Cautiva

This is an Argentinean film about a 15-year-old girl, Christina who goes in for a routine blood test and the doctors find something they don’t go public with right away. She has a pretty frank discussion with her mother about having kids and her mother is pretty weirded out by the questioning – you might think because of the girl’s age, but you’d be wrong. The students in Christina’s school are studying how a bill becomes a low in the United States, and one of them gets belligerent about the power the president has to pardon criminals. We find out this girl’s parents “disappeared” due to the fact they were leftist supporters – only some of her friends know what happened. And now the girl has been taken out of the school. One day, Christina gets called to the school office where there are government people waiting to take her to a judge. She finds out her parents aren’t really her parents and also finds out her name and birthday aren’t what she thought, either. It’s a little hard to take, obviously. She is sent to live with her biological grandmother in a strange house since her grandmother has been searching for her since she was born. While at school volleyball practice, Christina runs into the girl who disappeared from her school and they have an uncomfortable discussion while naked in the shower. They decide to try to track down as much information about their parents as possible. They were both born in clandestine political prisons and Christina finds out more about her adoptive family and her biological family than she had wanted to. She doesn’t find out where they’re at currently, and then the movie ends. It was very anti-climactic. It just fizzled at the end. There’s very good acting in it, and it looks like it’s going to be a great plot, and then it just doesn’t go anywhere. Very disappointing ending to a decent foreign film.

Sherlock Holmes

Despite some confusion surrounding the name of this film, it is not about a certain adult film star’s younger lesser talented brother. It’s about Sherlock Holmes, the world greatest detective and his sidekick, Dr. Watson. They solve a variety of crimes thanks to the amazing gift of combining minute pieces of information/evidence together into a story. This film iteration of the literary series stars Robert Downey Jr. playing Holmes and Jude Law playing Watson. Holmes and Watson capture an occult-dabbling big-shot named Blackwood. After Blackwood is executed, a groundskeeper claims to have seen him rise from the dead. Blackwood’s reputation with the occult has people flipped out when he keeps popping up. Blackwood tries to take control over parliament by rigging up some sort of chemical weapon and trying to pass it off as an occult weapon. Holmes and Watson systematically debunk all of Blackwood’s occult shenanigans and eventually kill Blackwood. It’s a fast-paced murder mystery and only a handful of obvious CGI (one of which was so outlandish I couldn’t believe they left it in the film). Otherwise, it was mostly green screen stuff in the background, which I can generally deal with. The film ends with an obvious set-up for a sequel as Holmes and Watson received what will lead to their next case. The film was well-acted and of course Robert Downey Jr. is hot and shirtless in a couple scenes. Watson doesn’t play a bumbling sidekick, he plays a very competent and hilarious partner in mystery-solving. It’s not an amazing film, but it was pretty good.

The Mutant Chronicles

There’s a machine that changes men into mutants and it’s buried under the earth and its secret is protected by a secret cult. It’s been around since the medieval times, but has lasted through the year 2707, when four corporations rule the world. They’re all at war with each other, but the battle between “Capitol” and “Bauhaus” is the most extreme right now in what used to be Europe. Out of nowhere, these random zombie–like mutant pop out of the ground and start cleaning house on both sides. Apparently, war broke the seal and awakened the machine. The mutants take civilians and military people to the machine and it changes them into a bunch more mutants. Ron Perlman, as Brother Samuel, asks the leader of the cult (John Malkovich) for a small team of people to go destroy the machine. Samuel pulls together soldiers from each of the four corporations to be the fighting unit, including Thomas Jane (from the Punisher) as Mitch Hunter. The Mutant Chronicles are a prophecy/guidebook to how the machine can be shut off. The team is instructed in how to destroy the machine and how to fight the zombie mutants (which includes swords), and then sent off to destroy the machine. Most of the people on the mission are killed by the mutants, but Mitch keeps going and brings as many pieces of the Chronicles as he can scrap together. He gets captured by the machine and half turned into a mutant. Then he grabs a couple of injured soldiers and proceeds to try to blow up the machine, which turns out to be a giant space ship and launches into space. Who writes this stuff?

For being 2707, the weapons are surprisingly 1950-ish. A lot of heavy iron and oddly, what appears to be steam-powered stuff. Really? It’s some sort of steampunked WWI combined with Alien and with a splash of Sin City thrown in. I still can’t figure out why the mutants seemed to be pieced together with bits of metal band-aids and such. The CGI in the film is really bad, not tear-wrenchingly terrible, but it’s still pretty obviously low-budget and painful. Almost as bad as Megafault, but that one still wins the prize for the worst of all time.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

This film takes place during World War II in Germany. A young boy comes home from school to find his family is planning for a dinner party and discussing moving to the countryside since their dad got a promotion. The young boy, Bruno, isn’t pleased about the move since he loves the house they’re in and all his friends. The family’s new home is a bid drab and gloomy and not at all warm and inviting like their last home – more of a walled compound than a home. It’s also in the middle of freakin nowhere in the countryside. Bruno can see a farm from his window with a bunch of children. He says the kids are a bit strange, since they all wear pajamas. He asks his mom if he can play with the children, and when she finds out what their “pajamas” are, she freaks out a little bit. The father tries to explain who the farmers are by saying those are not people, and that he should not play with the children on the farm. While Bruno explores, he comes across a kid in striped pajamas on the other side of a fence. Bruno doesn’t understand what’s going on with the whole concentration camp situation, so he thinks this is just another kid playing. Bruno begins to understand some of what his tutor and sister and father are teaching him about Jews. But not enough. He arranges to have the little boy bring him some of the pajamas and a hat to sneak him into the camp. The little boy can’t find his father and Bruno wants to help him out. Bruno digs under the fence and gets into the camp dressed as a prisoner. Things don’t go well for Bruno or the other little boy, or for a lot of Jewish people during World War II. I won’t ruin the ending, but it’s not bunnies and flowers. This film is extremely well done and is very touching. The photography is great and the acting is superb. The movie implies a lot without showing the horrors of the holocaust and shows how children are brought up in the culture without knowing they are being brainwashed. Yes, you have to overlook the fact that everyone has British accents in Germany, but that’s easy to do, right? It’s a very depressing movie, but it’s still quite good.

Step Brothers

Some people hate Will Farrell, and some people wish they could hate Will Farrell, but can’t. I’m in the latter group. This film is about two single parents that get combined (thankfully, Mary Steenburgen is the smokin’ hot mom, so SCORE for me) and two adult children living at home are now forced to live with each other. Yes, Will Farrell acts like an overgrown idiot kid (like most of his movies), and it always comes across as moronic, but he does string enough one liners together that it passes for comedy. While the fight scenes between the two step brothers are moronic, there are some classic moments in many of them. I will say that singing in any film ruins it for me, especially when people sing Guns N Roses songs as operatic barbershop quartet idiocy – this film does have that, so be warned. Farrell’s biological brother stops by for a visit and is a pompous ass to everyone, and ends up winning over the new dad. Farrell’s brother dares the step brothers to punch him and John C. Reilly socks him right in the face. Farrell and Reilly become best friends. The step brothers go job hunting (as a team), which fails miserably, and they decide to go into business together and start an entertainment company. All kinds of things go poorly and they’re forced to move out of their parents’ house (because they caused their divorce) and get real jobs. The parents eventually get back together and everyone lives happily ever after. It’s a ridiculous movie, and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny except for a handful of one liners, especially the line about Kobayashi. Those one liners are classic, but seriously, it’s probably not worth the 1:45 you have to invest in the film to get them.

Gomorrah

This Italian film opens with a bunch of guys getting tanned and manicured together. Two guys pull guns and start blasting the other guys, spraying blood all over the salon. There are multiple local crime bosses, the Camorra, who take a fee on what people make. They get money from drug dealers, prostitutes, old people, whoever. That's how things operate in this area, I guess. Two local small-time kid drug runners hold up a larger operation and steal their drugs. Their local crime boss isn’t too happy about it, so these two kids think they’ll set up their own shop and be the bosses. The two wanna-be crime bosses steal some guns and go practice shooting in their funderoo’s at a lake – still not sure what that’s all about. The kids in this apartment complex are all in training to be runners and lackeys for the crime bosses. They run errands and get shot while wearing flak jackets and such to prove their manhood. Some friends end up being paired with different crime bosses and are forced to split their friendships over turf. There are all kinds of shootings in the apartment complex and some of the kids are forced into doing the dirty work. There are two side stories in the film as well: a cartel who disposes of toxic waste and also a tailor who sells his services to the Chinese. These things are unrelated to the main plot, but since the Camorra has their hand in these industries, I guess the directors felt they needed to include them in some way. I think this is sort of an expose on the Camorra, the mafia in Scampia – one of the largest drug trafficking areas in Italy. It’s pretty brutal, but it really doesn’t have much of a linear plot. It’s an interesting film, but really doesn’t have much plot to grasp onto. It’s not an uplifting film, since there’s a lot of shooting, including two of the main characters, but it is enlightening. It just kind of left me hanging.

Megafault

Since I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with Brittany Murphy in it, I felt I owed it to her legacy to watch one of her films. This SyFy channel-appropriate movie is about earthquakes ripping through the country across faultlines and swallowing whole cities. The feds send in seismologists to research it and they don’t get very far. Brittany Murphy is one of those experts. The film starts with an incredibly bad CGI mining blast scene and gets worse from there. I HATE watching films where I yell bullshit in the first minute of a film. I also realize I am not a fan of Brittany Murphy. I also heard there were a couple of scenes in the film shot in Davenport, IA (which I grew up near) – which is true since one of the first scenes was shot at the RiverCenter in D-port. And, as it turns out, the rest of the film’s scenes are shot in the Quad Cities and LeClaire, IA (despite the city names they put on the screen). And now that I know this, I’m embarrassed to be from there. Whether it's Lexington or Aspen, you'll find a Major Art and Hobby Store on the corner of 2nd and Perry, only wearing different clothes so you know it's cold - are viewers REALLY that stupid? All of the cities filmed get painfully and fake-ly sucked into the center of the earth. It’s absolutely ridiculous that someone would try to pass these scenes off as acceptable special effects. It’s probably the worst special effects I’ve seen in a Hollywood production. Yes, I was yelling at the screen, in fact. Loudly. Actually, I’m pounding out the letters on the keyboard as I type this. I really need to get this CGI-rage under control. Or maybe the film makers in Hollywood need to get their CGI shit together. Maybe Eriq LaSalle should get his shit together as well, since he was more believable in the Soul Glow commercials he did in Coming to America. The seismologist team decides to shoot a magic laser to freeze the underground water and create a second earthquake to cancel out the first earthquake. Then if things go bad, the Grand Canyon will absorb the second earthquake and stop it from spreading like the initial earthquake. This is the most ridiculous plot ever. And I’ve seen better special effects on an 8mm home film camera from the 1950s. I’m done with this review, or I’m going to have an aneurysm.

Shut Up & Shoot Me

This is a Polish film that starts with a guy who appears to be a butcher, a mailman, a pooper scooper, and a bartender – I think this is the comedy part (Oh, those crazy Pollacks!!!). The real plot is actually about a British couple spending time in Prague and worrying over whether he turned off the iron in their room before they left. A statue falls from a building while they are walking and crushes the wife – seriously, DESTROYS her. As he’s in his flat later, he tries to electrocute himself with said iron after that, and it doesn’t go well. The guy from the beginning of the film shows up to drive him to the morgue as he’s crawling out of the bathtub. He receives an urn full of his wife’s ashes and he’s a bit mentally frazzled. The husband is still suicidal and wants to hire the guy from the beginning of the film to kill him. They go to a secluded field and the husband tries to pay the guy with a credit card – yes, to kill him. The driver takes him to an artillery field and sits him in the middle of it. There are shells exploding all around and none of them kill the husband. So the husband has to hitchhike to a hotel. The husband tracks down the beginning guy and asks him to finish the job – so the beginning guy talks the husband into jumping off the roof of the apartment building. The husband won’t jump, so he ends up sleeping on the couch at the beginning guy’s flat. The beginning guy’s plan is to have other people kill the husband and they get into all kinds of ridiculous situations in which the husband still ends up not dying. They accidentally kill a mobster’s girlfriend in a parking garage and through the surveillance tape, the mobster finds out who these guys are. The two guys try to dispose of the mobster’s girlfriend and aren’t having any luck with that. A couple of other people end up dead as well.

The film almost became one of those “buddy movies” where zany things happen, only this is more depressing – so maybe it’s more hilarious at the same time. This film amused me, but it wasn’t one I’d rave about. Surprisingly, this film had about 413 times more plot than most foreign films. Go Poland! I did chuckle a couple of times at how ridiculous it was, so maybe it is worth a look.

Stuck

A nursing home nurse is being considered for a job promotion due to the crap (literally) she deals with every day at work. Her boss tricks her into coming into work on her day off and the nurse isn’t happy about it. This film is about the rough day this nurse is about to have. This film is supposedly based on a true story about a woman in Texas to which this happened - I'm not sure I'm buying it based on this film.

Across town, this other guy can’t pay his rent due to his recent job loss, so the landlord kicks him out of his apartment. The landlord is kind of a douche and tells the guy he can’t take any of his belongings with him when he’s throwing him out. There’s a scuffle in an upstairs apartment and the evicted guy grabs his belongings and runs for it. The guy has an appointment with an employment agency to find a job, but it doesn’t go well. He ends up sleeping in a park that night. The nurse is at a club on some drugs and goes home slightly tipsy. She’s on her cell phone when she runs the homeless guy over and he sticks in her windshield, bleeding all over the inside of her car. She freaks out and keeps on driving, through the city and to her house. She parks her car in the garage to hide it and when she reaches for her purse, the guy moves and asks for help. She freaks out and runs inside the house to her drug dealer boyfriend. She tells him she hit a homeless person and he tells her not to worry about it. Then they end up having sex and she keeps seeing the homeless guy’s face on her boyfriend’s while he’s “getting’ up in them guts.”

The next morning, she goes out to the garage and the guy is still alive and still stuck in her windshield. She remembers she’s supposed to be at work, so she calls as cab. As she’s going out to the cab, the homeless guy honks the horn on her car. She whacks him in the head with a board to make him stop. When he wakes up, he uses her cell phone to call 911, but the battery dies in the cell phone. He continues to honk the horn and a boy hears him and goes and gets his mom. The kid’s dad says he doesn’t want the police around or they could get into big trouble. Unfortunately, the father won’t let the mother and kid call for help.

The guy climbs all the way into the car, grabs a bottle of water, and fashions a splint out of the board she smacked him with. The nurse gets off work and goes to her drug dealer/bf’s house where she finds another woman in his bed. She whips the new girl’s ass (including hitting her with a frying pan) and throws her out into the hallway. She gets over the infidelity pretty quickly and gets the bf to help her with the guy she hit the previous night. He suggests calling 911 – hilarious. The bf ties the guy up so he doesn’t keep crawling around everywhere. They tie him up and sack him up in garbage bags, right when the nurse’s co-worker walks into the garage to check things out. The couple comes up with a story about hitting a deer, since she saw the car and all the blood. The co-worker had come by to tell the nurse that her boss knows she left work and things are turning south at work.

Meanwhile a neighbor is walking his dog and the dog gets into the garage and gets blood all over her fur, yet the owner thinks it’s food or ketchup or something and takes the dog back home. The couple tries to figure out how to dispose of this guy. The homeless guy unties himself and is ready for the bf to come back. The bf pulls a gun on the guy and it goes off right as the homeless guy stabs the bf in the eye with a ball point pen and kills him. The nurse comes back out to the garage and finds her dead boyfriend and the guy bashes her in the head with the car door. And for a guy with two compound fractures, he’s walking pretty well, using the broom as a crutch – weird.

He gets out into the street and pulls the gun on the nurse. The gun goes off and she smacks him in the head with the shovel. Apparently, no one sees her dragging his body back into the garage. She dumps gasoline all over the bodies of her bf and the homeless guy and argues with the homeless guy. He starts the car and then runs the nurse over inside the garage. He breaks both her legs and she’s now laying on the hood of her own car. She tries to shoot the homeless guy with the gun and the sparks from the gun end up lighting all the gasoline she’s poured all over the place. The homeless guy manages to get the garage door open and crawls to safety.

First off, she’s a nurse, so she’s not an idiot. Secondly, he’s got compound fractures in both legs with bones sticking out, and he’s been sliced open badly by the windshield he’s sticking out of, but he isn’t dead. Thirdly, the neighbor kid and mother would have called 911 no matter what if they saw a guy sticking out of a windshield moving around. Fourth, you don’t just whip together a splint out of a board and a plastic bag, especially when you’ve got bones sticking out of your pantleg. Fifth, the nurse got over the whore much quicker than I expected. This list goes on and on and continues to get more and more ridiculous. This movie is so far beyond the scope of reality that it’s not funny or even entertaining. It’s just annoying and implausible. The acting in the film is decent, so I’ve got no complaints there, just with the writing. Don’t waste your time with this film.

Ninja Assassins

This is a modern day ninja movie that takes place in Berlin of all places. Aside from the unusual setting, the movie explains why after thousands of years, people who look into what ninjas are doing end up dead. The film is made by the same people that did the Matrix, and it seemed pretty clear in the effects throughout this film. In fact, I described this movie to my friend as a combination of the Matrix, Ghost, and the 1980’s television series “The Master”. (Which is also appropriate since Sho Kosugi is one of the main characters in the film and was in the 1980’s television series.) Two Interpol agents begin looking into some mysterious deaths they think are paid assassinations. All signs point to a group of assassins who are infants stolen as children and put into ninja training. The ninjas try taking out the two people investigating them and come very close, if it weren’t for the meddling of one of their former students who is trying to help one of the Interpol agents. They never really say why he’s helping her, other than she has a “special heart”, which is absolutely asinine. But whatever. The film is action packed with lots of explosions, TONS of ninja stars, swords, and scorpion whips. There are some really awesome blood spurting scenes and most of the special effects are top-notch, especially the parts where limbs and whole bodies are being chopped in half. There were a couple of spots I (quietly) yelled bullshit in – the fact that the Interpol operatives managed to get a crap ton of Humvees up on a remote mountain ninja training camp without being heard even though there are no roads – this was where my friend TheDoctor yelled “AMURKA!!!” in the theater – it was classic. There were a couple of other ones aside from that, but that was the funniest one. I’m not a huge fan of modern day martial arts movies – I’m more of an old school guy, but I make exceptions. This film is good, but not great. I’m glad I saw it, but I really thought it would be better than it was. One thing this movie will do is make martial arts movies more accessible to the masses of people that loved the Matrix. So I guess it’s a good thing, after all. And yeah, I’ll probably add it to my vast collection of martial arts DVDs when it comes out.

Pirate Radio

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this film, originally titled "The Boat That Rocked". I saw the previews for it and some clips with interviews with the actors and a huge part of me wanted to see it. And then there were parts with ridiculous clothing and dancing and singing on a ship – which 1000% turned me off. Thankfully, the singing and dancing were reserved for very specific and (almost) appropriate parts of the film. This film is about a time in British history where pop and rock music simply were not played on the radio. There were boats anchored off shore that would broadcast music people actually liked and were technically doing nothing illegal. The government hated these stations for giving kids a rebellious attitude, but the only thing the government could do was create BS laws that would make what these ships were doing crimes of the highest order. The story line of this particular adventure is a young kid gets sent to live on the ship by his mother (his godfather is the ship’s captain), because he isn’t adjusting well socially and he’s been caught smoking a bit of the herb. The ship’s residents – all on-air-disc jockeys – take him under their wing and show him a bit about life and a bit about radio. They have huge outlandish parties on board where they ship women from the shore to the boat and do wild things to them and then send them back home. The government passes a law to make paid advertising illegal on these ships and this only slows down the ship’s team. The government passes an additional law saying the radio signals endanger merchant marine’s lives. The government then sends out an armada of boats to shut down the ship, but the ship sets sail on the lamb still broadcasting… until it hits something and starts to sink. Then the government won’t step in to help save the lives of the radio people. The film is really well done. Despite some super shaky hand-held footage aboard a rocky boat at the beginning, they eventually find a tripod that helped my nausea. Philip Seymour Hoffman is brilliant in this film as is the guy from Shaun of the Dead (Nick Frost). You actually grow to love these characters and their off-beat sense of humor and camaraderie. I would recommend this film to people who grew up listening to the radio, people who are old enough to remember the 60’s (which I am not, just so you know), or people who have roots in radio or broadcast (which I do, consequently). Apparently, the film is historically-based (still fictional, so not historically accurate), so it should tell you something about how far the media has come in the last 40 or 50 years.

Murder Party

Random guy is walking down the street on Halloween night and steps on an invitation to a Murder Party. He has just rented some videos to watch that evening, and since he has nothing else to do, decides to go to the party. He dresses up as a cardboard knight and heads out. He shows up at this warehouse where these costumed people are waiting to kidnap him, torture him, and kill him. One of the costumed girls falls over and impales her head accidentally. Should we be laughing? Yes, I thought it was hilarious. Turns out the costumed people are all artists who are vying for some artistic grant money by coming up with the best idea for killing the random guy who showed up. Alexander, the grant money guy shows up and talks to them about challenging themselves to reach for the stars when coming up with ideas for killing this guy. They all sit around and inject themselves with truth serum and just spill their secrets – kind of hilarious also. Then things start to go terribly wrong. People start killing each other in brutal ways. The murder party expands into another art party nearby where more people get killed. The knight eventually escapes and makes his way home. Even though there was a definite climax, it was kind of anti-climactic. Not a fantastic movie and I think the script writing could have been more funny during most of it, but it was still fairly amusing. I did laugh at a couple of inappropriate times, however. That's got to mean something, right?

Chinese Hercules

This is a traditional kung-fu film in which an orphan kung-fu student accidentally kills a guy in a fight over a girl and has to run for his life and also vows never to fight again. He leaves the area and gets a job hauling bags of rice from ships to a storage facility. He tries to be a good person, but every time he does, the bad guys beat him down (sometimes physically). This evil syndicate closes down the pier he works on and all of his coworkers fight back without effect. The girl he fought over shows up randomly to bring a message to the runaway, and tries to get him to fight back for his coworkers. This huge muscle guy works for the syndicate as a thug and can only say a few hilarious words like “We kill them. We dump them.” Classic. The girl the runaway fought for enrages him enough that he goes after the muscle guy in an epic battle. The film is not the greatest sound or visual quality, and the plot is a tad weak in that I’m not sure if the huge muscle guy is Hercules or the fighter runaway guy. And if it is the muscle guy, he only has about 10 minutes of screen time – but I guess it is a better title than “scared runaway kung-fu guy.” It’s one that most people can pass on, but since I’m a fan of kung-fu movies in general, I wasn’t going to pass this one up. It’s forgettable.

Awake

In this movie, a rich NY kid has a bad heart and undergoes a heart transplant. However, when they give him the general anesthesia, he doesn’t actually go under. His vital signs all read as if he’s unconscious, but he hears and feels everything the doctor is doing. To keep his mind off of the procedures and pain, he focuses his attention on his new wife, but his thoughts drift wildly the whole time. Turns out his surgeon is in some sort of plot to kill the kid because he’s rich. Oh wait, his brand new wife, Jessica Alba, is in on it too. But they kill him on the table by saying his heart was rejected (by the way, this part of the movie is super graphic – just a warning). He’s still on the breathing machine, so he’s technically alive when another surgeon shows up and steals the heart from the rich kid’s mom, in a super unexpected turn of events. The film is an interesting concept, but is not exciting by any stretch. I could have lived without seeing this one. They really could have made this one a bit more suspenseful.