[GAD]

Resident Evil II (Blu Ray) - 7/10. Enjoyable (I love me a good zombie flick), but hokey too often. I felt like I was in a game with the way the plot was forced.

I'm watching III now.

GAD

 

[blessingx]

Saw Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven on DVD. Consider it an artistic (and chronological) bridge between Badlands and The Thin Red Line/The New World. This is one of the biggies of the 70s that has since faded at bit in public awareness. A new Criterion release may help its cause, especially in a year of No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Beautiful and for those excited about The Will Be Blood, time, space and how those are captured has some similarities here. Highly recommended.

Check out this essay....

Malick's films have sometimes been frozen, by those unsympathetic to them, into pious homilies or grand statements: Man versus Nature, the redemptive path to God via love and sacrifice, the corrupting effects of Civilization encroaching upon an idyllic Wilderness . . . Yet nothing is so certain or schematic in his work. As always, everything is in motion, seeming opposites ceaselessly transforming each other. Days of Heaven shows us, in myriad inventive ways, how nature and culture are always intertwined, how a certain kind of technology, a certain kind of civilizing process, is part of even the humblest garden arrangement, the most elementary use of a cloth to cover the body, the fashioning of a piece of a tree to make music . . . This is part of the deep Heideggerian legacy in Malick: there is no pure Being, only the action of hands upon the world, fashioning (for better or worse) a living space, a temporary arrangement of people and materials. And those "cosmic" shots, that conjure heaven and earth gazing at each other as in a mirror: these are far from constituting a reassuring New Age bromide. Malick resembles, at one level, the tragic philosopher Simone Weil: the God in heaven in whom she so fervently believed was not, in her view, by our side and guiding our every step, but rather someone very far away, discernible only as a distant echo, someone who had set in motion a terrible Destiny Machine that would first bring us pain, separation, betrayal, and wars before it delivered us any faint or fleeting redemption. Malick is a true poet of the ephemeral: the epiphanies that structure his films, beginning with Days of Heaven, are ones that flare up suddenly and die away just as quickly, with the uttering of a single line (like "She loved the farmer"), the flight of a bird or the launching of a plane, the flickering of a candle or the passing of a wind over the grass. Nothing is ever insisted upon or lingered on in his films; that is why they reveal subtly different arrangements of event, mood, and meaning each time we see them. Because everything is in motion everything is whisked away quickly, and the elements of any one cellular moment are very soon redistributed and metamorphosed into other moments. Just look at and listen to the last minutes of Days of Heaven, with their split-second swing between end-of-the-line melancholic emptiness and wide-open possibility, for a sublime illustration of this ephemerality, which is miraculously caught and formalized in the language of cinema.

That alone should make you see it.

 

[TheMarchingMule]

The Transporter (Blu Ray) - 4/10 (3 for explosions and guns, 1 for the Blu Ray quality)

Another movie where the main character is "Chuck Norris-like" invincible, and everything just happens to work out for him. Acting was horrible; the non-stop squealing Asian girl he rescued threw her coffee to the side BEFORE she was biotch-slapped by her dad. Oh, and I learned that sex makes up for everything done wrong.

On the flip side, I had some fun; I decided to cheer every time the main character decided to lose his shirt in the midst of fighting. And I went crazy when he spontaneously tipped over an oil barrel and slicked himself up and all of the bad guys around for a wrestling match.

The Golden Compass (movie theater) - 1/10 (one for it eventually having an ending)

Man, and here I thought Eragon was the worst movie I saw in theaters. Terrible, stereotypical "good guy/bad guy" acting, I almost fell asleep because the good guys ALWAYS came to save those in trouble at the last second before the final blow, and worst of all, apparently the book (my sister later told me that it was an almost-perfect book-to-movie transition) decided to pull a revised version of the (in)famous Star Wars scene where the evil character tells the main character that she was, in fact, her mother. I couldn't take it anymore; I yelled out loud "Oh Christ, you're kidding me!"

 

[owkia]

Good Luck Chuck (DVD) - 3/10

First up is the comedy in this movie. Besides one character that had me laughing out loud a few times, no one else is all that funny. That one funny person is the guy that plays Dane Cook's friend. He's a plastic surgeon that only does huge boob jobs on overly hot women. If you like over the top sexual humor then this guy will keep you laughing. No matter how funny you might find Dane Cook's stand up, you won't find him to be funny at all in this movie.

Next up is Jessica Alba. She's not funny at all and isn't super attractive in this movie either. There are so many other topless women scattered throughout that you really don't even notice her. Dane Cook shows waaay more skin than she does and waaay more skin than he really needed to. You literally see him in a dozen different sex scenes on screen all at the same time.

 

[ken36]

30 Rock-Season1-4/4-Went through 24 episode last night on 3 DVDs. Better than any movie I've seen lately.

 

[Contrastique]

The Fountain by Darren Aronofski. 9/10
What a fabulous stunning gorgeously shot film. This is a must-see for real! That man sure knows how to make beautiful movies.

 

[YamiTenshi]

Triad Zone - 6/10

Pretty much a parody of the entire triad genre. A lot of dry humor and a bit of action sprinkled in because, well, this is about triads. Good acting by most of the cast. A standard triad storyline though there were some subplots left unresolved that I wanted to see play out.

 

[412]

AVPR - 1/10. 1 to poor shmucks who bankrolled this crap.

 

[mwallace573]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheMarchingMule /img/forum/go_quote.gif (my sister later told me that it was an almost-perfect book-to-movie transition)

I haven't seen the movie, but from what I've heard and read, they did some major changes to the story during the transition. They included rearranging the time line of some of the major events of the story not to mention giving it an entirely different ending. It's nowhere near the butchery of "The Lost World", but it ranks pretty high up there in my book. I've read the first two books of the series and I am almost through the third, and it's a shame to see what they did to this movie. With proper directing it could have been something worth watching. It certainly wasn't the casting that hurt it. I personally think they are a pretty good set of books, though I'm having a hard time nailing the proper age group they are targeted at. They definitely bounce between the younger and older groups at times. A good read IMO, but not a good watch.

 

[blessingx]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mwallace573 /img/forum/go_quote.gif I haven't seen the movie, but from what I've heard and read, they did some major changes to the story during the transition. They included rearranging the time line of some of the major events of the story not to mention giving it an entirely different ending. It's nowhere near the butchery of "The Lost World", but it ranks pretty high up there in my book. I've read the first two books of the series and I am almost through the third, and it's a shame to see what they did to this movie. With proper directing it could have been something worth watching. It certainly wasn't the casting that hurt it. I personally think they are a pretty good set of books, though I'm having a hard time nailing the proper age group they are targeted at. They definitely bounce between the younger and older groups at times. A good read IMO, but not a good watch.

Well I'd actually see the film before stating some of those criticisms. Faithful translations make the worst films. Here's an interview with Philip Pullman. Favorite quote...

Quote:

"‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

 

[mwallace573]

Quote:

Originally Posted by blessingx /img/forum/go_quote.gif Well I'd actually see the film before stating some of those criticisms. Faithful translations make the worst films. Here's an interview with Philip Pullman. Favorite quote...

It's definitely a movie I'll wait for DVD to view. I based my opinion from talking to a few friends who have seen the movie and the wikipedia article on the movie, both of which confirmed most of my fears about the movie. You are right about me knocking a movie I haven't seen yet though. It's a practice I try to avoid, but this was one of those times where I just kept on typing when I should have stopped. Kinda like now.

 

[GAD]

Resident Evil: Extinction (III) (Blu Ray) - 6/10.

It's basically what you expect it to be, though even for a RE movie, it had some useless plotlines that went nowhere and such. The "completer genetic mutation complete with psionic powers all in 24 hours" thing is getting old.

GAD

 

[archosman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by EyeAmEye /img/forum/go_quote.gif Right after I watched the movie, I went to Amazon to order the soundtrack From what I was able to find out through Google, there is a legal issue with the band Underworld, who contributed a small amount to John Murphy's brilliant score, so as of now, the release is questionable.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut had the same problem. It's been finished since 2000 but due to one of the original producers it was held up this long.

Saw it again this weekend. Not sure what to think. Saw the original, re-release w/o narration, and now this. Still a great movie.

 

[blessingx]

Just saw Once. 2am and I have to up in four hours but I couldn't stop. Practically magic and a perfect ending shot.

 

[ken36]

Peaceful Warrior- 2/4-Has a message, feel good sports movie.