So over the holiday last week, we watched the movie District 9. Originally my wife had declined to screen this film, but after hearing from several friends about how good it was, she agreed to go see it. I had also told her it was supposed to be good, but apparently, after suggesting she might like Hellboy because it was made by Guillermo del Toro (she is a huge fan of his Spanish-language movies like The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth), suggesting she might like Kung Fu Hustle because because it was “probably like a Jackie Chan movie”, and trying to convince her that Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a classic of 80s filmmaking, I lack credibility. Go figure.
Category: Reviews
Reviewus Interruptus: “Slumdog Millionaire”
So the other night, my wife was feeling lazy and wanted to watch a movie. We went through the On-Demand options, watching the trailers … Confessions of a Shopaholic … Duplicity … Slumdog Millionaire … she thought they all looked interesting but decided she wanted to see the best-picture winner, so we bought Slumdog Millionaire. Unfortunately it immediately started with our young hero being subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” and went downhill from there.
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gest revyoo of marley and me by dennis the vizsla dog!!!
hello dadas nice reederz all three of yoo sorry dada that was a cheep shot its dennis the vizsla dog hay gess wot??? dada has askd me to come and do a gest revyoo of the faymus dokyoomentry marley me and dupree wot we watchd this weekend and — wot??? oh dada sez the dokyoomentry wuz akchooaly calld marley and me sorry my bad ennyway dada shoor i wil lend yore silly blog sum of my star power ok heer goze!!!
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Review: “Resident Evil: Extinction”
So I finally got around to watching Resident Evil: Extinction on one of the free movie channels … and wow, I’m sure glad I didn’t pay any money to see it. I thought the first Resident Evil was mediocre but watchable, and actually rather liked the second one. The third one? Not so much.
Rather than use my usual rating system of how soon it would put my wife to sleep (which would be: Immediately if not sooner), I’m going to revert to the “Things I Learned From This Movie” format that I stole from badmovies.org and that I use occasionally. Ready? Let’s begin.
Video Game Preview Review: “Shadow Hearts: Covenant”
A few weeks ago, I posted a capsule review of the PS2 game “Shadow Hearts” and mentioned that I had the sequel queued up for my next game. I’ve got a few hours into the sequel now and while it’s too soon for an actual review, I would like to make a few comments about it:
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Video Game Review: “Shadow Hearts”
So this week I finally finished up a game I’ve been playing for about six months, a fantasy RPG called Shadow Hearts. This game is relatively ancient by video game standards (it came out in 2001), but what can I say — I only play one game at a time and I have a stack of games eight inches high waiting for me. Once I’m done playing those, I can upgrade my PlayStation 2 to whatever is out at that point — probably the PlayStation 6. But I digress. Continue reading “Video Game Review: “Shadow Hearts””
Review: “The Graveyard Book”
As you can see by my sidebar, Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors; I’ve loved all of his books except one — his children’s book, Coraline, pretty much left me cold. I can’t really explain what I didn’t like about Coraline; it just didn’t grab me the way Gaiman’s books usually do. I was interested to see if The Graveyard Book would be different, and it sure was.
New (To Me) “Night Watchman” Review
As I mentioned a while back, I periodically Google myself to see if there are any new reviews or other mentions of my stuff. Evidently I don’t do it often enough, though, because I’ve only just now become aware of this review (published last August by Sharon of A Bookworm’s Journey; Sharon’s dog Rusty is good friends with Dennis the Vizsla, and the two can often be found conspiring together against the squirrels) of Night Watchman. A brief excerpt:
Once I started it it was hard to put down. The characters and places Viscosi created were engaging, interesting. I would have loved for Yolanda, a psychic, to have had a bigger part.
I can’t argue with that — by the time I was done writing this book, Yolanda had become my favorite character as well. Perhaps she’ll get her own story some day …
Sharon gives Night Watchman 4 out of 5 stars. Thanks, Sharon!
Review: “Homefront”
This week I finished up reading Homefront, by Kristen Tsetsi. (You may have seen the occasional comment from Kristen here.) I don’t usually write book reviews here, because it’s difficult to apply my snarky rating system to them (“this book put my wife to sleep in N minutes” … nah, doesn’t really work), but I’m making an exception for Kristen because I really want to encourage people to pick up her novel.
Review: “The Machinist”
We finally got around to watching The Machinist, a movie where Batman (Christian Bale) loses like a hundred pounds, starts messing up on his day job as an operator of heavy machinery, and starts seeing things that may or may not be there. He also finds mysterious and threatening cryptic notes stuck to his refrigerator. (At the risk of providing a spoiler, if you’ve read my short story “You“, then you already know who’s leaving those notes.)
I wasn’t sure quite what to make of The Machinist at first. I thought it might be a dystopian science fiction flick, one of those films where it’s always dark and gloomy and everyone toils in hopeless servitude for some nameless mega-corporation; so when Batman (I’m going to keep calling him that because my wife, while she was awake, just kept staring at Bale, shaking her head, and saying, “That’s Batman?”) ventures out into the bright California sunshine, the effect was actually quite jolting. The contrast between the hellish factory where he works and the sunny world beyond was effective and, I’m sure, quite deliberate.
The film does a good job portraying Batman’s spiraling isolation and paranoia, and contains some powerful scenes, particularly when Batman chaperones a boy on a ride at a theme park that neither one of them has any business riding. The final few scenes, when we get to see (in a flashback) Batman before he lost all that weight are also very well done. The big revelation didn’t come as a shock to me, as I had figured it out ages earlier (as I mentioned, I already wrote this story ten years ago), but seeing it actually play out was affecting nonetheless. The contrast between a flush and healthy Batman and his gaunt, haunted future self was simply astonishing. (I’ve no doubt that Batman had a doctor following him around the whole time they were filming.)
The Machinist put my wife to sleep almost immediately; I think she barely lasted fifteen minutes. Perhaps she would have stayed awake longer if Batman hadn’t been so frighteningly thin. This film is pushed as a thriller in its trailer and its description, but it’s really more of a character study, and is quite deliberately paced. If you go in expecting a lot of chases and action (or Batman eye candy), you’ll be disappointed; but if you want to see some moody cinematography and good acting from Batman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a nearly unrecognizable Michael Ironside, then you might like it.
Viscosity 