Daybreakers (3.5/5)

Daybreakers is a 2009 vampire themed action horror starring Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, and Claudia Karvan. Now I know what you’re thinking, ‘Twilight has forever ruined vampires for me, they are so overdone’, and in general I agree, but I have to make an exception for this movie; it doesn’t conform to any of the traditional vampire story lines and really the vampires are more a vessel for a delivering a plot line more befitting an action movie than anything else.

According to the mythos of Daybreakers, in the year 2009 a mysterious plague spread throughout the world transforming most its population into vampires. Over the following years, society adapted to the change by making their cities, cars and homes vampire friendly, i.e. sun proof, and hunting down, capturing, and farming any remaining humans for blood to be sold to the public. The movie itself is set ten years after the plague in 2019 when the world is undergoing a widespread blood shortage causing vampires to starve and devolve into primitive, mutated, violent creatures known as sub-siders who attack and feed off other vampires. The largest blood-farming corporation, Bromley Marks, employs hematologists, including our hero Edward Dalton (Hawke), to find a blood substitute before both humans and vampires die out completely. Just as the sub-sider problem turns into an epidemic Edward encounters two humans, Audrey Bennet (Karvan) and Lionel “Elvis” Cormac (Dafoe), who claim to have found a cure to vampirism. Naturally, this being Hollywood, the Bromley Marks has ulterior motives that aren’t in humanities best interest and therefore, with the help of the military, attempt to hunt down Ed and his human friends and violent, bloody wackiness ensues.

Daybreakers is a visually appealing film with an imaginative premise and plot-line the runs the gambit from action to dystopian “Big Brother” futurism to zombie-esque horror all with a couple decent plot twists thrown in. if one wished to look hard at the film they might find a few inaccuracies like the unrealistic amount of blood spatter the film makers manage to get out of one exploding corpse, but, honestly, if you’re the sort of person who is going to take serious issue with the realism of a vampire movie you should probably stop reading this right now and go get a life. Ultimately Daybreakers is a fun, clever, and largely unappreciated little action horror film and if you like gratuitous violence, spontaneous human (or in this case, vampire) combustion, and blood-suckers you, like me, will love this movie.

Daybreakers IMDb page 

Romeo & Juliet (yeah its a play and i'm breaking the rules already, sue me) 1/5

Note: I realize this is kind of a long review, but count yourselves lucky, this is an abridged version my original was nearly 5 pages long. Also this gets a 1 star out of 5 simply because I couldn’t find a JPEG online for 0 stars.

I hate Romeo & Juliet, I know I’m one of about five people in the country I who feel this way, but seriously the thing is just a steaming pile of crap! Now don’t get me wrong I love Shakespeare, Hamlet is probably the best tragedy of all time, but I honestly believe he was higher than a 60s Berkeley student when he wrote Romeo & Juliet. Furthermore, the play’s plot is the kind angsty teen drama bull one would expect from Stephanie Meyers, not the “Immortal Bard”

First on my list of things I hate about Romeo & Juliet is its complete lack of realism. Let’s look at the major plot defects: first we have two idiotic 13 year old kids who think hormones and teenage angst is equivalent to love, a tragic ending caused by a monk and a plague placed with the kind of convenience one usually only see in 90s sitcoms, and, to top it all off, the Capulets and Montagues, who have loathed each other for generations, suddenly decide to be friends in a bull-shit kum ba yah ending that even Disney wouldn’t expect their audience to swallow.

Problem number two, in any Shakespeare play the audience can predict by the end of the first act if it’s a comedy or a tragedy because Shakespeare has a strict storytelling pattern;  Romeo & Juliet, however, breaks the pattern. Judging by the first two and half acts Romeo & Juliet should be a comedy, but just as the audience is preparing for a lovely ending where in everyone gets married and lives happily ever after, the play takes a hard left turn into death-ville.

Finally, Romeo & Juliet is Shakespeare’s most famous play which is an insult to all his other actually good plays. The fact that every American school kid is forced to read Romeo & Juliet is most likely directly responsible for America’s lack of interest in Shakespeare; honestly, if I hadn’t already seen and read several other Shakespeare plays before reading Romeo & Juliet, I would’ve written off good old Billy completely. So boys and girls if you haven’t read Edward & Be—I mean Romeo & Juliet yet, don’t and if you have, try to erase it from your memory and replace it with The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, or one of Shakespeare’s other actually decent plays.