Movies seen in December 2010

Well now that I'm keeping track of all the movies I've seen and when I can post a little end of month summary of them. This one is being written a bit early, as I'll be vacationing in December and won't have time to do updates. Perhaps I'll go back and edit the post after it's been updated. Just for you.

• Easy A [7] - Decent movie, but probably forgettable.
• The Prestige [9] - This one keeps growing on me everytime I watch it.
• Dogma [7.5] - Not as heavy as I remembered.
• The Illusionist [7.5] - Not as good as The Prestige, but very solid.
• Judge Dredd [5.5] - Actually quite a bit of fun to watch this after fifteen years; probably should give it a higher score...
• Restrepo [8.5] - Terrifying and amazing.
• Aliens [10] - Definitely one of the favourites of all time.
• Alien [10] - Absolutely fantastic film; creepy, suspenseful and engrossing.

My score in braces, out of ten.

On Blu-Ray, Nobody Can Hear you Scream

My, I have made quite a few posts regarding the Alien series of movies. More accurately, the first two movies. Shameful, but I haven't even seen the third or fourth. I just watched the first two again, on Blu-Ray, and have to say they look absolutely amazing. More movies should be given this treatment. I've been holding off on watching these two films until I got my new television set, and now that it's in place, I could finally take a look.

The TV is really wonderful; I'll be sure to have a post dedicated to it soon enough, after I get more of a chance to play with it. These two movies are great, perfect 10s of course, and they really shine here. I didn't think it was possible to get so much detail out of such old movies, but it goes to show you what "they" can do when given the proper time and dedication. I recall a while back when the original Star Trek series was being released in high definition, how great the picture was. When the proper work is done, the image can be brought up to reference quality and best modern-day movies without a problem.

I guess Cameron had everybody in an uproar when he said they will be "de-noising" the film, which when done with Predator, made everyone look like plastic. The transfer lost it's grain and film-like quality. Well whatever he said, it didn't put a negative on the movie. There is a layer of grain on the movie [Aliens] that just looks splendid, and very smooth.

There's not much else to say about it: the quality is astounding and the films themselves are even better. It's safe to say these are both "top five" movies, if you will, and it's time I gave the others a bit of respect and watch them.

Google Storage

Time for another little tech-centric entry. For the past couple of months I have been uploading all my photos to my Google Docs account, and it has been glorious. For years perhaps I have played with the idea of backups and online storage: I have a ton of photos in the range of forty gigabytes and they must be cared for.

First, a little history. Photos have been and I'm sure, always will be, the most important thing we can backup. But how do you do it securely? I started with making CD backups, of course. This evolved into DVDs and eventually, external hard drives. But it took quite some time for me to get into the offsite backup solution, which involved me copying everything to a 500GB drive and leaving it in my drawer at work. It's pretty rudimentary but it's the very least you could do. If you make disc backups, great, but you have to make multiple copies, and you have to keep them offsite.

Restrepo

There is no one word that can summarize feelings for this film. It's going to be difficult to string together any words that can give this documentary, and more importantly the people it features, the respect that they deserve.

Restrepo is the name of an outpost established in the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan, named after a soldier who was killed there during a small skirmish early in his platoons campaign. The film documents a year and some months the platoon spends there, filmed by an embedded journalist and photographer. And it is insane. I just can't get over what these people go through while serving. The footage that is shot on site is intermixed with interviews from some of the soldiers recently after they have been relieved of duty. There are moments where stories are being told through the interviews, cutting from soldier to soldier, and I'm on the edge of my seat.

One sequence in particular serves as conveniently sad and disturbing climax of the film: the Rock Avalanche days. We get first hand accounts of the story, then surprisingly, a cut to footage from shortly after all Hell breaks loose. We see reactions, emotion, plans, chaos, all unfold before our eyes and you realize - not for the first time - that this happened, this was not fake, this really happened to these people. It's a lot to take in.

There are other scenes that show day to day life, interactions with locals, downtime, mourning and the fighting. The film focuses on a few of the soldiers and lets them speak for themselves; there is no political agenda here. It's an absorbing, thought-provoking perspective on war that is both humbling and scary.

The Apprentice

I'm sitting here watching the second last episode of The Apprentice. This is the first non-celebrity edition in quite a while and for that, I'm thankful. I kind of got out of the show for a while and watched last Bret Michael's dominated season, but it was enough to spark the urge to see this show again. You could say it holds a special place in my heart, although as I type that, I know how ridiculous that may sound. If the Apprentice gets a special place, so does a lot of other shows. To give you an idea, if I could only watch one show between the two, The Amazing Race would take the cake (from a reality show perspective).

The show premiered in 2004, a distant six years ago. Life was quite a bit different then, as I lived with three others in an eclectic apartment with a mix of great and more...interesting times. I could go on for a while on memories from this era, but I have to focus on my fondness for this show during that time. My one roommate and I would sit down to watch this every week, and it was fantastic.

This show was different from the others: people weren't starving, they weren't doing crazy physical challenges and to put it bluntly, the show didn't feel fixed. I'm not saying things like Survivor or The Amazing Race are, but there is a lot of magic that happens in post-production. You truly get the sense that Trump is involved and actually cares about the contestants. He will, after all, be working with them (perhaps indirectly) for the next year. Instead of giving the winner a cheque for a million dollars and being done with them, these winners got a real job. This was a real interview, and what a good way to do it. So, instead of trying to survive, everybody focuses on the tasks at hand.

And the tasks are great. I love the small, basic things like taking ice cream and trying to sell it on the streets. Running basic businesses brings things down to a level that you can relate to. And what makes it so relevant to me is that I was in my later years of business education studying at university. This show permeated so much, that one of our financial management professors told us to watch the show, to be discussed in class the next day. I'm not sure if that was real official homework but it was a great exercise in class, and I had already been watching the show anyhow.

I'm not sure how many seasons I watched while still going to school, but after I moved out of town I didn't really have motivation or somebody to which watch the show; I think the ratings dropped heavily (my bad, sorry) and it become the Celebrity Apprentice. The problem I had with that was the tasks were so grand: in one episode they are raising money to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. They raise as much money in an episode or two as the winner receives on Survivor. The celebrities, while fighting nobly for their charities, really don't need to be there. Contrast that with this season's contestants who have all been "hit hard by the recession" and they fight hard.

Back in the days of the first couple seasons of The Apprentice, I had much grander dreams of what life would be like and seemingly, the drive to do it all. I'm not sure what happened to that version of myself, but while watching this show I get a gleam that he's still kicking about in there.

The Walking Dead

You know this show exploded onto the scene and continues to be AMC's highest rated show, which is a slight disappointment because other shows, like Mad Men and Breaking Bad deserve a big audience too. So who is watching the show? It took some convincing but I think my parents are (although I suspect my mom's interest will decline) and of course, us zombie lovers. If vampires get a whole host of their own shows, why not zombies?

It's because zombies are relatively one note villains: they want your brains and won't stop till their dead (again) or they've quenched their unending hunger. There's not much variation to them; they move slow or they move fast, they explode easily or are tough to kill, they are the result of a virus or other, mysterious circumstances. But a show like this isn't going to give you all the details of their zombie universe right away, except the obvious (slow, medium toughness).

Rick wakes up from a coma in a hospital, 28 Days Later style and stumbles into the fresh zombie apocalypse,  bringing the viewer along with him. I figure this is a good way to introduce us into it, and the first episode really is fantastic. Rick's reaction to the world around him is suitable, and the touching story of the father and son is really well done. The man's wife is roaming around as a zombie: he has an opportunity to kill her (put her out of her misery) or holding onto hope and letting her "live."

It's not long that Rick sets out to find his own wife and son, and falls into trouble. I won't spoil any of the plot for you; the series follows the comic loosely but stands on it's own, with new characters and situations. This is great, as being a reader of the comics, you're not already spoiled as you are kept in the dark.

I will mention a few things: you absolutely hate Rick's wife. Are we meant to hate her so much? In the comics she does some shady things, but I guess that character is a bit more compassionate and dimensional. I feel as though the show has too many characters going on, and they die before we get to know them. Granted, in the comic, people are dying all the time, but we get to spend more time with them. We still feel their deaths. Background characters are given screen time then killed; I didn't even know their names and am not "shocked" every time as I am in the comics. Sometimes you get a revolving door feel going on in the comics but I'm not sure the show can do that. They simply do not have enough time to develop these characters. This is something that Lost realized early on: stick with a core set of characters and flesh them out fully. Try to introduce new ones and it's too much for the audience and the show itself.

So the zombies aren't the focus, of course, the characters are. And I hope they spend more time with a select few of them. Let's see some flashbacks (we got one so far) and really delve into these people. Let's get them into crazy situations but always focus on the humanity behind it all. That is, after all what we love about zombie pieces.

Easy A

You have to know the primary motivator for watching this film is for Emma Stone. Every since you saw her in Zombieland, you were in love. And by you, I could very well mean, me. To each their own. You (ok, I) realized then that she was in Superbad, which wasn't all that great but I still have it on Blu-Ray, so whatever that tells you, ignore it. All of a sudden, she's driving her own movie. Obviously the Hollywood machine has decided she will be a star, or she is very talented. I'm no judge of acting ability unless it's really terrible, so all I can say is that she is not a terrible actress by any stretch. This leads me to believe that Hollywood has fallen in love with her, and for good reason. The fact that she will be Gwen Stacy concretes the idea.

So how does she fare in this movie? I was a bit skeptical but also a bit entranced by the trailer for this film: a girl, who is not a harlot, pretends to be by effectively allowing rumours to go around school indicating she is sleeping with every guy out there.She emblazes the letter 'A' on her clothes and dresses provocatively to really drive the nail home and let everyone know that she gets around. Things get a little hairy when the lies spin ever so slightly out of control, but for the most part the guys who pay for her "services" effectively have better lives as they become more popular, and in many of the cases, do much better because their self-confidence is improved, even though they did not actually commit the act.

So one of the major things I took away from this film was the telephone game: rumours spread like wildfire when they are juicy, and they spread like wildfire full of napalm when they spread in a high school. Modern society makes it so: everybody has a cell phone and armed with a text plan. As soon as something happens a single person can text a dozen, and then another dozen, compounded...you know how it works. Within an hour everybody should know the rumour or some variation on it. This is not something that I can relate to but definitely I can understand: when I was in high school there was nary a cell phone around (I think they were still relegated to being car phones) and even in university, cell phone usage was not high. In the past five years, it has exploded. There are stats out there that say the average person texts 60 times a day. Seriously? My brain melts out of my ears thinking about it.

There are a few other points to the movie that probably aren't worth discussing: it's funny and worth the watch. The movie wraps up with a happy ending but not for everybody: there are consequences. Teenagers are a funny bunch.

No, I'm Spartacus!

Alright, not the movie, but the Showtime series, Blood and Sand. This show really has it all: sex, violence, drama, gore. And honestly, despite some overly stylized and "fake" looking green screen, this show is quite compelling. I just finished watching the seventh episode and feel it safe to say I'm a fan of the show. The sale wasn't quite there for the first few, but the show is proving itself worth the watch. If not for anything else, then for the sex and violence.

In fact, what spurred me into writing about this was watching a gladiatorial bout and seeing a blade go through a knee. In typical movie fashion, the scene would flash quickly to the next cut, but no, not here. We see it, we see the turmoil, the brutality of it all. This show knows no shame: women in the stands are cheering, ripping off their shirts. Men are drinking from giant goblets. And they are digitally cloned to fill a stadium showcasing a truly wicked crowd: there is no way I would have survived a day in that universe.

With the star being treated for cancer, the second season is being delayed and I fear it will never see the light of day. Apparently there's a bit of a prequel series coming out that should fill the void. In the meantime I would advise everyone, including myself, to watch the original movie. I remember it being good, but my experience with it is foggy.

Skyline

My memory fails me: I could have sworn I wrote a one-liner on the trailer for Skyline. Perhaps I did, and the post never saw the light of day. Well, the fact is, I thought the trailer looked interesting, and I LOL'd when I saw the tongue latch onto a helicopter. The movie was dismissed. But, in my circle, there was excitement for this movie, and for good reason. Science fiction, starring a grotesque alien invasion with slick looking special effects and the hook: you look, you die.

I was misled and surprised when this movie came out, seemingly out of nowhere without fanfare. It was being critically panned: I was informed of an 11% rating. The tomato has been wrong in the past though.

In contrast to a movie such as Independence Day, this film takes place entirely from the perspective of a group of nobodies, holed up in the penthouse of a tall building that has prime viewing of the end of the world. ID4 takes you on a veritable trip of ranks, from the goofy crop-duster to the president himself, ending with such magnificence and massiveness that you can't help but be entertained as you cheer for human race. If anything, Skyline entertains but depresses at the same time, which is not all that surprising anymore. Gone are the days of gift wrapped happy endings: aliens are invading, they want our brains and there is no stopping them.

The movie doesn't convey emotions as well as it could, I suppose, but it gets the point across. I'm more concerned about these aliens; I'm left wanting more. Where do they come from? Are they purely organic? Are they cybernetically enhanced? Answering any of these would be bad as it would take you away from the near-first person perspective and shift you into the seat of the Watcher himself. Do we get a sequel? The ending seems to have left a few people thinking so. I kind of saw it as an extra infusion of cash to add some more to the movie.

Perhaps it is true: you either love this movie or hate it, except for a one person...you know who you are! This movie gets a respectable 7.5/10

Super Mario Galaxy

When did Super Mario Galaxy come out? The following Christmas I received the game as a gift, and so begins one of my greatest shames: I didn't put the disc into my system until most recently, i.e. two weeks ago. Now realize, that's not normal behaviour for anyone except those who lost faith in the Wii, and generally, Nintendo games.

I tried Twilight Princess on the Wii without much luck. I hated swinging the damn remote every time I wanted to attack. So, after a few hours I put the game away, hence ending my love for the series. It was hearbreaking. Mario was a series that I had already skipped once: Mario 64. I've played it dozens of times but never to completion; definitely not to the same vigor I played any Mario game preceding it. So, with a new Wii console under my credit card, it was time: I casually walked over to my library of games and could hear a squeek of a voice coming from the bottom of the shelf. I looked down. A cloud of dust erupted as I passed my hand over the line of white cases; I could hear the voice again. It was in my head.

Super Mario Galaxy was, all of a sudden, in the system. I was playing it. It felt...natural. It was....fun. What happened in the previous three years that prevented me from playing this? I've certainly had fun playing other games but a high caliber Mario game is something else to behold. Don't forget, this guy changed the way we played video games numerous times through his career.

I was so happy that motion controls did not take centre stage in this outing: you can point the remote at the screen the whole time to pick up gems, or not. Gems certainly help you throughout the game but you won't have a tired arm getting them. There are some "bonus" galaxies that utilize the remote in nifty ways, such as controlling Mario on a giant golf ball, or twist it about as you control Mario on a giant stingray. They are fun, as they break up the rest of the game. There are little throwbacks to coin rooms inside pipes; classic music and enemies roam about as you take on different suits such as the bee and boo.

The 3D aspect is taken to another level. I feel as though they've added another dimension to this game: you can be on one side of an object, run around and you are on the other side. You can be playing on a giant sphere with no boundaries. You get twisted around and play with gravity, and all the while the control just works. Some "planets" are big and just act like levels in previous Mario games. In other levels, you fly from planet to planet and when you step back to think about the amount of design consideration that has gone into them, you are amazed. Mario games have always had very excellent level design and that's what makes them really shine as platformers. This just amps it up a bit.

I realize that I was scared to play this game: it looked different and I wasn't sure how to play it. Perhaps that's what getting older is all about. If I was in my late twenties when Mario 64 came out, would I be too scared to play? Galaxy has reinvigorated my interest in the Wii; I play more casually, without worrying about points, achievements or how long I've been playing. I simply enjoy it.