watching movies one cup at a time

Zombies movies these days are very cliche these days. Almost as bad as vampires. What sets this movie apart though is there is nothing supernatural involved here. The so-called “zombies” are in fact victims of a catastrophic outbreak of a disease that infects the blood in a matter of seconds, turning the infected person into an out-of-control raging monster. They cease to function as a human beings and are instead reduced to a form of sub-human incapable of rational thought or behavior, with nothing but homicidal urges completely taking over everything else. It plays on our societal fear of bio-terrorism and viral outbreaks. And as the norms of society are wiped away in the 28 days of the title, we are shown the good and the ugly side of everyday people force to survive on their own.

The film is directed by Danny Boyle and the tone of it reminds me of his film, Shallow Grave, and has Christopher Eccleston again performing another brilliant character. Cillian Murphy also turns in a brilliant performance as the audience’s view into a horribly twisted world he literally wakes up in to. But be warned, this new world is brutal and harsh as we find some of the human “survivors” can be worse than the infected.

Not for the squeamish but definitely worth checking out.

The vampire has got to be the most overused and cliche cultural subject out there. What makes this movie different is the movie’s setting in an arctic Alaskan town that is in complete darkness for part of the year, and the depiction of the vampires as an animalistic pack of feral creatures in wool trenchcoats. The fear they inspire comes from the cold blackness of their eyes and the shark-like rows of teeth that are used more the destroy than to delicately bite a neck. These creatures are here to destroy their prey until every drop of blood is drained from this town that gives them unfettered freedom to move about in the darkness.

Based on a popular comic book series, the flaws of this movie come from the transition from print to screen and from some mediocre acting. What is dark and menacing in print loses all subtlety up on the screen where each frame needs to be filled with something thrilling and eye-catching. It works often, but is nowhere near as intense as the comic book artwork. And a couple things about the story really bugged me. Like the vampires are there for 30 days but it seemed like they killed everyone in the first week. Why bother hanging around? Why not move on to the next town? Or why not save some blood for later? Seems a waste to pig out all in one week.

Danny Huston and Ben Foster are both brilliant as the purely evil visitors to the town, but Josh Hartnett continues to just stink up every movie he’s in. I just don’t buy anything coming out of his mouth and his character just got pretty annoying after awhile. In more capable hands, his heroic figure would have had a lot more heart to it instead of feeling half-baked.

Bottom line: Worth checking out but could be better.

I was really looking forward to this movie. I liked what the director Julie Taymor did with Frida and this looked interesting and vibrant. It got some good reviews but I never made it to the theaters to see it. So I was looking forward to the DVD.

Well… I can’t say it’s bad. But I can’t say it’s good either. There are definitely some interesting visuals in here and some exciting musical numbers. But really I just got kind of bored with it. It kind of just stumbled along looking for excuses to throw in Beatles songs. There is a character named Prudence who I felt only existed so they could have a moment and sing “Dear Prudence.” And everyone’s name is like that. It’s like some big Beatles fan wet dream.

Now I love the Beatles. They made phenomenal music. But I wasn’t really feeling this mash-up version. It just didn’t have enough real story. I didn’t care about any of the characters and I didn’t care what happened next. I’m sure they were going to bump into someone named Elanor just so they could sing “Elanor Rigby” to her. Yawn.

And then they started having all these dumb cameos. Bono shows up about half-way pretending to be some Ken Kesey type guru/hippie dude. Bono, now there’s a guy who doesn’t know the meaning of the word “subtle.” His acting style is no different than his stage presence. Great for a stadium of 20,000 fans, a little overblown for a small movie like this. I couldn’t help but think back to that horrible 70s movie Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton. Horrible film with lots of pointless star cameos that pillaged the Beatles catalog with no connection to the actual Beatles musicians themselves. This movie by no means sinks to that level, but I can’t say I wasn’t reminded of it. And that ain’t a good thing.

Plus through in a little hippy-dippy Hair influence and a really original looking film starts to feel really unoriginal. Again, not a bad movie. Just not as good as I expected.

Nicolas Cage makes about 3 or 4 mediocre movies a year. I guess it pays the bills. Every once in a while he does an exceptional performance that justifies why he got an Oscar all those years ago. However, this film is not one of those exceptions. Now having said that, it’s really not that bad. I kind of enjoyed this movie.

Cage plays an assassin-for-hire named Joe. He is on one last job in Bangkok and things don’t go as planned. But Cage’s role doesn’t slip into a two-dimensional one-note character. It could very easily but he gives it some edge, some depth. Not a lot, but just enough to make you pay attention. This isn’t Shakespeare and most likely this movie will be forgotten, but for what it is, it’s pretty decent.

Adam Sandler takes a turn toward more family fare with essentially a kid’s movie here. This is the first film produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions that has received a PG rating. It’s not bad but there isn’t much too it really. And the fantasy element about the bedtime stories coming true never makes it to the land of believability. It just sort of happens and then is accepted as normal almost immediately, without any attempt at explanation or even curiosity.

I found the funniest character to actually be the unexplainably big-eyed guinea pig thrown in for comic purposes, Bugsy. He’s just the right balance between weird and adorable. More could have been done with him.

For a mild, enjoyable movie, it fits the bill. No big laughs here but a few light chuckles.

Bruno is the next movie from Sacha Baron Cohen, the same performer that brought us Borat. Like Borat, Brüno is basically a series of outrageous situations where his character interacts with an unsuspecting public to illicit a reaction and hopefully cause a scene. This time instead of a foreign journalist, it’s a gay fashion “expert” let loose on models, hunters, soldiers, swingers, Hollywood, and heterosexuals in general. This is definitely low brow, often gross humor. But I have to admit I laughed out loud at least 3 times. He just has a way of making these ridiculous situations humorous. It’s just so crazy you have to laugh and laugh at the poor people caught in the middle trying to make sense of it. It’s crazy and crude, but it definitely has it’s moments where it connects. If you laughed at Borat, you will laugh at this.

This is supposed to be a comedy? The trailers made this film out to be a very funny, kind of slapstick comedy. But this film was not funny and was often quite dark. All the characters are pretty loathsome and while Brad Pitt acting goofy is entertaining for about a minute, it’s not enough to qualify this as a comedy. After an hour and a half I just didn’t get why we should care about any of these people or anything that was going on. It just felt like a waste of time.

This is a “prequel” of sorts to the original Cube movie and Hypercube, it’s sequel. You don’t have to have seen the other 2 movies, but it helps. This one looks like it has a bigger budget with a slightly better production value. The first Cube movie definitely had a low-budget sci-fi vibe.

The basic idea is that there is an enormous Cube structure that contains many cubed chambers within it. Each chamber potentially has a deadly trap that will kill a person almost immediately. People get put in the cube without any warning or instruction and must figure their own way out. Tho pretty much no one does since there are so many traps.

This Cube movie actually spends the majority of it’s time outside the Cube, sort of behind the scenes. The thing I liked about the first Cube movie was the mystery of who was behind it all. You never found out who or why these things were happening. That left it up to the imagination, and that makes a big difference. The following 2 movies have tried to give insight into the organization behind the Cube. But either tell us all of it or not at all. Just teasing little pieces out only demystifies the whole thing. At least if we heard the whole story it would give it some closure.

The acting and directing were just allright in this movie. By far the best character was Mr. Jax with his messed-up eye. He was great fun.

I love vampire movies, I have seen most of them. It’s been a bit overdone lately with television shows and films, the culture is getting a bit weary of it all. At this point it can be argued that vampires have been done to death, in just about any way you can think of. Daybreakers attempt at a fresh take on the subject is to transform the entire world into a society where vampires are now the overwhelming majority on the planet with humans being hunted down and harvested for their blood. The central conflict to the movie is that the vamps are running out of human blood and facing a starvation-induced mutation that essentially turns them in to the more monstrous end of the vampire legacy.

It’s a great idea and it did catch my attention. And while the movie does a good job of world-building, I wish they would have explored it more. Instead, we get glimpses but too soon we are thrust into a car-chase, manhunt scenario that shifts the focus away from vamp society on to human “rebels” perpetually on the run. The idea of our society shifted to a vampire world is much more fascinating to me than just another chase-down of fugitives. I want more vampire world twists on our own culture. I want more of our culture reflected through the eternal night and pale, blue of the vampire world. That is what is different and interesting than the other vampire sagas out there. Turning it into “humans on the run” just feels tired.

Most of the plot devices in the movie are done very simplistically and watered-down. This starts with a good idea that could have been so much better but then dumbs it down for the popcorn crowd. It will make a good cable movie, wait for it.

This movie is clearly the bastard child of Road Warrior and Escape From New York. You could even consider this a sequel, it’s so close to the same stuff those films were made of. Just replace nuclear war and rising crime with something a little more contemporary like a deadly virus, but keep everything else pretty much the same and you got Doomsday. It’s set in the near future where a “Reaper Virus” is killing people within Scotland at a rapid pace. The government responds by walling it off and putting the whole region under quarantine. 25 years later the virus pops up in London and the government sends a team back into Scotland to find out why there are survivors in there. Did they find a cure? Well Scotland has sunk into chaos and the survivors are split into two camps. One are the city-dwelling punks that look they turned the Road Warrior movie into a religion, and the the other camp lives in an ancient castle and totally reverted to a medieval way of life. There are sword fights, cannibalism, gladiator matches, crazy tattoo chicks, and a bad-ass car chase that could have easily had Mel Gibson behind the wheel.

Overall it’s a fine movie for what it is. Fans of Road Warrior should eat it up.