A year later "Snowpiercer" is still a movie to watch

This snow needs some piercing

September is a horrible time for new movies. I love to watch movies, but the theaters have nothing good to offer. Channel surfing is the best way to find anything worth watching.

Last night as I was channel searching at 10pm, I came across the movie "Snowpiercer". I saw this movie in the theaters and I loved it, but I also forgot about it. I own it on DVD as well, but I leant it to a friend, and I still don't have it back. I'm here to tell you today that, holy shit, this movie is still totally awesome! First of all, the cast is incredible. You have stars like Chris Evans, Jamie Bell, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt and Ed Harris just to name a few. The set and art direction to this movie is beautiful. The movie takes place in one area, the train, but the train has many different parts. There's the back, aka the poor people, there's sleeping cars, there's a garden, an aquarium and a spa. That's just a quarter of the train. As you get to the higher class people, there's a school, sushi bar, fancy dressed people in one random car, a night club and then the engine. All these cars on the train are beautifully and meticulously designed. For example, the garden looks like a real life garden. I wouldn't be able to tell you if it was on a train or if it was on ground. The nightclub looks like my nightmare of a nightclub. I don't frequent places like that, but the few I've been to are recreated in "Snowpiercer" to haunting perfection. The engine is enormous and beautiful.

The fighting and combat scenes are like watching a bloody ballet. There's one fight scene in particular, where the train's soldiers each gut a fish, presumably to show the passengers that blood will be spilled, and it's awesome. They fight each other with hatchets also. You can hear each plunge into a victim's chest, head, arm and leg. It's brutal, but awesome. When they reach a tunnel, the soldiers turn on night vision and they film the rest of the fight scene from the view of the soldiers. It's really, really cool. Inventive too.

The writer and director, Joon-ho Bong, is very talented and clearly has his own vision for movies. He's only done 13 movies, with "Snowpiercer" being his first, mostly English speaking movie. But, what other people may know him for is the terrifying Japanese horror film, "The Host". That movie is very scary.

Chris Evans, who is great in this movie, gives one of the most heartbreaking yet stomach turning monologues I've ever heard in a movie. I'm not going to spoil it because you need to hear it to believe it. It's so sad and extremely upsetting. When Evans gets to the engine, the back and forth between him and the trains inventor, Wilford(played by Ed Harris) is awesome. You get the viewpoint from the lower and upper class. It's really good, really interesting writing. I cannot recommend this movie enough. It's so great and so much better than crap like the new Transporter movie, or that Agent 47 movie. Hell, I think "Snowpiercer" is better than Chris Evans past two movies, "The Avengers" movies. And, I love "The Avengers" movies. But, if you want to see something super interesting and innovative, watch "Snowpierecer". It also has fighting and explosions and all the stuff you want in a popcorn movie, but "Snowpiercer" has the writing and directing of a small budget independent movie. This movie is incredible and comes highly recommended from me.

Watch it and enjoy.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and co host of the X Millennial Man podcast. With the dreadful movie period coming up he is looking for other great movies to watch from the last few years. Follow Ty on twitter @tykulik.

Ty wants to rant about the overrated Meryl Streep

The inside of every Diet Coke bottle Meryl Streep buys

With the release last week of "Ricki and the Flash", I want to take time out today to call out critics and, most importantly, Meryl Streep.

I don't get the love that's given to Meryl Streep. Sure, she's a fine actress, but all the accolades and the awards being given to get baffle me. Case and point, "Ricki and the Flash" has a rating of 59% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus being, "while the narrative is trite and predictable, Streep shines in her role as an aged rocker reuniting with her family". First of all, when I first saw the preview for this movie, I thought Funny or Die, or The Onion made a joke preview. There was no way this was a real movie. Meryl Streep is easily in her sixties and they try to make her look like she's in her forties. You look great Mrs. Streep, but you don't look like your in your forties. The preview also makes the movie look like a melodramatic piece of garbage. AKA, a typical Meryl Streep movie and role. I cannot believe critics convinced themselves to, not only see this movie, but heap praises on Streep. Put someone like Naomi Watts or Maggie Gyllenhaal, two great actresses, in this exact same role and I guarantee you, critics would have crushed the movie. But not with Streep. She or her people must have given money to the critics association with the understanding that they'd never bad mouth her. That's not fair to other actresses and actors out there. Even guys like George Clooney and Brad Pitt get bad reviews when they're in bad movies. That doesn't happen to Meryl Streep.

Not only does she get rave reviews no matter how bad the movie is, but she gets nominated, and sometimes wins Oscars for bad movies. Last year the movie "August, Osage County" was released. It got luke warm reviews. It was about a family full of people with mental problems. It was another typical melodramatic movie that wanted to be a play. In fact, I think it was originally a play. Anyway, Streep plays Julia Roberts mother that has dementia, or something like that, and she spends the movie basically yelling her lines and, as Jon Lovitz would say, ACTING. She chews so much scenery in that movie. Did she get blasted by critics like a lot of the other actors in the movie? No, in fact, she got nominated for best supporting actress. What a crock of shit. That movie is garbage and her performance is really rough to watch. I don't recommend that movie. The same thing can be said for "The Iron Lady". This is the Margaret Thatcher movie and it got slammed by critics. I think it was below 40% on Rotten Tomatoes. That's not good, in fact, that's pretty bad. That's "Pixels" bad. But, once again, not only did Streep get nominated for an Oscar, I think she won it that year (ed note: She did win the Oscar). So, a movie that's given such a bad review for how terrible it is, gets awarded for with an Oscar. WTF! That makes ZERO sense!

I guess, I don't, and probably never will understand the love for Streep. I haven't seen many of her movies because I'm not into melodrama, but the love for her makes no sense to me. She's a very good actress, but I'll take Maggie Gyllenhaal or Naomi Watts or Jennifer Lawrence or Octavia Spencer over Meryl Streep any day.

No question.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the co-host of the X Millennial Man Podcast. He is really annoyed that everyone in his family loves Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia. Follow Ty on twitter @tykulik.