MURDER – short film

Super cool.

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

Drive – Finally saw this, boy it’s a weird one. Good, yes. Besides Ryan Gosling, who does a good job (although having no personality isn’t exactly amazing acting), the star of the movie is the pacing. It moves extremely slowly, deliberately, almost ploddingly at times. But with a wonderful sense of tension. Then sporadic bursts of horrifying violence. More and more of that as you approach the end. Kind of a weird movie, kind of a what’s the point. But good.

London Boulevard – I almost really like this movie, but it tries to do a bit too much. The basic idea is colin farrell is fresh out of prison. He is simultaneously trying to work out to what extent he is involved with some gangsters, and also for some reason doing a bodyguard type thing for a recluse celebrity chick (keira knightly). I really like most of the movie. It does get kind of over done toward the end. Some of the people’s choices just don’t really make sense, they seem to exist only to heighten the craziness of it all, rather than contribute to the movie. It’s too bad, I was pretty into it, and that stuff at the end dulled my enthusiasm. Still good though.

Sleeping Beauty – Uh, ok. This movie is trying way too hard to be interesting. It reminds me a bit of Eyes Wide Shut, in that it tries to treat sexuality so nonchalantly. As if it’s completely beyond our puny human taboos. What? Oh you are bothered by the idea of being served by 7 women in weird bondage outfits with their tits out? How plebian. Bunch of bullshit. The movie doesn’t have any kind of point, a girl trying to make money cuz she doesn’t have any. Extremely weird things she does in order to make it. I think the main point is that the girl (one of the ones from sucker punch) in it is fantastically hot and you see a lot of her. Short of that, I’m not sure why you’d watch this.

Iron Giant – I’d always heard this was really good, and it is! There’s nothing particularly unexpected in it, but it tells a very nice story. It’s funny, it’s sweet, it’s everything you could want from a movie like this. Come to find out it’s Brad Bird, so that makes sense!

Four Lions – Ugh. This is supposed to be a dark comedy. Except it’s not funny. Not really dark either. It’s these british guys who fancy themselves jihadis. Except they suck at it so it’s just fucking pink panther goes to terrorist training. It’s not good.

Fast Five – So this movie is really more a heist/action movie than a car movie. I mean, it’s not really a heist movie, those are a lot slicker. It is an action movie there’s shooting and, uh, action. It’s not really a car movie. They have a race… OFF SCREEN. They go to all this effort to get bad ass cars, then RENT COP CARS. They finally get to a big over the top car thing at the end. Besides ignoring every single law of physics, it’s pretty fun. I’m really not sure. In other news, Vin Diesel looks like a roided midget next to the Rock.

Contraband – This movie isn’t what I expected. I thought from the previews that it was Mark Wahlberg’s Taken. But it’s got none of that. He’s just a thief who gets forced into thieving. It’s an okay movie, nothing is particularly wrong with it, nothing great either.

Conan the Barbarian – Not nearly as bad as I imagined, but still not good. However, the sand fighters were pretty awesome, and pretty much worth putting up with the rest of the movie, which is just average.

Man on a Ledge – This one’s okay. It’s kind of heistey, which is fun. The brother and his gf are pretty funny together. Everyone does a fine enough job. I liked it well enough.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – This movie is really good. It’s not as sad as you’d think. I mean, it’s pretty sad. But it is very uplifting in its own way. It reminds me very much of that book the curious incident of the dog in the night, in that it really pegs the perspective of an autistic (or slightly or whatever) person. I mean, I’m not, and I don’t know anyone who is, so I could just be getting tricked. But it really seems to present that perspective so honestly, it’s really good. The story/journey as a whole is pretty wonderful, it’s very nice.

Grave of the Fireflies – Holy shit. Now THIS is sad. It is sad from the very first moment. It is sad at the very last moment. It is sad nearly every moment in between. This is a Studio Ghibli movie, but nothing like any other movie. It’s about a boy and his sister in Japan toward the end of WW II. It’s really freaking horrendously sad. We were bummed out for like a week afterward. It’s very good. The relationship between the two is good. The desperation to be free, even if that means something bad, is painful, beautiful, sad. Good movie, but don’t ever make me watch it again.

The Producers – Yikes, not so good. I’m not sure why this is such a thing. Partially it suffers from its age, people just don’t act like that in movies anymore. Gene Wilder’s character is so ridiculously obnoxious. The idea is pretty clever, produce a broadway bomb, get rich off of the failure. That’s a cute idea, and it ends as it only can. And the ridiculousness of Springtime with Hitler is pretty funny. But all the rest of it is honestly hard to bear.

The Lincoln Lawyer – This movie was alright. It’s about a morally bankrupt defense lawyer who finds his morals. Sounds kind of trite, and it kind of is. But it’s still worth watching.

The Tale of Desperaux – This movie is pretty close to Ratatouille! And of course that means Ratatouille is like this movie since the book is a bit older. This one is pretty cute. Desperaux is kind of annoying, to tell you the truth. But I rather like the rest of the movie. The creature made out of food sticks with me as very charming. It’s a somewhat average cartoon at the end of the day, but it’s likeable.

Enter the Dragon – Er, no thank you. I was excited to see this after the Ip Man movies. I thought the “Wwwwaaaaaaa” thing that people do when mimicing martial artists was a ridiculous exaggeration. It’s really really not. Bruce Lee is a ridiculous exaggeration of himself. And there’s barely any ninja’ing in this movie. All the fighting is quick cuts, mostly one hit kills. Super disappointing.

Copying Beethoven – This was good. I wouldn’t have expected to like it, but it’s pretty cool. I’m not sure how true it is, it’s about Beethoven’s copyist (duh?), which is a very weird relationship because Beethoven’s an asshole. But it’s pretty interesting, at least in the fantasy that it’s true.

Friends with Benefits – Comments: 1) This movie is better than you’d imagine, it’s actually pretty funny. 2) Emma Stone screaming “He is the Sheryl Crow of our generation” completely makes it worth it. 3) C’mon, no one plays the Move. 4) The amazon guy was pretty funny too.

Batman Blows His Cover

HA!

10-year Civ II game

That is awesome.

A Brief History of (console) Video Games

Made of sounds, music, and video from all the console generations.

Venus transit

In case you missed it in person (in which case you should be very sad), this is beautiful.