movie reviews
I've seen a lot of movies lately, both old and recent, in theaters and on DVD. So I thought I'd write down my thoughts about them.
Banlieue 13
Saw this with shadowray at a theater. The best way to describe how I feel about this movie is the following quote from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
So I guess... this movie makes me feel two years younger. Also, a soundtrack of french techno and hip-hop is definitely the most kick-ass thing ever. A Scanner Darkly Saw this on my own at a theater. Overall, I guess I was pleased. It is, perhaps, the most literal translation of a Dick story to film. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. It's certainly one of the most "intellectual" (I can never tell with Linklater if that's a good thing or not). It's probably the best earnestly anti-drug movie ever, because it's not quite sure whether or not it is an anti-drug movie. I LOL'd at times. Dünyayi kurtaran adam, aka Turkish Star Wars I take it back, this is the best anti-drug movie. Mostly because it shows you what happens if you hit the Turkish hashish once too often and then decide to make a movie. Except that you spent all your money on Turkish hashish and so instead of "a galaxy far away" you have some dusty hillside outside of Ankara, and instead of special effects, you "borrow" some scenes from Star Wars. I really can't describe this movie. It must be seen to be believed. The DVD transfer didn't seem very "official". More like a DVD encoding off of a 9th generation VHS tape. I did my part and saved a poorly transcoded MPEG version on my hard drive. In retrospect, my mistake was watching this alone. It definitely calls for a lot of booze and at least a dozen friends so that the suck will be dulled and divvied out equally. Layer Cake Saw this on DVD. This movie stars James Bond and Transporter Chief Miles O'Brien as British gangsters. Another bad-ass movie. Directed by the producer of Lock-Stock and Snatch. Some people on IMDB complained that it was hard to follow and that english people speak funny. I really didn't have any problems. Watch for a cameo appearance by the FCUK brand early in the movie. Overall I enjoyed this movie (and its soundtrack) and I think Daniel Craig will make an awesome bond (assuming Bond really goes back to his roots and will be a bit of a bad-ass and not the English Superman that he's been in the last few movies). V for Vendetta Went to see this at Cornell Cinema with tywysoges. After a few days, I think I've finally figured out what bugs me about this movie. (Though this is mostly Wikipedia's insight). The problem is that in the comic book, the "bad guys" weren't 100% bad. You could see how entirely reasonable men could come to fascism out of necessity. That's what made the story work. In the movie, the "bad guys" are evil. Evil isn't scary. Evil is a cartoon. So for all the clamoring about the movie supposedly being evocative of what's going on in the US now, I think it was a mistake by the Wachowski brothers to change the story in this way. I think the movie will date badly because of their changes.