Matt Damon plays the part of a slightly insane fellow who works for ADM and decides it would be a good idea to become a Government Informant. Well, actually, he thinks it’s not that great an idea, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Mark Whitacre can’t help himself. He thinks of he is the man in the white hat, as the hero in his own story, as a man doing the right thing. The only problem is that he is a lair and a thief. This tends to make his usefulness as a whistleblower a bit…
Category: movie review
Inception-Dreaming The Matrix
I’ve been waiting for someone to make another Matrix movie since 1999 and Inception is pretty close. It’s a sci fi movie, sort of. Sort of because there is no real science mentioned as to how the people in this universe share dreams. This is not a problem, since we are never sure what reality really is and if there is a higher level where the real technology of Dreaming exists. We are shown a number of realities, all of which have differences in how time passes, so that the 30 seconds it take a van to fall from a…
The Last Airbender-Tai Chi of The Gods
In a mostly Chinese world where the practice of Tai Chi gives you the power to control the four elements we find a tired and trite movie. Our hero is a small boy who is the only survivor of a race of Monks who lived in high temples and had the power to bend air. Everyone, with the exception of our tiny hero, speaks in a stiff and overly formalized style. So it is a shock every time Aang says anything in his hip and modern American fashion. This was a George Lucas style special effects movie-think Phantom Menace, not…
Push-Can’t Tell The Players Without a Scorecard
I expected Push to be a lot like Jumper, and there are a lot of similarities between the two films. Both feature good looking young people with amazing powers being chased by a bald black man. Both have exotic locations. Both make very little sense, but are still fun to watch. In Jumper the whole world was the film’s setting, but in Push we spend the entire film in one of Hong Kong’s many fine ghettos. Though there is the occasional hint that they might be going somewhere else. There was one scene that was reminiscent of the PreCogs in…
Choke
Choke was written by the author of Fight Club and it has that same kind of slightly alternate world view. Choke is the story of Victor Mancini and his multi-faceted life as a sex addict, an Historical Reenactor, a son, a friend, and a con artist. When we meet Victor he is at a Sex Addicts meeting and instantly hooks up with one of the women in the support group. Our hero, such as he is, works at a place that looks like Williamsburg, Virginia-one of those spots where everyone dresses up like it’s 1750 and talks with a lot…
Choke-From The Author of Fight Club
Chokewas written by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, and the film made from that book has that same kind of slightly alternate world view. Choke is the story of Victor Mancini and his multi-faceted life as a sex addict, an Historical Reenactor, a son, a friend, and a con artist. When we meet Victor he is at a Sex Addicts meeting and instantly hooks up with one of the women in the support group. Our hero, such as he is, works at a place that looks like Williamsburg, Virginia-one those spots where everyone dresses up like it’s 1750…
Lars and The Real Girl
spoilers within. One of my favorite artist is MC Escher, who made 3D images on 2D paper. He was intrigued by how easily people were fooled into believing a 2D image was 3D. He played tricks on the viewers of his art, but we still see a 3D image on the flat page. Movies are not real. They are filled with actors, sets, lights, and scripts. It’s all made up. And yet, we look at a film and it can make us cry, or laugh, or feel rage at an unjust world. Lars and The Real Girl is an extraordinary…
Running With Scissors
You know, memoir is not court stenography. Memoir is not a video on YouTube. Memoir has a narrative. Memoirs, a good memoir, is a person’s experience, their memory, and how that experience mattered to them, emotionally and psychologically. Augusten Burroughs I’ve always liked memoirs, though I didn’t always know that I was watching a memoir. A Christmas Story is a fairy tale memoir. Little Big Man was a fake memoir. Most of the brilliant writing of David Sedaris is in the form of memoirs. Oprah yelled at James Frey for making stuff up in his memoir A Million Little Pieces.…
Juno The Lighter Side of Teen Pregnancy
Juno is the story of a pregnant 16 year and how she deals with it with wit and wisdom. Juno reminds me of a long episode of The Gilmore Girls. Juno is filled with brilliant dialogue that no high school kids could ever come up with and way cool adults who like nothing more than hanging out with high school kids. There are also a lot of odd little details such as a phone shaped like a hamburger and Juno’s fondness for stripes. I knew nothing about Juno before I saw it, other than it was about a pregnant high…
Moulin Rouge – Great Soundtrack
Moulin Rouge is the standard star crossed lovers story of power, betrayal, lust, greed and tragedy. I grew up watching musicals like My Fair Lady and Camelot and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. These were movies where people would break into song and dance for no reason-and I never had a problem with that. Most of these shows featured music written for them, though Singing in The Rain was the result of MGM buying up a bunch of old music. Moulin Rouge is one of those films that has the feel of a music video and uses modern music in…