Category Archives: movies

Iron Man

Iron Man was really the perfect beginning to the summer movie season. I saw it Saturday and Sunday. It has been a long long time since a movie truly showcased Robert Downey Jr’s hotness. And he’s quite hot in Iron Man. It feels like something that was horribly wrong with the world has been restored. And, did I mention the hotness?

Sundance Movie – Bugmaster

One of the few Sundance movies my husband was able to get tickets to was Katsuhiro Otomo’s Mushishi or Bugmaster. First of all, I don’t think I was in the right frame of mind to appreciate the movie, because I was tired and watching it late at night. The circular and meandering plot centers around Ginko, a bugmaster who travels around helping people who are afflicted by mushi/bugs – not normal ants or roaches but mystical creatures who sometimes prey on humans when the natural order of things is disturbed.
Visually, the movie is quite striking. The scenery is lovely, and the animated special effects used for the mushi makes them look otherworldly and a little spooky. Ginko travels from village to village, but he gradually heads towards a confrontation with the forces that shaped him as a young child. The movie felt a little long to me. Although the slow pacing allows you to appreciate the setting of the movie, I was really looking forward to some sort of story resolution at the end. I think the movie has made me more interested in checking out the manga when it is released, just to see how the source material differs from the adaptation.

September is the time of great action movies

I’m looking forward to September, which oddly enough has two action movies coming out that I’m really looking forward to. The first is Crank, because I am a big fan of the cinematic oeuvre of Jason Statham. I adore the Transporter movies, so there is no way that I’m not going to be there opening day for a movie where Statham gets injected with a deadly mystery poison that causes him to have to run around to keep his adrenaline flowing or die. The tagline for the movie is “Poison in his veins. Vengeance in his heart.” How could that not be good?!

There’s also Tony Jaa’s Tom Yum Goong aka The Protector. I have a VCD of this, but I’m looking forward to seeing the fight scenes on a big screen.

Add to that Jet Li’s new movie Fearless, September is going to be a happy time to go to the movies.

Miami Vice

I had really low expectations for this movie, and I still ended up being disappointed. For an action movie it seemed curiously dull and flat. I don’t expect much from a Miami Vice movie, but I would have thought that there would at least be a car chase leading to a speedboat chase or a speedboat chase leading to a car chase. There were NO car chases and NO speedboat chases. It seems a little worthless to have a movie with really expensive vehicles and no chase scenes. Instead, we find out that in Miami, people take showers with each other often. John Hawkes from Deadwood had a small role, so that was amusing. No one rolled up the sleeves of their suit jacket either. That bummed me out.

Heroes on a half-shell

It is a little odd, seeing people resurrect the toys and TV shows of my youth. I dunno about the Transformers movie, but the trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was cute. Now I’m waiting for a Jem and the Holograms movie…

Blogging will be light for the next few days, because I’m going out of town to attend a wedding.

Superman Returns

I liked this very much. It did feel like a Richard Donner movie with better special effects. I thought Brandon Routh was appropriately Christopher Reevey.

X-Men: The Last Stand

This movie bummed me out. I know that there’s a difference between movie X-Men and comic book X-men in terms of characterization and continuity, but WAY too much stuff happened that seemed totally out of character. Also, it was really anti-woman to an astonishing degree. I mean, if Halle Berry’s Storm is the strongest female character in the movie, that is just sad. On the other hand my main expectation for an X-Men movie is to see Hugh Jackman shirtless, and at least that expectation was fulfilled. I liked the little scene after the credits.

Poseidon

I’m not really recommending this movie, unless you are sick of packing, all your dvds are in boxes, you’ve already seen MI:3 and don’t want to see the spelling bee movie, you’re stuck in a torrential rainstorm, and you are not averse to watching movies of the Kurt Russell escaping from things genre. But it was a bit of a break from my current main activity of sorting through the debris of my life and deciding if I want to pack it or throw it away. There was much water, explosions, and very, very cheesy acting.

The Promise

The Promise was beautifully filmed and operatically overwrought. I can’t say much for the plot, but you know that you’re seeing a pretty good action movie when the villian fights with razor-tipped fans as his main weapon. It is a nice movie to see if you enjoy a lot of billowing silk and wirework in your martial arts movies.