My Wushu Blog

Possibly the best action sci-fi I’ve ever seen. It is not as confusing as say Primer, not as mind-numbingly STUPID as Avatar but filled with great action.

I’ve seen a few headlines about the movies plot; how it might be ‘too smart’ for the average movie go-er. I think that is insulting to the average person, and I hope that movies like this will retrain the “industry” to continue to make “smart” movies instead of anticipating that the average person is a drooling slack-jawed yokel who is missing a tooth. The movie is not “too smart”, it is perfect. There is a lot of things you get to try and process, and the best part is the two days AFTER seeing the movie where you are still thinking about all the little details.

I didn’t see any commercials or reviews of this movie before hand, so I really didn’t know what it was about. I prefer this.
RANT
I feel that move movie trailers show way too much *visual* information. That is an important distinction to me. I can read the back of a book and get the outline of a plot, but nothing is spoiled. I can see an extended trailer for a movie, and what typically happens is you are given a voice over of the plot but then shown every major event in the movie. It is those small snippets that kill it. The best example of a ruined movie is the trailer for Surrogates.
END RANT
The movie is about mucking in someone elses mind to either extract or plant an idea, which makes this just as much of a heist film as a science fiction one. There is a team of people (The Spot Man, The Architect, The Chemist, The Forger and The Extractor), each person has their own sort of specialty. The one common task they all have is while in a shared dream state, one person has to be the host for the dream environment, and also be the anchor to bring everyone else back. This is where the movie gets complex, and very very interesting.

It reminds me of programming in two ways. The movie is basically a stack data structure. Last In, First Out. That might be hard from some people to follow, but all the move does is pop-off the stack in a very spectacular way. It also reminds me of a recursive function, but I’m not going to fully explain that.

Each dream environment, or Object, on the stack is ultimately in the mind of the “Anchor”, but the Architect designs the actual environments. By far the coolest character is not the main character Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), but the Point Man played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Every second his in on the screen, he is either doing or saying something that is completely awesome. The tumbling hallway sequence is astounding!

I don’t want to say anything else about the movie. I have really liked all of Christopher Nolan’s movies (The Following, Memento, Insomnia, Batman stuff), so it is no surprise I enjoyed this one as well. It still catches me off guard about how good it is.

Michele and I saw this in the theaters when it came out, and I just re-watched it the other night. Both times,  I was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t think it would hold up to a second viewing, so I’m not even sure why I tried that hypthesis out, boredom I guess.

The first, and probably the best, thing this movie has going for it is atmosphere. Between the scenery and almost overbearing score, it oozes a subtle tension. It is not overwhelming, just enough to keep your eyes peeled open, and your butt glued to the seat. The second, and close tie, is the story, acting and dialog. It is all very good, and I really like the era this takes place in; post-WWII, were everyone calls each other ‘boss’ or ‘chief’, smokes unfiltered lucky strikes, and resolved most conflicts with “fisticuffs”.

The main premise is two US Marshals are sent to a isolated metal institution for the criminally insane because one of the patients went missing. The movie quickly moves to the conclusion that there is more to this case, since it was physically impossible to the patient to ‘escape’. So, the likely conclusion is someone must be covering something up… or so it would seam.

Now, both of Marshals are in a quandary. They have their perception of the evidence that is presented, which includes other inmates and the staff also says, as well as the administrations reluctance to provide any real help.

To top if off, the missing patient suddenly re-appears. She is totally unscathed, and cannot recall where she has been the last few days.

After all of that, Teddy Daniels reveals his own personal reasons for coming to Shutter Island, and he intends to “blow the lid off of the place”. Not all is what it seems, but you’ll just have to watch it. Maybe twice, it is certainly worth it.

While I feel the films title is really shallow and hokey, the movie itself really stands on its own. Oh, and this is your subtitle warning: it has them!

I felt like I was watching a classic Twilight Zone episode, where an ordinary middle aged man finds himself in a strange and perplexing situation and clumsily adapts to all of it. Clumsy at first, towards the end, or maybe I should say the begining? Hector, our protagonist is doing quite well at making quick and harsh decisions. The transition is pretty brilliant, I hardly noticed it until I really thought about it all.

So, what is Timecrimes about? It is based around time travel and the paradox of free-will. Let me offer a graphical representation of the movies plot:

The movie takes a 24 hour window and layers and warps it on to itself a few times, and it does it well enough that you are not left with lingering questions or laughing at obvious plot holes. You will be left with one perplexing question and the end, and that is “How did it all start?”

My only complaint is that it is SO well done, and the plot is so perfectly packaged up, it is easy to put it all together very early on. No a big deal, it is still nice to see how it all goes down.

It is very good, and I would put it up there with Primer, another well done time travel movie.

I haven’t felt the urge to post about movies recently. A lot of that comes from the lack of good movies, ones that might get me excited enough to spend a few minutes and collect my thoughts so this blog doesn’t turn into illegible techie gibberish. Here is one that I sort of liked though.

Here is the thing, when commit an entry on this blog about a movie, there are two things that I think about:

1. I want people to share my excitement and see this movie
2. I don’t want to spoil anything

What I’ve come to realize over the years, talking with people about movies, is that I’m WAAAAAY off the spectrum of what normal people consider “good”. Most of the movies I’ve blogged about here are from a different country, and might be considered “art house”. The combination of these two elements quickly eliminates said movie from someones list. That is OKAY, and I’m not going to act even more pretentious because I watch different movies than you, and keeping that in mind I’m going to write a little more content about the movies I watch because you may not want to see them anyway

I saw an image of this movie over a year ago, and the image was essentially what you see in the poster above,  of the main character “One-Eye” looking poised and ready to kill/mame/fight. My expectations were immediatly set, and they were high.

Fast forward to the other night, when I finally get to see the full featured film behind that one image, and my impression is mixed. It is stunning visually, and is reeks of something you would watch in school. It comes off more allegorical than your typical monomyth story. Its downfall is those very two points, I was really looking forward to a near mindless action flick with a good setting and an interesting main character.

Valhalla Rising starts its first chapter (yes, the movie is broken up into 6 parts, or chapters) in a Scotland, it is cold and brutal. One-Eye is a slave, forced to fight. Though “forced” might be the wrong term here, because while he eventually kills his captors, he seems content with playing by the rules. He sits quietly in his cage, and after a fight, he promptly presents his wrists so he may be cuffed again. He is also incredibly vicious when fighting, and his owners have to tie him by the neck to a post. With his missing eye, and his unnervingly proficient fighting skills he may actually be a representation Odin, and the film makes a few allusions to his mysterious origins.

One-Eye dreams of events that will happen to him. His first dream is of him finding an arrowhead in a river he is allowed to rinse off in. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of epiphany that accompanies these visions, he seems to just accept them and follow them through, much like his gladiator-esque fights. With this Arrowhead, he escapes and kills everyone save the small boy who tended to him.

The boy, now without any support, decides to follow One-Eye. They come across a group of fervent Crusaders, who immediately ask the two if they are tribesmen or good god-fearing Christians… As the boy gazes at the smouldering pile of bodies, he wisely says “Christians”. After some posturing and a bit of a sales pitch by the Crusaders, One-Eye and the child go with the Crusaders to Jerusalem to fight for the Holy Land.

They never reach Jerusalem, but instead, the America’s (Canada perhaps). Shipwrecked, isolated, and starved, the crew starts to degenerate and turn on One-Eye and the Boy. Then there is the indigenous Native Americans, who the Chief Crusader is intent on conquering for God after some of the crew are slain. One-Eye has another vision, and this time it is of their death. Just as before, he acts the vision out even though he knows the final outcome.

Even though I was expecting something between Casino Royal and Gladiator (Hey, One-Eye was the bad guy in CR, I was hoping for a similar pace m0vie), and I got what would have been an English assignment, I’m still thinking about the movie and it’s themes.

I like to watch horror movies from other countries, and not just Asia (the entire J-Horror category is getting absurd). They tend to have different dogma’s in them, or cultural references that I’ve never heard of. This is a Swedish movie (Yay subtitles!!), and it takes place after The Great Norther War (1780?). Sweden and Russia are drawing new territory lines post-war, and a group from each respective country has to survey the land and get any town or village on the border to sign an agreement about the new lines.

This is an abstract horror movie, and I thought it was really awesome. It was pretty creepy, almost no gore of jumpy scary stuff. It had a lot of atmosphere, good dialog (from what I could tell, the subtitles were a little too literal), and very good pacing. There were a lot of allusions and symbols, it is the kind of movie that if you watch a couple of times you’ll continue to get more out of it.

If you like horror, and not gore or slasher horror, this is well worth watching.

It’s October, and that means I naturally start to gravitate towards horror movies. Ahh, it feels so good The smell of a smoldering chimney is in the air, or someone is burning evidence…

I Sell The Dead is about two grave robbers, one of the two is eventually arrested and tried for murder. He tells his story to a priest, hours before his planned execution. Oh, its not as serious as it sounds, its pretty funny.

The movie is really low budget, but it has a great cast who must have either worked for free, or well, were the result of the rest of the films cheap look. It even has Angus Scrimm, or “The Tall Man” from the Phantasm series. Has that guy ever NOT looked creepy?

I’m going to have to get a copy for my Mom, this is right up her alley.

I was conflicted about posting a little blurb about this movie. I wanted to actually post some other movies, good ones, and I felt it was only fair to also post a little something about this one. If I don’t like a movie, I usually just don’t bother with a post. I think this is the first movie in which I was so disappointed with, I had to at least get that out there before I posted anything else.

So yeah, this movie was TERRIBLE. Hugh Jackman is a good actor, and I liked the first two X-Men movies. Also, when I was into comic books, I had a decent wolverine collection. So, as a kid, I had read a bit on the various back stories of Wolverine. They were all really cool (okay, I was about 10, so cool for a 10 year old), and it was just lame how it ended up on the screen.

What was really terrible is the lack of any character development, so all the decisions made in the movie either lack any motivation at all, or have so lack-luster logic behind its laughable. The movie starts off with a couple really awful plot devices. First, Wolverine kills his father, runs off with his brother, Sabertooth, and minutes after they escape they decide “Hey, its cool, he lied to us… now, lets go fight in some wars and kill a crapton of people!”. So, they fight in every major war until Vietnam when lo and behold, Wolverine decides he’s killed enough… Really? You slaughter how many people and then when a ranking officer threatens the life of something else you decide then it was all wrong and become a lumberjack… I couldn’t suspend my disbelieve, and I watch Zombie movies.

Maybe I have been spoiled from the last decade of really good superhero movies, so it is just natural that eventually, this genera returns to its roots as a cheesy B movie. Seriously, don’t bother with this movie, you will feel your brain dying.

This movie was LONG. 3 hours, and most of the time it’s pacing was perfect. Except when it wasn’t. I had decided to start this movie at 11pm, so I finished it around 2am and I was pretty sleepy.

This movie has a lot going on, and I probably would have felt very lost if I had not read the graphic novel (okay, okay, “comic book”). Now, I read that almost 3 years ago (I flipped between that and a Reg Exp book during a very boring LANDesk training class), and from what I remember, the movie is nearly identical to the comic. When I first read there was going to be a Watchmen movie, I didn’t think it would pan out. I also wasn’t even interested in seeing it when it came to the big screen. I decided to buy the movie on a whim, and I’m pretty glad I did.

When I read the comic, I found Rorschach to be the most engaging and interesting character. He is a complete sociopath, hardly a “good guy”, but his unrelenting moral code that he does not budge from is great. He also has some of the best lines in the story. What is very cool about all the characters in the storyis that they are all heroes and villains at the same time. Maybe that is really what a vigilante is, and I think the story goes to great lengths to reinforce that idea, especially if those vigilantes are not kept in check. Hence the phrase “Who will watch the Watchmen?”

Rorschach is the primary detective in the story, he moves everything along. The other main characters, mostly the Night Owl and Lady Jupiter, I found a little boring. I was drifting a bit with their scenes, and I didn’t care for the romance angle.

There was also Dr. Manhattan, who aside from Rorschach, was the other well developed and entertaining character. His complete detachment from humanity proved an interesting contrast to everyone else’s struggle to stop the inevitable mutually assured destruction (remember, this story takes place in the 80′s, where the Cold War scare was rampant… I think, I mean, I’m not THAT old ).

The second disc had 3 bonus features, and I liked those a lot too. One covered real life vigilante’s, and provided multiple angles on how they are viewed in our society. The feature had members of the Guardian Angels, a combat trainer for the FBI, a history professor and a writer. All of them had their own rational for whether self-appointed hero’s were needed or even justified.

Another cool feature was an interview with a Physics Professor as the science consultant of the movie. Which was fantastic, and super nerdy. I thought it was great that even a movie based on a comic was trying to maintain a balance between the story and plausibility. I thought he did a good job.

So, to summarize, I really liked this movie. It was fun, sometimes a little too graphic (it has this hyper-stylized feel to the violence, and it didn’t feel necessary all the time), and it continued to make me think about the story over the week.

This movie was released here in the US, though HBO, as Pu-239. It is based on a short story with the above title.

Poor Timofey, he works as an engineer in some type of reactor. There was an accident, and he was exposed to 1000 REMs in a few minutes. They read this from his Dosimeter which I though was cool. This isn’t about his half-life, but the very painful last two days of his life while he tries to obtain enough money for his family to live on.

How does he plan on getting a large sum of money? By selling 100 grams of very pure (he says its 100% pure) super-grade Plutonium. Well, he tries to sell it, by standing in a open market with a cardboard sign.

There are many aspects of this movie that I really enjoyed, mostly I’m a sucker for long monologs and voiceovers. I have no idea why, thats just something I like. It also focuses around a moral entanglement, which is essentially, would you steal to provide for your family?

Good movie, I don’t have HBO but man, the internets kick ass.

I had never seen this movie, I mean, I think I saw the ending of it a long time ago when it first came out on VHS, but I didn’t know what it was about. Over the past few years, Jenny has asked me maybe a half dozen times if I had ever seen it, and after the last few times she finally brought it in for me to watch

This movie was complete shit… Ha, just kidding Jenny

No, really, it was hilarious. There is a lot of quick come backs and one liners that you really have to pay attention to catch. At the risk of sounding (even more) like an old man, they don’t make comedies like they used to. Really, you don’t see this kind of a movie now, this is the kind of comedy I like, way more than what Judd Apatow and the like pump out. It’s classy, yet its about coning people which isn’t classy at all.

Now, back to chasing kids off my lawn….