Apr 20, 2008

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

The Forbidden Kingdom - Yay kung fu!  Okay, so I'm not really a big kung fu expert.  I don't know anything past what everyone has seen, so I'm probably an easy audience for this movie.  But there's punching and kicking and flipping and tripping and other things that rhyme and it's fun.  The plot is just normal, and everything happens exactly as you know it will, but that's not really the point.  Jet Li vs. Jackie Chan was extremely cool, however, they are fantastic.  It does make me wonder, though, is there common wisdom for which of these two is better?  Different styles to be sure, but is it obvious to people who know about martial arts which is more skilled?  Just curious.

Dr. Zhivago - So I had never seen this, supposed to be a classic, right?  Don't think I was super impressed.  It seemed very epic, but I didn't feel it.  Pretty long, and kind of boring.  Not sure why, just didn't buy it!

Romance & Cigarettes - Holy crap!  I had no idea what to think about this movie, I'm not even sure why I had it.  It's a John Tuterro movie, produced by the Coen brothers, and it is fanTASTIC.  It's a musical, with olderish popish music.  Some random people in it, Susan Sarandon, James Gandolfini, Mandy Moore, a few others I recognized.  It's kinda of just about a family and a cheating husband, sounds boring.  But it is so much fun.  It's pretty silly, but it doesn't try to hide that fact.  The music is pretty great and fits amazingly well.  It's just a really fun movie, everyone should totally see it!

District 13 - This movie is totally bad ass!  It's a near-future cop/gang kind of movie, but it's jsut filled w/ cool shit.  The plot is pretty standard, defuse the bomb stop the badguys kinda stuff.  And none of the acting or writing is anything to care about.  They got themselves two excellent badasses to lead the way, however.  It's like a Jason Statham movie, with two of em.  Parkour (opening scene to the most recent Bond), ninja fights, gun battles, generally running around and beating the crap out of people.  So much fun!

Appleseed: Ex Machina - So this is a sequel to a movie I saw a while ago, it's a whole big manga anime thing.  I remember liking the first one a lot, it had really fantastic action sequences, some of the best I had seen in an animation.  This one was that in parts, but mostly not.  The beginning was great, and I thought we were back to greatness.  But then it gets bogged down in a bunch of plot I don't care about.  Besides the fact that it's standard anime type boring plot, I also don't remember the last movie, so all the political machinations are beyond me.  So the whole middle bit is boring, and kinda cool again at the end (though it's basically the 3rd matrix movie + the borg queen).  Plus, I don't really dig robots fighting, it doesn't have the impact of people fighting.  So when everone suits up and it takesa million bullets to kill anything, it's kinda boring to me.  Oh well, it wasn't bad, just wasn't as cool as the first.

John Adams - This was more of a miniseries, but it took 4 hours to watch, I'm counting it!  It was quite good.  It's nice when movies make history interesting for those of us who have finally grown up enough to realize how important it is!  The first half is really fantastic, the opening stages of the revolution are fascinating.  I think it got pretty boring when Adams goes to France.  Even the political machinations aren't all that interseting, it's mostly him being grumpy and fish out of water (which Paul Giamatti is very good at, of course).  But still, good movie, educational, fun to watch.

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