he watched The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy, and for him, it went as expected, but he keeps thinking that LOTR is so much better. For Rodrigo, it was the first time that he was watching a film adaptation of a Tolkien's masterpiece, after watching it and thinking "OMG what was I missing?" he saw the whole LOTR trilogy two days later!

OK, before we start describing the movie, please press play on this video:

Done? So, here we go..

         Once upon a time, there was a guy, white as snow, weak as a chicken waiting to go to the aviary, and small as a 5 year-old kid. His name was Bilbo Baggins, and he was a Hobbit! Before you start wondering "what the hell is a Hobbit" and start looking for it on wikipedia, I will tell you: it's a kind of a small human specie that lives in The Shire, a colourful place where everybody smiles, but nothing happens. Ok that's all I can tell you.

  

         So, let's go back to the narrative... This guy, Bilbo, is invited by a giant wizard, Gandalf, the Grey, to go on an adventure with him and a group of dwarves (Oin, Gloin, Bombur, Bifur, Bofur, Ori, Nori, Fili, Kili, Balin, Dwalin and Dori [the guys in the picture above]), leaded by Thorin Oakenshield (another dwarf), son of Thrain, son of Thror, from the line of Durin, the next king under the mountain (yes, António did his homework). The purpose of their adventure was to reclaim Erebor and to recover the dwarves’ long-forgotten gold, a shinny treasure that was being safe kept by Smaug, the Terrible (a dragon that took over the city of Erebor, in the Lonely Mountain, and stole the dwarves’ gold, killing many dwarves and, even worst than that, destroying a kid's toy [SHAME ON YOU, SMAUG!]).

         During this adventure, returning to Bag End, his home, was something that crossed Bilbo's mind several times, but after they found “Sting” (his sword) he kind of gain some courage that made him keep going, no matter how hard and dangerous it got. It is in this film that we see Bilbo finding The One ring (the one forged by Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom) that so far belonged to Gollum. After he found it he was able to become invisible and run away from Gollum and from the Goblins’ cave.

         When he finds this ring, he gets the chance to know a creepy but cutie weird "creature", Smeagol, basically, a guy that talks with himself (there was no psychologist in Middle-Earth...), and that has a creepy face:

         We wont tell you anything more about the plot, otherwise you would not get curious to watch the movie, and that would be shameful!!!!

So, now here it comes our opinion (noooo, don't close the blog!!!):

In our sincere, opinion, this movie is amazing! Great plot, great action scenes, great music, great EVERYTHING (except their size, don't forget that most of them are dwarves...)! But once we can only give a 10 to the LOTR trilogy, we are very sad to tell you that we gave this super nice movie a shameful 9,9! :(

Before we finish this kind of a review, we want to congratulate Peter Jackson for another great job (yeah, we are talking about the first Hobbit, obviously!), it was a great choice of actors, and even with some modifications to the book, he managed to do a great adaptation of it!

        This is pretty much our opinion, maybe if Rodrigo had given António the opportunity to write even more, you would probably be finishing the lecture of this super well written text (or not) with your grandchildren saying "Happy 120th Birthday!" (assuming that you are 10 now).

 See you later, you hater! :D

Globalisation

Hey guys, what's up?

So, today we are not going to write another film review! We are here writing you about Globalisation, and, because of that we will focus on two different points of view: one of them is the impact of globalisation on cinema, the other one is the impact of cinema on globalisation! I know they look just the same, but trust us, they aren't. And even if you don't trust us, they still aren't the same, so, you should believe us! ;)

On the one hand, this phenomenon of getting into a global culture has a lot of impact on movies, if each country had it own culture without sharing it with other countries, this would definitely change the movie business. Firstly, we wouldn't be able to see the mixing of cultures on movies and on TV series, such as Modern Family (we would probably be watching Regular Family and it wouldn't have the success that Modern Family has nowadays), instead of having a movie with a lot of cultures and ideas, we would have a lot of movies about a lot of cultures, individually... BORING!

On the other hand, movies have been contributing to the process of globalisation, for instance with the American movies, since these are the ones with the highest audiences and with that, the message they want to pass on is reaching the entire world. Due to that, many cultures have been influenced by the American lifestyle, making the different countries getting closer to each other in terms of culture, Americanising the world! And instead of having the United States culture, it would be the UCW (United Countries of the World) [if somebody picks up this idea, let us know... we have dangerous connects, (we believe that the guy working on the pizzeria belongs to La Mafia, so be careful!)]

So, vote UCW! Oh wait, this is not a campaign promoting peace in the world, so, let's try again:

So... see you later, hater! :D

Our opinnion on "Romeo + Juliet" (1996)

   Hey guys, what's going on?

   We have some good news for you... WE ARE BACK!!! :D (even if you think that these are not good news, please don't break our hearts...)

   Ok, like we said on the first post this blog is focused on cinema and our english teacher suggested two themes for this week: the Elizabethan era, and the contemporaneity of Shakespeare. So, limited to that two options, we looked at one another and our eyes just said "We are not going to write about 'ellaborated' (=horrible) hairstyles". So, here we are, writing about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

   Our teacher showed us a part of the movie "Romeo + Juliet" (1996), but even without knowing if we liked that "parts" (we were confused...), we were curious about the rest of it, and after a romantic lunch, we went to Rodrigo's house (we're not going to tell you the address!!!!), and we just watched the whole movie.

   The first thing we want to tell you about this movie, is that: DON'T WATCH IT!!!!

   We are kidding, actually, although we didn't like the effects, the "Movie Maker transitions" and the excess of stupidity in some scenes, we really enjoyed the movie, and, from 0 to 10, we would give it a 7,49999999(9).

   Actually, we forgot how to write a film review, so we decided to write our opinion and express it the best way we could.

   The first good thing about this movie, is Claire Danes, a great, an amazing and wonderful... actress! 

   The second positive aspect about the movie was the fact they challenged themselves to use the original script, and even if it sometimes got to ridiculous (gangsters speaking on such a "polite" english...), it made the whole movie much more interesting! And we liked the way they used the "chorus" from the original script, as a newscast...

   The third positive aspect we will mention, before we start highlighting more negative aspects, is the fact that even using the original script, Baz Luhrmann managed to bring this story to a different time... Instead of having a plot situated on a far (far, far.....) away time, like in the original script, this plot is situated on modern times, and the rivalry between the House of Montague, and the House of Capulet, is represented as gangs quarrel, with everything related to Mafia, the guns (as a metaphor for the "swords"), the cars, etc.

   On the bad side, we noticed that sometimes, as it happens in our blog, the humour gets too excessive (look at the image above...), and this takes the credibility away... And don't forget everything we said before starting to highlight the positive aspects...

   But, in spite of that, we enjoyed the movie and there was never a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

   

   See you later, you hater! :D

(P.S: The only purpose of this picture is showing that we did watch the movie, even if this text couldn't prove it...)

Hey Guys, welcome to the Popcorner! This super awesome blog is owned by 2 cinema masters: Rodrigo Pinheiro and António Valente. Ok, we are not cinema masters, but this blog is our unexpected journey through the movies and TV shows world. We have been challenged by our english teacher to create this blog, and, therefore, we will publish here many posts about everything related to cinema, from film reviews, to the technical parts of a specific movie (maybe Hobbit, once António is just Hobbit's #1 Fan!)... Our posts may be in the form of texts written by us, or vlogs starring your 2 favourite guys (us), maybe if we want to do that one day, you may will see short animations or other stuff! The design of this blog (the background) is 100% ours as you can see in the 2 circles with ours blog name on it!

We hope you enjoyed our first post, and that you will keep on following us!

Readers, we think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!

Rodrigo Pinheiro

António Valente