Okay, so I went through a buncha flicks over my 2 weeks vacation. A rather weird lot, actually...
Extract (2009) 6/10
Mike Judge's 3rd flick after
Office Space and
Idiocracy, is a lot of fun, but is nowhere near as clever or funny as his 1st two.
The Frighteners (Director's Cut) (1996) 9/10
I was already a fan of this little Peter Jackson gem to begin with, so I was definitely on-board for a director's cut.
Well, the new stuff isn't disappointing, but it's mostly little stuff. Snippets of dialog and such. But there are a couple of fairly extensive scenes that flesh out Michael J. Fox's character a little.
If you liked the flick, there's just mosr to like here, but the new stuff doesn't alter the film in any kind of drastic way.
The High Life (2009) 6/10
Set in 1983, richard (played by Timothy Olyphant) is working in a hospital in order to keep himself close to a supply line of morphine. However, he gets fired from the job when his former cellmate, Bug, gets paroled and finds him working there.
While walking home with Bug, richard decides to get some cash from the bank, pulling it from a new-fangled machine called an A-T-M, something Bug had never seen nor heard of before having been in prison on a long stint. But they both reckon that it would be fairly simple to steal from them given the proper plan.
Not the greatest movie ever, but it has it's moments - also it's only 78 minutes long, so it doesn't take up too much time.
The Hurt Locker (2009) 8/10
I really liked this one quite a bit.
It follows a bomb removal unit in Iraq and the struggles that they go through disarming makeshift bombs (IEDs) left by 'insurgents' to kill Coalition soldiers.
Sgt. William James (played by Jeremy Renner who may get an Oscar nod) is put in charge of a bomb squad that is a little over a month from the end of its tour. The crew doesn't like Sgt. James much at the beginning because he's reckless. He takes very little precaution in dealing with very grave matters and it wrankles his other men.
It's still a very good flick tho, and doesn't have nearly the goofy machismo that
Point Break had...
Inglourious Basterds (2009) 9/10
After hearing so many disparate reviews I had to see this one myself.
Wow.
What a great movie! Wholly, blantantly and completely historically inaccurate, but hey if you can't figure that out then you're a reh-tard.
Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa (aka The Jew Hunter) was astonishingly good and he'd better get a nomination at the Oscars for this performance.
Invictus (2009) 6/10
As you're probably aware, this flick is about Nelson Mandela (played effortlessly by Morgan Freeman) giving support to the South African Springbok rugby team as a way of unifying the blacks and whites of South Africa following the end of Apartheid.
This isn't a bad movie really, it's very adequate in many ways, I just found it to be predictable.
And while I understand that it's based on historical events, this isn't what I'm getting at. What I mean is that while watching the film you say to yourself, "Oh, this is the scene where X is going to happen." - and it invariably happens exactly as you thought.
I found
Gran Torino to be much less predictable than this flick so I was a little underwhelmed by
Invictus. It's worth a gander, but don't go out of your way...
Moon (2009) - 8/10
An unusual little flick about Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) as an employee contracted by the company Lunar Industries to extract helium-3 from lunar soil for clean energy back on Earth.
His stint is supposed to last 3 years, after which he will be returned to Earth. So he dawdles about the station checking various pieces of machinery to make sure they are functioning properly. His only companion is the facility's service bot GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) and the recorded videos he has that have been sent from Earth. For some reason, live real-time conversations with Earth are impossible so the recordings of his wife and newborn daughter (born just before Sam left for the 3-year moon stint) are the only thing he has to remind him of his family.
Overall a cool little movie...
Phantoms (1998) 0/10
I DL'd this flick because I'd just recently re-read the novel by Dean Koontz.
The film is as terrible as the novel is excellent.
Ben Affleck is particularly bad in this movie (and let's face it, he's bad in
a lot of things -
Pearl Harbor anyone?) and ends up being cast in a part where he should've been about 10 years older. Liev Schreiber is playng a character that in the book who was fat, coarse and ugly...
And then there's Peter O'Toole. He so clearly did not want to be in the movie that his contempt comes through in his melodrama. He was the peanuts in this poo sandwich.
Avoid this movie at all costs.Pirate Radio [aka The Ship That Rocked (UK)] (2009) 7/10
This was a fun little flick despite all of the bad news I'd heard about it when it came out in the UK.
It's set in 1966 at a time when the BBC would not play rock & roll music, so radio ships would set up just outside British waters and broadcast to the UK what the BBC was against playing.
Already in hot water with Minister Dormandy (played by Kenneth Branagh) whose intent is to shut down the Pirate Radio ships, gets ramped up when one of the DJs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) manages to let a conversation with the station owner (played by Bill Nighy) get onto the air in which the owner says the word 'golly' seven times.
And it's all downhill from there...
Planet 51 (2009) 5/10
Meh.
Not great. Not bad. Just so-so.
Police, Adjective (2009) 8/10
This is a Romanian film (so you'll have to 'read' it) about a police officer named Cristi who's been given the task of tailing a high school student who smokes pot and is suspected of dealing.
But after following the kid for awhile, he begins to doubt that this kid is actually a criminal. He begins to realize that almost every other European country turns a blind eye to or has legalized marijuana. As such Cristi is having a difficult time coming to grips with destroying the kid's life over a law that may not even be enforced soon. Cristi is also being forced to make an arrest when he would like to investigate further up the chain to the actual supplier, rather than settle for a small fish.
As his CO begins to question Cristi's ability to even be a police officer if Cristi can't enforce an existing law because of his moral 'crisis of conscience'. Eventually the film even delves into the very definitions of words like moral, law, conscience and police (hence the title)...
One note tho', the film for the most part is very slow-paced and there are numerous scenes without dialog where Cristi can be seen waiting for some part of his investigation to be completed by others in the station. I think this is used to show the excessive tedium and time consumed just to apprehend a kid who has smoked a joint that he might possibly have shared with his friends. However, it can make the flick a bit of a trudge in places...
