Movie Reviews

You can buy DVD's and software on the street for as little as 50 cents, but I'd recommend spending the 75 cents on a properly pirated DVD from a store. Even those are sketch and will sometimes skip or not read on low-end players. The ones on the street are anyone's guess as to what they are. I bought what I thought was Pirates of the Caribbean II + Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The packaging said "Johnny Depp" and had a pictures from both movies, plus Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow on the back. That's a lot of film. The actual DVD contained the 1980's remake of Cutthroat Island.

They make great efforts to make the packaging and artwork on the disc look as legitimate as possible, though the descriptive text on the back is better for a chuckle than insight. Example... did you know the Mr. Bean movie won nine Academy Awards??



On to the reviews:

American Soldiers

Horrible. This is the first fiction piece I've seen about the war in Iraq. I was expecting a lot more. Basically imagine someone making a compilation of newspaper clippings about everything that's happened to our soldiers in Iraq, then make it all happen to a small squadron over the course of six hours. Every ten minutes they run into an ambush, car bomb, IED, RPG attack and apparently it's too "hot" for air support. At no point have I ever read that it's been too "hot" for air support during the Iraqi occupation. The dialogue, both in script and as delivered, is just... horrible. This is the first movie I've ever watched and said out loud, "I really wish Samuel L. Jackson would come in and help this movie out."

After the middle section we fast-forwarded through the dialogue, with Dru ad libbing and me guessing the next scene. I was one for two. I predicted at some point our motley crew would wind up in an Abu Ghraib situation, which they did (except it was a Latin American contractor who introduces himself as someone whose specialty is "extracting information," then beats a prisoner while yelling "Information!" This, by far, was the best scene of the entire movie.). I was wrong about there being a scene to come where'd they have to search an Iraqi's house an hold a crying family at gunpoint.

There is no plot. There is no character development. There is no begining or end. I give it one half out of three jolly rogers just for being able to fool someone into financing the project. I propose a new rule of film: countries without militaries are NOT allowed to make war movies. This is your first warning, Canada!

Infernal Affairs (1, 2, and 3)

It's like the Godfather... but filmed in Hong Kong. The whole story revolves around a mob boss, a police chief, and the informants each has working inside the police and criminal underworld. Lots of action, lots of thinking. It's one of those movies where you have to watch every scene to get it. The first is the best, the second is the prequel and really good, and I fell asleep half way through the third one because all but one or two characters were different.

Journey to the West / Shinseoyugi

We found this on CCTV back in Jixian. It was the only show with English subtitles and was also hugely entertaining. Dru bought it when we got back to Tianjin. It's the funniest thing I've seen since arriving here. Slapstick, puns, and lines like "Step off my intestines, b*#ch!" So far as I've pieced the story together - it's very hard to follow - it's about a Monkey King reborn as an idiot for being arrogant in a former life. He's some sort of half-witted warlord with a crew of idiot-wimp man-childs. There are at least two long scenes involving his entire crew stomping on his testicles. I wasn't able to find the movie on Amazon, so it's rare. There are also two movies, but I've only seen the first. There's also a low budget spin-off TV show based on the same folklore with scheming flying monkeys. You can't make this stuff up.

Brokeback Mountain

I wasn't expecting much. Honestly, a movie about gay cowboys? I figured it was politics - the first major release of a gay love story... Hollywood wanted this to win. Jesse told me it was good and he's normally spot on [except for Punch Drunk Love, you failed me there, friend] so I bought it. It was great. Good fiction being the suspension of disbelief, it was a movie that really drew you in. There were incredibly complex feelings both characters had about one another; most of the movie is set in 20 or so years after their first "meet up" and both go on to get married and live "normal" lives. These feelings came through on film.

Sideways

A sad(ish) mid-life crises type movie from the same guy who brought you the depressing end-life crises movie About Schmidt. An alchohalic middle-school teacher and a philandering minor movie star [played by Lowell from my favorite TV show ever, Wings] spend a week in California's wine country as a pre-marital "boys night out" type deal. It's a good movie and might have better resonance to it's 40-something target audience. Excellent acting. I also liked a subtext in the movie... be careful where your passions lie. It's disturbing to watch Miles, the main character, light up to talk about wines when in every other scene he is so weary of life. I also really liked how it showed the dynamics between friends... how two different personalities need each other. You have the gloaming intellect matched with the roving and irresponsible go-getter. They both use each other in ways only old friends can.

New World

I can't rate this one because I haven't finished it. I haven't finished it because it's four hours long. It's slow. It's beautiful. It builds on a visual narration with little dialoque. It seems like the real details of Jamestown, like cannibalism, where brought it for plot momentum without being a cheap cinematic trick. I like it. I wish it were two or three hours long and not four.

War / Война / Voyna

The best recent war movie I've seen, on par with Jarhead. The movie is about a Russian soldier and a British actor released by a Chechan warlorn to raise ransom money to free the actors fiance still held captive. Without giving too much of the plot away I think it really touches on the issue of how Westerners confuse and blur entertainment and media with reality. To the actor, the battle to get his girlfriend is just an action movie - figurively and literally. There is a great tension between the cold realism of the young discharged Russian soldier and the moral naitivity of the Englishman. Trapped inside the rubric of war-as-movie, the actor is oblivous to the actual moral costs of what it takes to accomplish what he has aksed the discharged Russian soldier to do for him.To the Russian soldier, war is war - "You think before war, not during."

Tags: Treyopia China Movie Reviews Sideways New World War Voyna Война NewWorld Brokeback Mountain Brokeback Mountain Shinseoyugi Journey Infernal Affairs Infernal Affairs American SoldiersAmerican Soldiers