I just got an email from one of my Wushu West buddies, Shahaub, and I wanted to plug his short film. Check it out, in HD, on the YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs2mJ3WnqQs The blurb is this:
A Mockumentary about a traditional Iranian man who makes a living for his family in a very non-traditional profession. This short is a commentary on the stereotypes, homophobia and taboo nature of artistic expression in both the West and Middle Eastern cultures. Read More...
HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc00094ea00-1-HBHB 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. Read More...
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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. Read More...
HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc0013faf00-1-HBHB Time… for a Crime!
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? Read More...
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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: Read More...
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. Read More...
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. Read More...
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. Read More...
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. Read More...
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. Read More...
Freddy, what I am saying is: know your limitations. You are a moron. HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc000e2b400-1-HBHB
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 :) Read More...
It’s long overdue, but Mark, Shahaub and I finally got together for a movie. All three of us are movie geeks. Mark was part of the industry with Jet Li and Rotten Tomatoes, Shahaub is in film school right now (and posted a few demo reels, like this one, on vimeo.com), and I like to watch them and then write about what I watch. Our conversations immediately started off with George Lucas movies, Arrested Development, and then oddly to my fear of Bees and Black Widows. Read More...
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HK AVR 254
It is no secret that I love watching movies in the comfort of my own living room. I get to eat what I want, drink and not have to worry about driving, and most of the time I’m by myself so I don’t have to worry about shushing people. What can I say, its a great way for me to recharge and get lost for a few hours. Read More...
HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc000e70000-1-HBHB Let The Right One In
Let the Right One In is a very memorable horror movie. It’s in the vein (HA!) of a vampire movie, yet it never really addresses the question and creatively dodges it.
The two characters are a boy and a girl. Oskar and Eli. The young boy lives in an apartment complex with his single (and very absent) mother. Like most boys, he has a bully problem. Read More...
El Aura
This was a cool Noir film. A taxidermist who is a little unusual, socially disconnected, and suffers from epileptic seizures finds himself in the middle of a heist. Yeah, it is sort of a jump, it works though.
Thanks again to twitchfilms.net and their cool DVD reviews.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
This was the first time I had seen this movie. I skipped seeing it in the theaters, that’s my usual thing these days, so I patiently awaited for it to come out on Blu Ray. I have some mixed feelings with the movie itself, but the video and audio quality was fantastic in almost all scenes. There was the particularly goofy jungle scene where the CGI was painful to look at, but I disliked the tarzan-esque vine swinging in the first place so that may have tainted my opinion. Read More...
À l’intérieur (Inside)
Not that I need an excuse to watch a horror movie, but I tend to watch them around the Halloween season. Maybe its the weather, maybe its the decorations, either way this is the trend I’ve set for myself.
Inside was scary. It was incredibly gory in the realistic sense, and the tension that it built up was relentless. Most the the movies I have watched recently are from http://www. Read More...
Chocolate
The only thing better then the food, is this movie. This is what I can expect from the same director of Ong Bak, which helped Tony Jaa become a recognizable martial artist. This movie is like Ong Bak, where the first half hour is pretty slow in setting up who the protagonist is but once you get past that its non-stop action.
I’d go over the plot but really, who cares? Read More...
The Abandoned
I like simple ghost stories, and I’d prefer that above something that is gorey. The short premise of this was something happened on a farm in Russia, the only survivor was a baby girl. Years (40 or so) later she returns back to her family farm and all sorts of spooky things happen.
It always sort of surprizes me when a movie like this slips under the radar, mostly because it was better than your average wide release blockbuster. Read More...
Taken
Luc Besson had a hand in this as the writer, and if you don’t know who he is he has written and directed Leon AKA The Professional as well as produced Danny the Dog and Kiss of the Dragon. As well as a few others that he has had a hand in, I have purchased and enjoyed them all. This was supposed to be release in the US next month but has been pushed back until Jan 2009. Read More...
Dead Man’s Shoes
I like how IMDB now uses tags on categorizing a movie. And not just “Drama” or “Comedy”, cause it has those as well (and this movie is not a Comedy or a Drama), but it has plot keywords like “Revenge”, or “Shot in the Leg”, or whatever else pertains to the movie’s story. Very cool, it now helps me find movies that are similar to ones that I already like without limiting myself to the director or the writer. Read More...
Michele and I don’t get to the movies all that much, and when we do it’s not like we decide on a movie and then find a babysitter, a babysitter presents themselves and we panic for a while trying to figure out what to do with our precious spare time. This is where I can always catch Michele at a disadvantage. I tend to know whats in theaters at the moment and what I would probably like to see. Read More...
This movie had Guillermo del Toro’s name attached to it, and I anticipated that it would be awesome and have some really cool creature effects. I was off on the latter, while the movie is a really good horror/suspense there is very little physical gore. One tiny part was graphic, and I made Michele mad that I had her watch the movie :)
The premise is a little orphan girl grows up, and as an adult she adopts a little boy, and then buys the house that used to be the very orphanage she grew up in. Read More...
Westerns never caught my attention, I avoided them at all costs. It’s mostly because my whole family was into all of that, and since it conflicted with my indoors only activities of computers and guitar playing, I rebelled against then and refused to watch Lonesome Dove. Also, it was an older movie, and I’ve discussed my aversion to watching older movies.
Well, I was doing my usual workout where I’m half-way lifting weights but mostly preoccupied trying to find something entertaining to watch so the workout wont feel so boring and lifeless. Read More...
I have a negative bias against old movies. Mostly black and white movies. It is really weird, because not only am I pretty snooty with the films I watch (see that, I called them “films”, which makes my movie viewing experience that much better than yours!), so you would think I’d go on and on about how great citizen kane is compared to the common swill people watch these days. Read More...
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No Country for Old Men This movie was probably the best Coen Brothers movie I have seen so far. I thought Fargo was pretty good, I didn’t like O Brother Where Art Thou all that much, and Raising Arizona was some sort of staple back in the day. No Country for Old Men is in another vein altogether and very complete in its approach. By that I mean every action in that movie is done from start to finish and there are no questions left over about what happened. Read More...
Western movies were never really my thing, I’ve never watched a John Wayne movie and the entire ‘cowboys and indians’ thing never caught my attention. 3:10 to Yuma got a lot of attention, and with Christian Bale in it I figured it would be hard to go wrong.
It was kick ass and it made michele leak a few tears towards the end. Christian Bale always pulls of the normal person doing normal things role really well, I mean even though he can pull off Batman with ease, he also does the non-superhero thing. Read More...
The Return
There is a reason why Michele shudders when I say that dreaded phrase “I’m going to go rent a movie.”, and it’s usually because I bring home something like The Return. Now its not a bad movie, but it’s in russian and its a slow cooker with a not so happy ending. She actually didn’t watch it, and that was probably for the best because that would have given her even more ammunition against my choice picks at Hollywood Video. Read More...
HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc000a3ca00-1-HBHB Young Sherlock Holmes
After playing the game, I got a hankering for one of my cherished childhood movies, Young Sherlock Holmes. I could have pulled out the laserdisc player, dusted off my LD copy of YSH, hooked up the player via svideo to my tv… aww thats a lot of work. They recently released it on DVD so I’ll just grab that.
I’ve bitched about DVD covers before, mostly Jet Li movies, but the new cover: HAHAHUGOSHORTCODE-0xc000a3ca00-2-HBHB Read More...
The Fountain
People either loved this movie, or hated it. I don’t I hated it, and I didn’t like it. I’m just glad I got it out of they way. I was going to watch it with Michele, but last time I watched a artsy movie like this with her was David Cronenberg’s Spider. She STILL mentions that movie incident to this day. I told her there was a high risk of this being a waisted 2 hours, so she went off to do something else. Read More...