Movie Reviews – August 2007

Sorry for the delay with this month’s reviews. I had a hard drive crash and I had to reestablish the blog on another computer. Also, I won’t be able to redo the banner for a while because all the photos were clobbered.

This was another light month moviewise. The third season of the TV series “Deadwood” is finally available and this accounted for six of our Netflix selections this month. I don’t consider “Deadwood” a movie, so it won’t be reviewed here, but as an aside, it’s really worth watching. Here is what we saw:

Here are my reviews:

Nancy Drew

This was a nice little movie. Nancy, as you would expect, is fresh and perky. She solves murders but she has such an optimistic outlook. Her father has to go to Los Angeles for a while so she moves there with him. He makes her promise that she will try to be a normal kid when she’s there, no sleuthing. She reluctantly agrees but when he leaves making the arrangements to her, she rents the vacant mansion of a movie star that was murdered 20 years ago. Of course the murder was never solved so Nancy finds herself in the middle of a mystery without even trying. Hollywood corruption, missing heirs and the unsolved murder itself are all woven into a dandy enough little mystery that it stands on its own without benefit of our famous young detective.

Theater – 3 stars

Bourne Ultimatum

In an effort to discover who he is, Bourne meets with a journalist who has been writing about a secret CIA section called Blackbriar and mentions Bourne in an article. Bourne wants to know his source but the reporter refuses to tell of course. When the reporter is killed, Bourne steals his notes and sets off on a multicity quest that takes him from London, to Madrid, Tangier and finally to New York. All the time the people he seeks or is with are dropping like flies. He ends up back where he received his basic training and the scene is set for the final showdown. We tried to see this movie last week but it was sold out. And when we went this week is was almost sold out. We had to sit in about the 4th row which was too close even for me. There was a lot of intentional camera movement, especially in the running scenes and at times it was fairly confusing. The story was good though and the movie had a lot of exciting action.
Theater – 3 stars

Deep Sea 3D/Dinosaurs Alive

This summer I have been babysitting Rachel on Thursdays and one of our favorite things to do is see a movie. Nancy Drew was one of them. When Rachel said, “When are we going to the IMAX to see a 3D movie again?” I didn’t have to be asked twice. We try to work it so we can see two of them back to back if we can. I was looking forward to seeing Dinosaurs Alive but I thought I had already seen Deep Sea 3D. Rachel told me that we hadn’t seen it though so I got tickets for both of them.

Deep Sea 3D was breathtaking. The photography was phenominal and the 3D was especially good. It also featured many animals that you don’t normally see and they appeared to be just an arm’s length away. In fact, like other underwater 3D shows I have seen, the plankton and small fish swim by right in front of you and you feel you have to scratch your nose. There is a particularly nice sequence with a Right Whale that gives you a real feel for just how big they are. I gave this one a 4.

Dinosaurs Alive was a little bit of a disappointment. Still good, but not as good as it could have been. Most of the movie was a documentary of field and museum work and some historical footage of the Andrews Expedition to Mongolia from years ago. It was done flat in a window superimposed over a 3D background of the same countryside. The fun came when they did “fly-overs” of museum displays of dinosaurs bones. And better yet when they animated the critters in 3D and set them in real 3D backgrounds. The problem was that the 3D camera they used had too much lens separation which causes things to be in super (hyper) 3D. When looking at distant vistas this is fine, but when looking at normal distance shots of people, something looks just plain wierd. You can’t quite put your finger on it. When they did close-ups, it was unwatchable. There was some other small difficulty with superimposing the animation over the real backgrounds. Sometimes the animals looked like they were floating slightly above the ground and other times they looked like they were standing in holes. But the dinosaur animation, which is what we came to see, was the best I’ve ever seen and so sucked the movie out.
IMAX – 4/3 stars

The Last Legion

Right after a newly crowned boy emperor is named Caesar, the Goths invade Rome and he is imprisoned on the island of Capri. His honor guard has been taken prisoner also and are awaiting execution when the captain, who has been mistaken for dead, frees them and they go to Capri to rescue the boy. They are betrayed by an old friend and their Byzantine allies and have only one hope… to locate the lost Ninth Legion in Britannia and return to throw out the Goths. In Britain they find the legion has been disbanded and that they have been followed by a death squad of Goths who ally themselves with the evil British King Vertigorn. They make a last stand at Hadrian’s wall and win the day. There is a surprise ending but it was hidden in plain sight all through the movie. I figured it out about half way through. The movie is interesting for the costumes and setting. The props in England are heavy handed, fake Stonehenge-like monument and the like. The British are depicted as barbarians even though they have been Romanized for nearly 500 years. Mediocre daring-do but still qualifies as a very low 3 for me. There was nothing too objectionable.
Theater – 3 stars

Nightwatch

A law student takes a job as a night watchman at the City Morgue. Besides being creeped out in the surroundings, mysterious things start happening. A serial killer who takes his victim’s eyes after he kills them is on the rampage and our hero is getting himself tied up in it somehow. He interacts with a disturbed friend, a surly homocide cop, his girlfriend, a wierdo doctor who runs the morgue and a prostitute who ends up being one of the victims. The first part of the movie is extremely tedious and just plain unpleasant. Things pick up about half way through but the movies’s initial failures simply trade up to bigger nastiness. The movie does trick you about the murderer, but the ending is grisly and did nothing for me.
Netflix – 2 stars