Helen & Troy: The Real Review

Have you ever been to a high school play where there is one guy who doesn’t really act, he just mumbles through his half memorized lines? Doesn’t really have any reason to be there except that he thought it would get him closer to the girl playing Juliet?
Now imagine an entire one act play with every actor being that guy. As well as the writer and director.
You now have a rough idea of what it is like to sit through Helen & Troy, a production that feels so half assed that it borders on having no ass at all.
The actors aren’t actors. They just sort of talk to each other on stage, with no emotion. They sometimes talk slightly louder, as if they have some kind of clue as to what this gosh darn thing called emoting is, but can’t quite figure it out.
Helen is supposed to be drunk, but you would have no way of knowing if the other two on stage didn’t say so. She seriously fails at acting drunk, something 12-year-olds who have never even heard of Vodka know how to at least attempt.
The story focuses on Troy trying to break up with Helen, so he can be with her mother Tina.
It’s not an original story. It’s not an interesting story. It’s a story that exists as a threadbare excuse for drama, drama that isn’t conveyed by the bored zombies on stage.
I had to write a critical review of this for JACC, and I seriously could not find one redeeming quality in this thing. Oh, wait. Helen had a giant ass.

There you go.

Twilight review: Dear lord I tried

It’s a new semester, and with it comes a new staff at the Student Voice.
In addition to this new staff, we have a slew of new columns, such as returning editor Serena Swanger’s Go Green column and Benji Guerrero’s fashion column. Both are pretty damn good. I have a friend who is almost metrosexual, and he tells me that the fashion column is pretty useful.

So, in essence that means I have my work cut out for me. And the only way I could step my game up was to try and watch Twilight.

I should probably elaborate on this point. See if, being an examiner of the “geek culture” means I have to be relatively well versed in a large number of things considered “geeky” or having the chemical composition of “nerd.”

Vampires for a while existed somewhere in this culture, not quite mainstream and yet not quite on the level zombie romantic comedies.

The first Twilight movie changed that. It took the soft vampire romance image that had been introduced in the work of Anne Rice and evolved overtime with books such as Twilight.

So I decided that if I was going to continue making fun of Twilight, I had to make sure it was as bad as it sounded. So, I borrowed a copy of the film from someone on staff, and tried my damn hardest to make it at least 30 minutes before throwing something through the TV.

The first thing you notice about the film is that it stars a girl who’s character is card board thin, so that the teens and tweens watching can project themselves onto her and be the center of attention for vampire and non vampire pretty boys.

You also notice that the supposed vampires in the movie WALK AROUND IN THE FREAKIN DAYLIGHT. Granted it’s not direct sunlight, but that’s still pretty damn blasphemous.

I’m all for reinterpreting classic movie monsters for modern times, but taking out one of the central characteristics? Then it’s no longer a vampire.

I also had heard that when the vampires are in direct sunlight, they glitter instead of bursting into flames. I decided that if I could make it to this point in the movie, I could stop watching. And have visual proof that there is no god.

I made it to this point, and I was literally stunned. If you’ve ever wanted final and definitive proof that Twilight is literary porn for 12-year-old girls, it’s this scene.

So after viewing this insanity and making the horrible images stop by throwing my printer through the screen, I took a moment to reflect on how bad Twilight really is.

It’s undoubtedly an insipid movie that has a protagonist that amazingly has no personality, and yet enough to make you want to hold her head underwater until the bubbles stop.

But, to be fair, it’s no different than any other work that’s just as shallow and geared towards men, such as Transformers 2. Actually I think it’s safe to say that, since there are no racist robots, Twilight is better than Transformers 2.

So, there’s that at least.