Bent Corner

I don’t get this movie.  It’s supposedly based on the music of ABBA.  Being that the story does not revolve around a queen that dances, I don’t really understand how ABBA music is involved.

I only know one ABBA song.

From what I have been told, the movie centers around a 20-year old girl who is about to be married.  She wants to be walked down the aisle by her father.  The only problem — if you forget for a moment that a 20-year old child so too young to get married — is that she doesn’t know who her father is.

She was raised by a single mother.  She didn’t grow up with a father.

She doesn’t know who her father is because her mother doesn’t know who exactly impregnated her 20 years ago.  Evidently in 1988 she had unprotected sex with three different men on or around the moment her daughter was conceived.  Classy!

I remember 1988.  People were more then a little freaked out over something called AIDS.  This was when most people finally stopped calling it the Gay Cancer and realized that AIDS or HIV, the virus that caused AIDS, was something everyone needed to worry about.  It was something everyone, gay or straight, needed to protect themselves against.

This meant people were starting to be more responsible when it came to having sex.  They were refraining from having unprotected sex with multiple partners.

Maybe the world that Mamma Mia takes place is some sort of alternate world that is free of HIV or other life threatening sexually transmitted diseases.

Then again, maybe Mamma was just a skanky crack whore.

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The superhero movie Hancock staring Will Smith, Jason Bateman, and Charlize Theron made over $107 million this holiday weekend.  The movie had been panned by critics.

The movie website Rotten Tomatoes have it a 37% on their “tomatometer”. That’s where they take published movie reviews and separate the positive reviews from the negative reviews. Out of the 167 reviews for Hancock, 106 of them were negative.

So why did so many people go see Hancock?

The movie studios wont stop making sucky movies if so many of the viewing public continue to go to the theater to watch them.  Going to the theater to see Hancock is rewarding bad behavior.  It tells the movie studios that they can make bad movies and people will go and watch.  Even if the critics let them know before hand, they will still go and watch.

Knock it off.  Do not go watch bad movies.

Proving once again the Hollywood ran out of original ideas a long time ago, USA Today is reporting that Robert Rodriguez will be producing a new Red Sonja movie. Playing the title role will be none other then 34-year old Rose McGowan, star of Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. She’s also the woman Rodriguez left his wife and five children for.

Very classy.

Directing the movie will be longtime Rodriguez associate Douglas Aarniokoski. I wonder if Rodriguez has any worries that Rose McGowan might leave him for Aarniokoski. She seems to have a thing for directors. Maybe she only screws the married directors.

USA Today reports that the movie will be taking it’s cues from both the comic books and the original works of novelist Robert E. Howard, the creator of the original Sonja. Both McGowan and Rodriguez claim to have not seen the 1985 version of Red Sonja staring Brigitte Nielsen.

The new Get Smart movie offends me. It really, truly offends me. It bothers me that anyone would take a true masterpiece of comedy goodness from the 60’s and rehash it into a movie for theater goers in 2008. If there was ever an old TV show that should have been exempt from a do over it’s Get Smart.

I understand that Hollywood is filed to the brim with uncreative hacks that must constantly tap into the creations of yesteryear to make a living. When they remade The Beverly Hillbillies, Dukes of Hazzard, Bewitched, or even McHale’s Navy, I of course didn’t watch these movies, but it didn’t bother me that they had been made.

Get Smart should have been off-limits.

Director: Francis Lawrence
Writers: Mark Protosevich, Akiva Goldsman
Staring: Will Smith, Kona the dog, Alice Braga, Salli Richardson, Emma Thompson

This movie was based on the novel by Richard Matheson. Scientists have cured cancer. Or so they think. They have taken the measles virus and reprogrammed it to destroy cancer. Unfortunately, the re-engineered virus has mutated into something that turns 10% of the human population into vampire zombies. It kills the remaining 90%.

It doesn’t kill everyone. A few people are actually immune to the virus. Most of them have been hunted down and eaten by the vampire zombies. Robert Neville — the Army research scientist superbly played by Will Smith — is immune to the virus. He is the last man alive in New York City. He also believes he is the last human on the face of the earth.

When he is not trying to shoot wild deer with his AR-15 on the streets of New York City, he is conducting experiments in his state of the art basement laboratory. He is trying to find the cure to this vampire zombie virus. Being that he was the last human left (or so he believes) I didn’t really understand his motivation.

There were a few things that never made much sense. Before Neville enters his brownstone apartment each evening, he can be seen pouring some kind of liquid from a plastic gallon dispenser. What was this liquid? Holy water? We never found out what it was. Also, flashback scenes show Neville wearing the Army insignia of a major, but other people refer to him has lieutenant-colonel.

I enjoyed the movie. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to watch it again the next day with the audio commentary track. The problem was there was no audio commentary track. I’m getting tired of DVD’s that don’t offer at least one audio commentary track. DVD’s that don’t include an audio commentary track might as well be VHS tapes.

Movies on DVD should always be in letterbox format and they should also include audio commentary tracks.

The Fountain

Directed By: Darren Aronofsky
Writen By: Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel
Staring: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz

I didn’t think a movie staring Wolverine and the girl from The Mummy could be so difficult to understand. I have to admit this movie went right over my head. I’m not saying I didn’t like it. I would have stopped watching it if that were the case. I just didn’t understand a whole lot of what was going on.

The story takes place during three totally different periods. The time of the Spanish conquistadors, modern day, and the far, far, future. Hugh Jackman plays the part of a conquistador, a modern day medical researcher, and a Moby looking guy traveling through space with the Tree of Life. I think all three characters were the same person. Rachel Weisz plays the queen of Spain and Jackman’s dying wife in the present. She also appears in the far, far future as Jackman’s dead wife.

I think.

The DVD doesn’t contain an audio commentary track. To help make up for that, the directer released a free audio commentary MP3 on his website. Actually, he released a torrent that people can download through BitTorrent. The audio commentary clears up a lot of the stuff I didn’t originally understand.

I plan on watching this movie again. It’s a very good movie.

Title: Rendition
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Omar Metwally, Yigal Naor, Meryl Streep, Peter Sarsgaard, Alan Arkin
Director: Gavin Hood
Screenwriter: Kelley Sane

This movie did very poorly at the box office. It deals with the controversial practice of kidnapping people suspected of being terrorists and shuttling them off to other countries where they will be questioned and tortured by members of that country’s intelligence service. When I say “controversial”, I of course mean that its bat-shit illegal and we shouldn’t be doing it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- I don’t know if we will ever win the war on terror, but I do know that we wont win it by torturing people.

We’re told in the movie that the practice began under Bill Clinton. I don’t know if this is true or not and I’m too lazy to go look it up on Wikipedia.

A chemical engineer of Egyptian descent (Omar Metwally) is returning home to the United States from a conference in South Africa when he is kidnapped by members of the CIA at the airport and shuttled off to a generic middle-eastern country in Northern Africa. Records show that he received a phone call from a known terrorist. He claims to not know anything about this phone call. He is then subjected to a massive amount of torture. He is waterboarded and he is electrocuted. A young and every green CIA analyst (Jake Gyllenhaal) is there to observe the torture sessions. He shows obvious discomfort in witnessing the torture sessions.

While this goes on in the generic middle-eastern country, his very pregnant wife (Reese Witherspoon) tries desperately to find out where her husband is. Records show he got on the plane in South Africa, but that he didn’t get off in the United States. She even found a duty free credit card purchase he made on the plane.

There was a lot of things I liked about this movie, but there were also a lot of things I didn’t like. I enjoyed the parallel story going on about the generic middle-eastern country’s security chief and his daughter. This story had almost absolutely nothing to do with the actual rendition, but it was a much better story. It also included something of a twist. I thought the ending was weak. The character played by Jake Gyllenhaal springs the chemical engineer from his dungeon and smuggles him out of the country. He tells him not to speak to anyone until he gets back to the United States. What good would this really do? He was picked up the last time he entered the United States. Why wouldn’t they just pick him up again? This didn’t solve anything.

Director: Patrick Creadon
Writers: Patrick Creadon & Christine O’Malley
Runtime: 94 painfully boring minutes

What’s an 8-letter word for a movie that totally blows? The answer is a movie entitled Wordplay. It’s a documentary on the New York Times crossword puzzle and the people that do it. Not only the über crossword puzzle nerds that actually go to a crossword puzzle convention and competition every year in Stamford, Connecticut, but famous celebrities such as Jon Stewart and Bill Clinton.

I guess the reason they included celebrities in the documentary is to show that not all people that do the New York Times crossword puzzle are major dorks. Some are just regular people that do the crossword puzzle to unwind. I can’t help but remember what else President Clinton likes to do in his spare time to unwind. It involves a female intern and a cigar.

Forgive me if I don’t take anything Bill Clinton does as an example of normalcy.

These über crossword puzzle nerds don’t just do the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen, they do it while timing themselves. How do you make the New York Times crossword puzzle even more nerdy? By turning it into a speed event. Some of them keep logs documenting how long it takes them to complete the puzzle. The reason they do this is because the competition at the yearly convention at Stamford is timed.

The level of nerdiness displayed by these puzzles doers in comparison makes the Dungeon Master of my old Dungeons & Dragons group look like Fonzi.

Much of the movie takes place at the yearly convention in Stamford. The competition involves seven timed crossword puzzles with the final three people with the best scores moving on to the main event. They then do a puzzle up on stage using a large dry erase type white board while wearing sound-canceling headphones that look to have been invented in 1972.

Towards the end of the competition when the tension was at it’s highest level, I was thinking how funny it would be for someone to pull the fire alarm. If Stamford wasn’t a 7-hour drive, I’d probably seriously consider making the trip just so I could do it.

These people would freak out.

Sheri and I went to see the family movie 300. Normally I don’t care for movies that try to cater to the entire family. They usually end up appealing equally to no one. This movie was different.

It was truly great.

I lack the ability as a wordsmith to describe just how much I enjoyed this movie. It tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas and 300 of his best Spartans fought against the creepy Xerxes and his massive and equally creepy Persian army. Take my word for it. It’s not as boring as I probably made it sound.

It’s based on the comic book by Frank Miller. I never read the comic. I did flip through it once at Waldenbooks while waiting for Sheri to finish shopping over across the way at Old Navy.

I should note that even though the film was billed as a family movie, it could at times be horrifically violent. In fact, it was pretty much always violent. Not only was it visually violent, it was audibly violent too. The sound of blood splatter was heard continually throughout the movie.

The visuals of this movie were breathtaking. Most, if not all, of the movie was made with actors filmed in front of a green screen. Everything was then added digitally. I don’t know what life was like in ancient Sparta. From the looks of this movie, I would have to guess that the men spent a great deal of time doing sit-ups. Lots and lots of sit-ups. When not doing sit-ups, they must have been doing scrunches.

Even the old men had well defined six-packs.