ShimmySnail

Think of it as Attack the Block but with a militia instead of aliens, 28 Days Later with a militia instead of rage zombies, or perhaps The Purge but with a surprise attack instead of a violent holiday. The dialog and acting are good, action is scary and surprising, but what really sucked me in was that it appeared to be a single cut. I think perhaps there was some editing and cuts disguised as a brief darkening of the camera view, but essentially the entire movie played out like the raid halfway through the first season of True Detective. Considering the realist timeline, it's impressive that it even has a bit of character development between Lucy.(Brittany Snow) and Stupe (Dave Bautista).

I actually really enjoyed this. After seeing American Movie, which I loved, I was ready to laugh my way through this, but I was surprised. The writing is good, and it has a surprise ending. I was surprised, anyway. Yes, it's a local film, it's short, it's a B movie featuring a bunch of amateur actors, but if people are going to give summer blockbusters a pass just because they feature big names and have lots of action and whizbang special effects, yet their writing sucks and they use pre-existing franchises as a crutch, then I'm going to give independent movies a pass on the low budget and lesser experience of the actors. I enjoyed it. If Borchardt's next film is as good, I'll be very pleased.

I won't even bother telling you the premise. I'm sure you know it. What I will say is that this has extremely tight writing. The plot twists hold up. I can't think of a single plot hole, and I'm one of those people who obsessively tears apart films looking for those (I don't usually have to even try).

I have a mixed race family, and I say it's extremely relevant, politically, racially, in today's world. It's not an anti-white film, it's not calling all white people racist, or anyone racist, it's just probably using some dialog the writer/director has probably heard a million times in conversations with white people in high society.

It's not a horror movie as it's listed on IMDb and by most viewers. It has some horror elements, but it's really a suspense movie, and it's a very good one because for the first half of the movie or more, you have a growing sense of dread, and you have no idea why. To top it off, it has some very funny parts, but they don't ruin the suspense because the funny man is on the other end of a phone, the protagonist's only link to the outside world, as it were, and so it is compartmentalized and doesn't diminish the very real threat he is facing.

OK, we all know the synopsis: gifted but henpecked high school chemistry teacher gets lung cancer and decides to cook world class meth, hijinks ensue. But it's much more than that.

The show is written VERY realistically. Because Walt starts out as such a real human being, in every scene, in every episode, right to the end, the viewer finds him or herself asking, "What would I do in the same situation?" No other show has managed to do that.

And as the show goes on, one's answers diverge more and more because we're less in Walt's position with every episode. How would a normal person go about making and selling drugs without getting caught? What would we do when our competition came to kill us? Those may be pretty simple. But what would we do when our loved ones found out, and keeping it quiet meant harming them, for whom, we tell ourselves, we have taken all this risk in the first place?

They say there are only seven basic plots, and America's clear favorite is "overcoming the monster," but this is not that kind of story. It's a "tragedy" much like the greatest story ever told: The Iliad, and it has elements of a dark comedy in it. Walt is Achilleus. Gus is Hektor. The DEA and APD are the gods, not knowing who to help and where to strike, and not entirely good guys in any case. The intelligent viewer will go from rooting for Walt to hating him just slightly less than his enemies. The less intelligent viewer will go from loving Walt to merely hating his shrewish but sensible wife. But all will enjoy the show. Buckle up for the ride of your life.

A minor criminal is exiled to a fenced off wasteland that used to be part of Texas with all the other undesirables (a la Escape From New York) and is immediately captured by cannibals. After her escape, the only safe place to go is a camp where a sex/drug cult leader is building his paradise and trying to impregnate as many followers as possible. The main character doesn't exactly love this setup either, so she at first goes looking for revenge on the cannibals, but ends up kidnapping the daughter of one of them, and the father comes looking for her.

I'm kind of surprised so many people didn't like this. It wasn't billed as a big action sci-fi kind of movie, and it's not. The director, Ana Amirpour, has been compared to Tarantino, but I feel she's the exact opposite of Tarantino. He's all about lots of dialog, skipping around in the story line, very little in the way of visuals, lots of jokes, etc. This is slow paced, very little dialog (almost none really), but it's telling a story in the style usually called "realism" where the textures of the world come through. It's a very good soundtrack, great visuals, the director makes full use of sight and sound to tell the story, which I have to say is what cinema, as opposed to books and radio, is all about.

It doesn't really have a straightforward plot with a simple conflict or obvious good and bad guys, but the director is not known for those Hollywood style movies at all. She's known for being very unconventional (her other big film was an Iranian vampire western) so just expect that it's going to be a weird film.

Well, I can definitely see why it's a "love it or hate it" kind of film. It's not a horror movie at all, it doesn't even have horror elements, though IMDb classifies it as one.

I don't want to spoil it, so I'll just say the film is not a straightforward story. If you're the kind of person who likes formulaic films with simple moral messages, who hates being surprised by Shyamalan type plot twists, who thinks that any style of photography or sound even slightly out of the ordinary is "pretentious" and therefore insulting, you'll hate it.

If you love open-ended interpretations, symbolism, beautiful tactile films, and trust that Aronofsky, Bardem, and Lawrence will take you somewhere, you'll like this film. That's how I went into it, and I loved it. Aronofsky is not quite as inaccessible as David Lynch, but think along those lines, and you'll be prepared.

I will say that the first half features a lot of tight closeups and hand-held camera work, so those who get motion sickness from such things might want not want to see it in the theater.

I really enjoyed this, and I think it's under rated. It's very difficult to make a film that is at once a parody of a genre that fans of that genre can enjoy, and still be a decent film within that genre. But like the original Scream, Behind the Mask pulls it off.

It's got humor, as the slasher they're following around, plain as day, explains his plans and the trouble he runs into (has to do tons of cardio so he can keep up with everyone while they're running off and he looks like he's standing still), and fear because you wonder if the documentary crew are just going to let this man butcher a bunch of horny teenagers, and if not, what will happen to them. Obviously it's not super scary because you get to know the slasher, but there are enough surprises to be suspenseful.

I didn't really notice any plot holes on the first viewing, and that's really all I ask, so I would recommend it if you liked Scream or other mockumentary films like Trollhunter or What We Do In The Shadows.

I loved this film. I have kids, so it really got to me. I think most people didn't like it because 1) it was slow paced, and 2) it was a drama. It was not a horror/sci-fi action film, no hack and slash, not real scary, nor was it meant to be. People wanted Yet Another Zombie Film, and they don't like to be surprised.

But if you're not one of those people, I think you'll like it. It's well acted, it's the only zombie film yet that deals with loss of family in a realistic way, and like The Walking Dead it puts the question to the viewer, "What would you do in this situation?" because the protagonist, Maggie's father, is just a regular guy we can identify with, even if we would never want to be in his position.

The conflict is clear. Maggie is going to turn into a zombie soon, and her father wants her to spend as much time with him and she can, but if he waits too long before sending her to quarantine she could turn and kill everyone, and his wife (Maggie's stepmom) doesn't have the stomach for it, and the cops keep threatening to come by and take care of the problem early. What he will do with her? How long will he wait? How can he handle it if he waits too long? These are on his and our minds the whole time.

I'm a big fan of B movies, particularly these caveman/barbarian things, but about 10 minutes in a boar is killed on screen, and maybe 10 minutes later there is a scene where the main protagonist/villain, Vood, takes his volcanic forged iron weapon and kills a lion, and I couldn't continue watching. The lion is not stabbed on screen, but it is shown first violently convulsing and then dead, so I assume it is all real. I understand filmmakers were very inhumane to animals, particularly horses, in Hollywood's Golden Age, but this was Italy in 1983 A.D., not the Roman Colosseum 81 A.D. For such suffering to occur for sheer entertainment is unacceptable. If someone could point me to some evidence of how this was all a clever fake nothing would make me happier than to be able to withdraw my review.

This is a message film, a bit like The Village in its moral tone but on a different subject. I can't say a lot without giving away the trademark Shyamalan plot twist, but this film is different from his earlier works in that it is shorter, and within the first half hour he pretty much gives you all the explanation you're going to get, and the rest is just playing out the situation to its conclusion. Wahlberg, Deschanel, and Leguizamo do a good job, and the child actors as well.

It is similar to War of the Worlds, the H.G. Wells book (not the recent special effects filled film), in that the world is falling apart and nobody can find out how to fight or hide from what is happening, but in this case the enemy is far less conventional than invading Martians, and that is one of the things I like about Shyamalan's films. They are very original. For one person to write and direct six halfway original films in a row is, in itself, fairly amazing. Each is a good story, well told, and this is no exception.

There's a certain percentage of moviegoers that just hate the type of movies Shyamalan does, although they continue to see them and complain about them, but there was nothing wrong with this movie. Some people don't like it when they can't figure out the twist, when the bad guys aren't easily recognized and impaled at the end, or worse yet, when there are no traditional character villains at all, such as in a couple of his earlier films.

They are frightening, and this film has a horror movie feel to it most of the time, albeit a PG-13 treatment of one. If you like interesting plots and being scared and surprised, check this film out.

It's so refreshing to get back to a show with some real, pure science fiction. This isn't your "aliens, robots, and spaceships" sci-fi of Star Wars (more properly called space opera), it's not filled with meaningless techno-babble that grabs randomly at today's scientific buzzwords like Star Trek, or your partly supernatural plots of The Outer Limits, but short stories from proved science fiction writers of the past several decades put to film, and so far it's well done.

It doesn't concentrate on special effects, but more the human questions, both spiritual and political, that advances in science or future fortunes force us to answer. That is the type of thinking man's (and woman's) science fiction that made the genre a success in America in the 1950's and when most of the greatest writers, and even the movie plots of today, got their start. It says, "What would YOU do in this situation?" "People can create androids that think. Do you treat them like humans?" Or "Aliens demand we decide whether we trust other nations or risk certain nuclear annihilation. What would you do?" So far the acting has been really good, using first rate movie actors, with the first episode starring Judy Davis, the second Terry O'Quinn, and the third Anne Heche and Malcolm MacDowell.

Unfortunately for the show I've seen a lot of negative comments about it from the self-appointed judges of all that is quality TV since it doesn't fit in the cookie cutter mold made for it by all the previous "science fiction" shows that showcase a lot of large breasted female cyborgs, space dogfights, laser gunfights, and alien forehead prosthetics. Seeking only escapist entertainment, they claim it has politics and real issues, so it must be worthless. I say, if it doesn't have those, what worth is it? But it is the only true science fiction show in recent years, and one that I intend to continue watching closely for as long as it is on.

The film is a virtual documentary or fictional documentary about something that never happened, the assassination of President George W. Bush the Younger, in October 2007. It's an incredibly innovative piece of film-making, similar to such method writing/directing pieces as The Last Broadcast, The Blair Witch Project, Interview With The Assassin, or more recently, Borat. However, this film uses a great deal of real film footage pieced together so cleverly you'd think it had yet to be shot, and that it was really about the assassination of Bush. The crime is still unsolved as of the start of the film, and the film goes over how such a lapse in security could happen and how and why the assassin evades justice.

The film doesn't spend a lot of time on fake newscasts, mostly on calm after-the-fact interviews and analysis. The parts that are new, filmed with actors, are, if possible, even better than the edited real footage. The virtual filmmaker interviews a spectrum of people including a former Bush former speech writer, a secret service agent assigned to protect the President when he was killed, the head of Chicago PD, an FBI evidence analyst, a few of the suspects who were picked up by the police that night, and some historians or political analysts familiar with the incident. The writing is incredibly good. The language the actors use and their emotion is perfect. It's clear the film's writers studied a lot of interviews and comments by similar people over similar types of events.

I'm not sure why, but a good third of the pro-Bush people post comments on IMDb like, "This is sick!" and a good third of the anti-Bush people post comments like, "Of only this were true!" The fact is that the film is not a political statement, not about Bush, at least. Personally I think it's a lot less controversial than most people, who probably haven't seen it, are assuming.

The film is a statement about the times we live in, who the government fears, who they don't fear but maybe should, and what that says about America right now. It presents people as they are: the cops as mainly consumed with maintaining order at the expense of civil rights, the radical anti-war/anti-environmentalists as dogmatic and unyielding, the pro-Bush administration as unquestioningly loyal and inspired by Bush as a person, and the suspects as very troubled but basically good people.

I think this movie got a bum rap. I actually enjoyed it much more than that travesty Johnny Mnemonic (my apologies to Gibson, I know he liked it). Note to Hollywood, Ice-T does not go good with everything, and the deranged preacher bit has been overdone. But here I think Abel Ferrara really made a world in line with what I envisioned when reading the short story, any of Gibson's short stories. It's not a future where everything is blinking lights and super speed CGI, it's a future where most people live in the slums, and the rest have a clean, aerodynamic, one-button-for-everything lifestyle.

The premise, a couple of corporate "headhunters" trying to seduce a brilliant researcher away from a billion dollar multinational with a geisha type mole, is the kind of premise that Gibson is famous for. It's a single incident revolving around human emotions but having worldwide implications because the man is so brilliant he could change the course of science.

The acting is great of course: Willem Dafoe, Christopher Walken, and an early glimpse of Asia Argento. The story doesn't hit you over the head explaining events like most films, but Ferrara never does, and half the fun is suddenly realizing what's happened, the check mate, on your own.

If you want action, go see Johnny Mnemonic, if you want deep, see this film.

People have been very hard on this movie, particularly fans who are angry that the cartoon was canceled and that Peter Chung had nothing to do with the movie, but nothing will satisfy those people. I just got the series on DVD and watched it before going, and I can honestly say it was a lot better than I expected.

Aeon is an agent of a group called the Monicans who are trying to bring down the leader of a futuristic dystopia that contains the last 5 million humans, the rest having been wiped out by an "industrial virus" 400 years before. The government is benevolent but autocratic, and Aeon is an anarchist, so she works as a saboteur and assassin to bring it down. She's sent on a mission to kill the ruler, Trevor Goodchild, but things get complicated. Betrayals, twists, trysts, and so on.

Visually it lives up to the cartoon, no problem there. There are some scenes right out of the cartoon (passing a message through a French kiss, Aeon firing a submachine-gun at a crowd of guys spilling off a ledge). The women are seductive (Theron looks a lot better as a human than Aeon does in ink, but that's just my opinion), the S&M theme is still there. There are neat costumes and strange devices, some right out of the cartoon, like Aeon's grappling hook pistol or the "phase" harness Trevor uses to travel to another room without moving.

The action is good: high energy martial arts mêlées, gunfights. It has the disjointed feel of the cartoon. What I mean by that is that Aeon will be shown going to her destination, passing a few obstacles, and then she's there. It doesn't try to show every step, and although that's odd for a movie, it's the same as the cartoon. There is the same romantic tension between Aeon and Trevor as in the cartoon, and in fact the movie gives an explanation towards the end the cartoon never did. The acting is good, the characters are flat but mysterious, like the cartoon. Without giving it away, the plot makes sense and is consistent, more so than The Matrix anyway.

They have changed the premise a little, Monica is not its own country, just a rebel group, and Aeon has morals now, which is a definite difference, since in the cartoon the dichotomy is that she has no morals but is neutral, and Trevor has the will to do great good but gets at it by being a tyrant. Even in the cartoon Aeon breaks character a bit to save the male Seraph creature from captivity because it's the right thing to do, which is a change from earlier episodes, so I can't ding the movie for doing the same thing.

For those who say it was too disjointed or surreal, know the cartoon made no sense either, which wasn't a problem. It was surreal, Aeon died in half the episodes and came back with no explanation, and it was great, it covered a lot more ground and had more interesting stories and colorful characters than a space opera that has iron clad continuity, but the only way to copy it is to make a movie that is just as disjointed and surreal, and it won't have any more mass appeal than the cartoon, which didn't last long. In fact I would say the only way for the movie to score really high would be to make it very different from the cartoon and more like your average sci-fi action film today, like The Matrix, which would beg the question, "What's the point of basing it on Aeon Flux?" So in essence, it was the best adaptation possible given the unique cartoon source.

Now HERE is a great horror film. I haven't been scared since 28 Days Later or, to a lesser extent, the Ring/Uzumaki series. I gave this film an 8 only because some of the dialogue is trite, and they use some of the "gotcha" gimmicks where the sound increases sharply for an instant to make you jump out of your seat. Other than that very common horror movie tactic, it is a solidly enjoyable film.

The story is great. It proceeds along a very formulaic horror movie story at first. Four or five annoying young adults on their way to a sybaritic party in the middle of nowhere. One is blind, one is a foreign student, one is the blonde, etc. One of them is being secretly pursued by an ex-pharmacy student/drug dealer he recently ripped off who is rumored to have killed others who crossed him. The car breaks down, nobody comes to help, cel phones are dead, and then BAD THINGS start to happen, usually preceded by the choking odor of decomposing bodies (hence, the title). At first these things are only observed, and then they start happening to our protagonists. The ending, however, will probably greatly surprise you, I know it did me, and I'm used to surprise endings.

The acting is good, the special effects are top notch, it's scary, and the story moves at a good pace. Definitely check it out.

The title of the book is Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. The other battles are within Swofford and his struggle to pull some meaning out of life. It seems that each time Swofford finds a goal or something important, circumstances in life take it away from him.

He wants nothing more to be in the Marine Corps while growing up, to participate in a war. Once in, his efforts to make a difference and his sniper's passion for the perfect kill are so diluted that he quickly wants back out. The sniper's ideal experience is overrun by politics, bureaucracy, personality conflicts, worries about his girlfriend's infidelity, and nature of the first Gulf War, which emphasized spending monumental amounts of money to fight the entire war by air and avoid losing support at home through infantry casualties and up close reporting of the Hell that even winners of wars insist that it is.

There are one or two scenes in the movie where things happen a bit differently than in the book, and some compartmentalized scenes from the book (mostly that take place back home) are left out, but it's extremely close, both in events and in overall tone. Many of Swofford's words are repeated in the movie's narration verbatim, no characters are combined to save time, no dialog is made up to give the movie a more comedic edge, jingoistic edge, anti-war slant, or anything of the sort. The book is a slice of life for a U.S. marine, make of it what you will, and so is the movie. Trumpets, waving flags, gory wounds, stirring speeches, and international politics do not impede or help Swofford's struggle to make something of himself, and although some may think that makes it rather pointless, in a way, that IS the point. The military cannot turn a scumbag into a hero, Saddam's crimes do not give your life meaning, being thrown together with a bunch of guys does not make you brothers, you must work for it like you would in the most ordinary of circumstances, and when Swofford gets back home, the same unemployment, family problems, alcoholism, and lack of direction that he and his fellow recruits once left are still waiting for him, and though the movie doesn't get into it, the book shows how a few of those new battles are won and lost by his former squad mates and the author himself. In that sense, some may find it boring, it certainly does not emphasize harrowing close quarters combat in the way that Black Hawk Down did, nor does it have a neat story like Three Kings, but it is an enlightening look into what impacted the minds of men in Kuwait as told by a very good writer. In that sense, it is very close to the recent documentary "Occupation: Dreamland" which follows an army squad in the current phase of the Gulf War, and the ordinary characters you see are very much the same.

The filming was beautiful, the score emphasized the tension the men felt in Kuwait while the U.S. was still implying Iraq could easily win the war ("we're expecting 30,000 casualties the first day"), and the acting is top notch from Gyllenhaal, Sarsgaard, and Foxx. The characters are entertaining but still seem realistic, and 99% of the dialog is taken from the book, which is as true and accurate as Swofford's memory.

This is yet another winner from Garrett Scott and Ian Olds, who also did Cul-De-Sac: A Suburban War Story, but this one will be available on DVD at some point.

Scott and Olds follow seven or eight squad members of the 505th battalion of the 82nd airborne around Falluja in the weeks before the final siege that destroyed the city. We get to see these guys how they really are, not how Black Hawk Down or Saving Private Ryan portrays soldiers (in idealized Hollywood robot super patriot tough guy fashion).

Scott and Olds go on patrols and missions with the guys to arrest suspected insurgents or defend meetings of important Iraqis, and you see how difficult it is for them to do their jobs. They spend 5% of their time supporting reconstruction, and the other 95% trying to hunt down attackers who are merely opposed to the presence of occupation forces.

They are from all points of view, some who support Bush and the war, and others who don't, but they all seem intelligent and think a lot more about why they're there than most of the politicians who sent them (of course it's their lives on the line and they won't simply take someone's word for it that there is a good purpose behind it). They question what they would do if they were in the place of the Iraqis who shoot at them almost every day, they know there is a better way to solve Iraq's problems, but none of them has the power as low ranking individuals to do what they know works better or undertake anything massive to help the Iraqis who plead with them everyday for jobs, electricity, gas, water, food, school supplies, and so on. Disillusioned, they forge ahead with their mission with a sense of duty and but no sense of accomplishment.

Most of the guys seem genuinely concerned with Iraqs, and some of them confess that after being shot at so much and seeing friends die they just can't like them, and even hate them. All of them are open with their opinions of the situation, their own circumstances regarding their original recruitment, continued enlistment, and hopes and dreams, which is something we can't get from scripted town hall meetings via satellite between President Bush and the troops.

Just as interesting, we get to see Falluja as it was, and all interaction with Iraqis is subtitled so we hear it directly from them, men and women and children of all ages. There is no evidence of the Islamic fundamentalists the Marines just weeks later undertook to destroy. Some of those arrested are clearly insurgents, and some...you never know for sure. There's a depressing parallel between the lack of jobs and education in Falluja and the lack of jobs and education that prompted most of the squad to join up and what they will face when they are demobbed.

According to the director, all of them squad members featured have seen the film and love it, and some folks at the Pentagon have even watched it to get insights into what their men are really feel about the war. In the viewing I attended, there were Iraqis, former soldiers (both Vietnam and some more recently demobilized guys), and at least one Afghani, and they all seemed to like the film. It's a service to the troops because it lets them speak for themselves for once at length, unlike in short articles, and it's an excellent record of the reality of the war from an undeniable point of view, not filtered through papers and news correspondents and politicians with pro-war points of view or at least a fear of being called unpatriotic. Ironically enough, it's probably the most pro-troops, anti-war film of all because it's honest and deals with the men as human beings like us or our friends and family.

PREMISE: This film makes you think. It's about a couple of entrepreneurial engineers, family men who are working out of their garage trying to make the next successful mass consumer electronic gadget, like the Palm Pilot. As a side project, two of them are working on (I think) something to do with superconductors but invent what appears to be a time machine. They can send themselves back in time by about a day. Then the questions start. What would you do with such a thing? What should you not do? Do you want to win the lottery and make millions, or become a hero by foiling an attempt on someone's life? If it didn't work out and you died in the process, could you go back and warn yourself not to try it? What if your doubles in the other time line created another machine? What if someone else gets a hold of your machine and goes back and invents it himself and makes sure that you don't? Could you send a time machine itself back in time in order to invent it even earlier?

PLOT: The two men are fast friends who trust each other implicitly, but they begin to get paranoid with the possibilities, they wonder if they are being honest with one another, and a complex game of mental chess begins. Strange things happen and they begin to wonder if other people have been using the machine, and if one or the other of them told someone about it. The movie is hard to follow, not because it's ridiculously complicated, but because 1) unlike most Hollywood films, they don't spell everything out for you in the dialogue,and 2) it gets so surprising towards the end you're too shocked to think it through in detail. Don't worry if you get lost, the exact details of what happened are not the point. Think about the possibilities and what the actions of the two main characters say about them.

OBJECTIVE QUALITIES: The movie doesn't waste time with cheesy dialogue, jokes, sight gags, love interests etc. It's not a sci-fi time travel movie like The Final Countdown or an action one like Terminator or a comedy like Back To The Future. It's more of a pure sci-fi movie that, without eye candy or special effects, makes you think about the nature of humanity after a given technological advancement has taken place. It's a low budget movie, but the editing, the acting, dialogue, and score, are very classy, near perfect, in fact. The actors talk at the same time occasionally, which is nice because it's how people talk in real life, they interrupt one another constantly. The filming is crisp and colorful, the editing is decent, and the loose piano score evokes a great mood. The props are bare bones but closer to what technological prototypes of mechanical gadgets would really look like, pretty uninteresting. The technobabble is thicker than, say, Star Trek, but that's probably because it was written by people with an actual knowledge of the chemicals and gases and effects at hand and not Hollywood level pop science that everyone is supposed to be familiar with but isn't very realistic (wormholes, force shields, antigravity devices, teleporters, etc.). Obviously they can't give a recipe for a real life working time machine, but it is realistic enough sounding that a first year engineering student couldn't punch holes in the writing with his eyes closed (2001, A Space Odysessy was similarly realistic and also yet impossible with today's science).

PERSONAL TASTE: You would enjoy this if you like stories by Philip K. Dick or such cult hits as Pi (by Darren Aronofsky), Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, The Quiet Earth, or Timecode (which is not a time travel movie, BTW). If you enjoy surprising endings and being made to think, you will like it, but if you are the type who expects to see a lot of pop culture references and hilarious jokes like "Oh, I'll never invest in Microsoft. That little garage software company will never take off," in a time travel film, you will likely think Primer is incomprehensible artsy condescending trash. I can say that it is a good film in an objective sense, if people don't like it, it is their problem, and there's no accounting for taste.

Still, if there is really a deleted scene in which the characters explain everything they way the writer understood it, it would have been cool to get it on the DVD, but it's not.

The Secret of NIMH was one of the best kid's movies ever. It disturbed and frightened me as a kid in the way a good fairy tale does (or the way adult movies disturb and frighten adults in on a different scale), because it makes you think about big issues, but in a way that kids can still learn from and love to watch. The sequel, wow, it was pretty bad. The animation quality was okay, not as good as the original but not horrible, but the story went the way of a mediocre afternoon TV cartoon. They added a few cartoony characters for comic effect, including a caterpillar and two cats, who could talk although it was never explained how since they had never been experimented on by NIMH. They turned it into a Disneyesque musical, with a song every 10 or 20 minutes. One character switches from an American to a British accent in the middle of the film for no reason. It's not scary in the least, not like the original, even atmospherically like the original scene where Mrs. Brisby confronts the Great Owl. Despite a fairly impressive valley where the mice now live, you don't have any feel for their world like in the original, cobbled together by enhanced intelligence into makeshift versions of the human world, complete with electricity and moving parts. There are strange slang phrases present like, "You know what I'm sayin'?" and "team-player." It is linked to the original, though, and if your kids have not seen it, they will be confused.

I will give it credit for one amazing plot twist in the middle which took me by surprise, and they resisted the urge to cutesy it up like Lucas did with his Star Wars prequels. The voice acting was decent. Some of the jokes were funny. Really though, The Secret of NIMH, the original, had a vision and a lot of hard work put into it. The second felt more like a moderate effort for a calculated return on a direct-to-video sequel they knew most people would ignore outright. Compared to the average Disney movie, just as pure entertainment for kids who've never seen the original, I would rate it a 5 instead of the 3 I gave it. Worth renting, not buying.

I rented this on VHS, then bought the toys, then collected the comics, it was so good. I never knew there was a TV show until after it was gone and unavailable. I'd buy it on DVD in a second.

The concept was fairly unique, dark water taking over the world and the hero going on a quest for magical items to stop its progress. It was like a fantasy take on pirates of the Spanish Main. The ships had really neat concepts, like the hero's ship which could glide for short distances, gigantic waterfalls in the ocean, and some sort of gas gun that worked by stimulating a living creature to produce knockout gas. The main bad guy, Bloth, had a ship which was actually a gargantuan carcass of a long dead sea creature, so it looked cool as well.

It had the same set of characters as a lot of fantasy films, close to Star Wars, but the characters were amazingly three dimensional for a cartoon. Niddler was likable, but you were never sure he would be on your side when the going got rough, and not in a typical cowardly save-his-own-skin type of way, but a maybe-he-really-is-evil type of way.

Now here's a real movie. Believe it or not this movie actually has a better premise and story than almost any zombie film out there of any production value. It's not a horror film, per se, and if you are expecting to be scared like with 28 Days Later, you will be disappointed, but it is a very entertaining comedic drama about a post-zombie-apocalyptic Mexican bad-ass named Matool who is actually happier now that the dead are walking the Earth because bashing them with a combination of kung fu and a solid hammer is the first thing he was ever good at and enjoyed in this world. Matool is shanghaied by a gun toting stranger looking for bedroom fodder for his swinger wife and her freak show sister. Naturally, Matool is eager to please. However, when a trio of wounded soldiers who have been ambushed by a new strain of hyper fast zombie show up at the house, the husband begins to wonder if there are too many roosters in the chicken coop. Tensions rise, zombies attack, alliances shift, but perhaps the ultimate factor is one that the audience has not even considered.

The acting is good, especially the main characters, Matool, Nathan, and Mandel. Matool is a likable protagonist, along the lines of a Quentin Tarantino type, perhaps. The tension isn't unbearable, but the unique plot has the audience genuinely interested in what the heck is going on and how it will turn out. The fight scenes are well choreographed and fun, and the dialog is sensible and well spoken. These are not your standard cut and paste horror movie lines. The editing and camera-work are good, and the soundtrack is well matched to the scenes. There are a few rough edges, it is a B movie after all, but not such as you'd expect, these people are actually professionals with no budget. Imagine "From Dusk Till Dawn" but with an original plot.

The filmmaker Judy Irving says in the film she wanted to do a more personal film for once, but it appears she got more than she bargained for.

The twin subjects of the film are one of the two parrot flocks in San Francisco and Mark Bittner, a barely employed but highly intelligent musician whose life had come to revolve almost completely around observing and interacting with the wild parrot flock. They they are technically wild (escaped from captivity or born to escaped parents), Bittner would supplement their food and care for the wounded and dying parrots.

Mark had taken his own pictures and video of the parrots in some of their more memorable moments: first flights, acts of parrot bravery, etc., and his personal views of the parrots thoughts and actions, while he is not a parrot biologist by training, seem instantly sensible. He goes through a rundown of their mating pairs, childrearing practices, and daily habits on a parrot by parrot basis, so that by the end the viewer can tell the parrots apart, and the personality differences between them seem so striking that the viewer constantly has to remind himself that Bittner is not talking about human beings.

I think each viewer will probably always view parrots more anthropomorphically after this movie, and that may be the real treasure of the film. The film follows a bit of the publicity surrounding the parrots, what different people in the city propose to do about this non-native species (e.g. trap it, exterminate it, ignore it), but after seeing them live and love and play for an hour and a half up close, it's impossible to see them as just more colorful pigeons or pests or a curiosity of island biogeography.

The filming is extremely well done, capturing many moments it might be thought would be impossible to capture without uncanny luck or infinite patience, the film moves at a good pace, and it covers both the parrots and the questions most viewers have about them such as: Are any professionals studying them? Where did they come from? How do they survive outside of their native South American habitat? What threatens their existence now? How does Bittner manage to do any of this without a job or a place to live? Are there any other flocks in North America? And it's a film that children can enjoy, too, both for it's visual beaut y and educational value.

The game is more linear than Driver, but it has a much better gradation of difficulty than Driver, as well. It starts out easy and gets harder until the last mission is very difficult, unlike Driver where some in the middle were next to impossible and had to be circumvented by going through an alternate plot line.

Multiplayer is fine, you can have fun with it, but it's not really a type of game play that lends itself to multiplayer.

The voice acting is good, Tanner and Jones do great together, the cut scenes are less confusing than the original Driver.

You can now steal cars. You still can't run over pedestrians or shoot, this is not Grand Theft Auto, the focus is on driving, and in that it succeeds. The locations are better than Driver, the cities are more open, Chicago in the game is the Chicago I remember from having been there, and it's interesting to drive around in Las Vegas (although all the missions are in daylight so it doesn't feel like THE Las Vegas) and Havana. Despite the other user's comments, I found less glitches in this than Driver, although I played the Playstation version where bugs are generally less common because you don't have to make it work with hundreds of video cards and half a dozen CPUs on three different operating systems, all at varying speeds.

You can drive some bigger cars including school buses and trucks, and there is actually a helicopter though not in the story portion of the game. It probably represents the limit of what you can do with a driving game on the Playstation hardware. Most definitely worth picking up if you are a fan of city driving games (as opposed to closed course racing games).

I've just finished watching the reconstructed, 2 hour and 40 minute version of The Big Red One. I've never seen the abbreviated version, and I don't intend to, so this review only applies to the new version. From what I hear, it is very very different. The German characters play more of a part, the sounds have been ramped nearly up to Fuller's preferred level of live ammunition in the theater.

This is truly a war film. It's got many of the same scenes that were later copied in films such as Schindler's List (where a Nazi tries to fire twice but his gun misfires each time and he gives up), a scene similar to the one in Stalingrad where soldiers hide in holes while tanks go over their heads an then attack from behind, and the D-Day assault where the men have to blow a hole through the tank trap the hard way, copied by Saving Private Ryan. However, the scenes here don't have nice tidy endings. The characters here were a prototype of the ones in SPR: the father figure, the writer, the sniper, the first generation Euro-American (in SPR it was a Jew, here an Italian), and one other guy, who is like a real person in BRO, but in SPR was just a two-dimensional imperturbable bad-ass (Tom Sizemore, who incidentally played a carbon copy of that character in Black Hawk Down. An unimaginative casting agent. Why not just have him suck bullets out of his wounds and spit them out with a p-ting!).

This is Sam Fuller's story, partly autobiographical, as the movie says, "Fictional life based on factual death." It's the best tag-line for the film. Compare to SPR's satisfied "The Mission is a Man," which was obviously not something thought up by a WWII veteran. Fuller wanted to make a non-heroic, non-sentimental war movie, which is how he saw the war, and he did. Unfortunately Spielberg, whom I have a lot of respect for, made basically the opposite film with SPR. The BRO spends time in Africa fighting Rommel, Sicily, D-Day, Belgium, and finally assaulting a concentration camp in Germany, following four characters in a platoon and their older, calmer sergeant, who is a veteran of WWI as well. Like SPR focused on Captain Miller, played by Tom Hanks, The BROfocuses on the sergeant, played by Lee Marvin. Tom Hanks is a handsome, nice leading man, he looks as if he's never fired a gun in his life (I mean he played the same sweet bachelor in Joe v. the Volcano, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle). Lee Marvin looks more like a military man, scarred, asymmetrical face, and in fact was a combat veteran of WWII. I don't get the feeling most infantry came out of WWII feeling like Private Ryan did, I get the feeling they came out feeling like Sam Fuller and Lee Marvin did.

Also here there is one German focused on, Schroeder, who is barely a shadow in the older cut version, and the Germans are portrayed as pretty evil guys, but not cartoon villains like in SPR where to them, one good turn deserves a stick in the ribs. The American characters reflect, not on why they're there (why bother this late), but on what they're going to do about it. They drink, they smoke, they swear, they say "cock" and "pussy" but not gratuitously, more spontaneously. SPR was totally sanitized ("FUBAR.") The only part in SPR that even hints about fornication is something Private Ryan tells about his brother before the war opting to not lose his virginity before he ships out. I'm sorry, but if you want to see the life soldiers really live and what they talk about, you can't bring your kids, and you might not like what you see, it's not like life in peacetime.

Now I know there's a lot of people, like me, who watch war films for the gratuitous battle scenes. It sounds like the original cut version was lacking, but this one isn't. One reviewer on IMDb compared the tone to Ballad of the Green Berets. Not the reconstructed version, at all. It's damned loud, it's scary, and the ambient artillery explosions, gunshots, ricochets keep you on edge. There's an incredible scene where men on horseback are charging through a gunfight, which was left out of the original entirely. The German tanks they meet in Africa are menacing. The D-Day assault is equal to SPR in this version. It doesn't have the special effects wizardry that Spielberg could do in 1998, or the experimental photography of hand cameras, but it's just as chaotic, terrifying, and you get the same sense of arbitrary death where people are lucky one second and dead the next. Very intense, which you might expect from a director who lived through WWII. It may be a bit dated, but not nearly as much as you'd think.

The movie is much less preachy and philosophical than SPR, but not nearly as bleak and nihilistic as the Thin Red Line or Stalingrad. It' seems conventional because it's reminiscent of so many heroic sentimental war films that came after it, but it is really groundbreaking and unconventional in its intensity and realistic tone. The characters are not smart, not idiots, they're the kind of people you'd imagine who were drafted out of high school but are wising up quickly out of necessity. Basically, it's just a good story. I'd say that it was second only to Das Boot as a WWII movie, out of all the ones I've seen (and I'm only counting real war movies, not action or romances that happened in WWII like U-571 or Pearl Harbor, which are not even worth comparing).

The Yes Men is a documentary about a group of anti-economic liberalization activists who have made a unique habit of impersonating the WTO and other right-wing organizations (including the George W. Bush presidential campaign) in talks and national media spots. They try to get noticed by the overblown repugnance of the right-wing plans they suggest for the world's poor. If Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was a satirical short story about the rich literally devouring the impoverished, these guys are the long running Broadway adaptation.

Despite the release of the movie and many high profile performances, they still have not been properly outed, which is good for their continued success since still nobody recognizes them, but part of their aim is to get people who would normally listen to the WTO talk start thinking about globalization and its human consequences in the third world (poverty, hunger, pollution, disease, increased political and domestic violence, environmental destruction, and so on).

Since it's a documentary normally I wouldn't be lauding performances, but in this case, these guys do perform for their audience, and they are absolutely wonderful. They propose such things as recycling human waste to be made into McDonald's hamburgers to be sold in the third world. To see them advocating the employment of sweatshop workers because it's more humane than slavery and MUCH more cost effective (since "involuntarily relocated workers" require room and board at American rates and in the third world you can employ dozens for the same price and you don't have to look after their health or recoup the costs of transporting them overseas if they "escape"), while nobody listening bats an eye, is hilarious (if horrifying). They take the best of Michael Moore, The Corporation, and Supersize Me and sneak it in under the noses of the world's economic and academic elite at conferences on globalization.

I was lucky because the filming ended in 2002, but the proprietors of the theater where I saw it downloaded their latest prank off webcast, which featured a Yes Man impersonating a spokesman for Dow Chemicals speaking on the Bhopal massacre, which was easily equal to anything else they'd pulled off, and played it at the end of the movie.