Movie Reviews – January 2009 – R.I.P.

I have found that if I don’t write a review almost immediately after seeing a movie, it gets increasingly harder to remember what happened and to comment on it as the days slip by. So, I plan on not writing the reviews any more. I will still publish a list of what I saw and may occasionally write a review or two if there is something noteworthy to say.

Here is what we saw:

Here are my reviews:

Quantum of Solace

Bond is investigating high-level manipulations of land resources, ones that will make certain people very rich. The responsible organization, Quantum, is all tied in with the death of Bond’s girlfriend from Casino Royale. There are several other beauties to sport with in this movie however and Bond does his best to keep his reputation intact. He travels all over the world in an effort to discover just what is going on and in the process is recalled by his boss, M. he ignores her of course and finishes up the job he set out to do. None of these recent Bond movies have anything to do with the original books anymore, so the producers are able to take them in any direction they want to. Some people don’t like this new, grittier Bond. I do. One only has to recall the dreadful Roger Moore movies to see what I mean.

Video – 3 stars

Get Smart

This was a remake of the 60s TV show. Maxwell Smart is an intelligence analyst with CONTROL who is constantly trying to qualify as a field agent. He gets his chance when a KAOS raid kills practically everyone in Control’s secret headquarters. Teamed with Agent 99 he sets out to foil a plot to threaten the world’s major cities with nuclear annihilation, and as a test project, Los Angeles. The bomb is set to go off with the last notes of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in the presidential command performance. Although this movie is a comedy it has some violence that the original TV series would not have had.

Netflix – 3 stars

Star Wars series

We watched these three videos for their nostalgia value. I’m sure you’re pretty familiar with them. I won’t describe the plots other than to say they document the development of the brilliant slave boy Anakin Skywalker till his appearance as Darth Vader. There were lots of great special effects in these movies and despite Jar Jar Binks they are fun to watch. While doing an initial screening, my grandson Wyatt, who is not allowed to watch Star Wars, happened into the room and was delighted to see “RD2” as he calls him. I hope he will be old enough to see them soon.

Video – 3 stars

Taken

Liam Neeson plays a retired CIA type. His wife has left him several years before because he was never around for her or their daughter. Now in retirement he has time and he is making a real effort to be around the girl. When she and her mother visit him unexpectedly, he realizes they want something. Since the girl is underage they need his signature for her to be able to go to Europe. He is against the plan because from experience, he knows the kinds of things that can happen to teenage girls who travel alone. His worst nightmares come true when she is abducted by white slavers. Just before she is taken he tells her to shout out any details she can to help them identify the kidnappers. She is able to give them enough information to put him on the trail. Before the kidnapper hangs up the phone our hero tells them that he’s a skilled agent and if they don’t let the girl go immediately he will come after them. They scoff at him and say, “good luck”. Boy will they come to regret that. He does possess the peculiar skill set he told them about, and there is hell to pay. This is a pretty exciting movie, despite the fact that the girl is a drip and deserves what she gets.

Video – 3 stars

Tropic Thunder

A Vietnam War movie is being made in modern day Vietnam. It has 5 big stars who are giving the director fits. In an effort to regain control he takes them deep in the jungle and isolates them so they will have to go through the same trials as a real life squad. Their job in the movie storyline is to rescue one of their buddies being held in a POW camp. The director has put up hidden cameras in the jungle which will capture the men on their quest. He also has a hand held camera that he will film them with as they go along. Right off, the director steps on 40 year old land mine and gets blown to smithereens. The actors think it is just part of the deal and move off to accomplish their mission. At the same time a real life heroin processing facility is in the approximate location of the POW camp, so the team comes up against real armed resistance. The bad guys think the team is DEA. In the mean time, the movie’s technical advisor and special effects man really do get captured and are being held at the camp. The leader of the squad also gets captured along the way and has to be rescued too. There is a big pyrotechnic finish of course. The squabbling among the team members is the basis for this comedy and there are some pretty funny parts. All in all though it was pretty average. I’d give it a low 3.

Netflix – 3 stars

Harry Palmer Trilogy

The Ipcress File

Harry Palmer is a low level spy whose boss has him transferred to another department to help investigate the compromising of several key Western scientists. Something has happened to them to prevent them from conducting their research. Palmer falls into the clutches of the people who are responsible for this and is subjected to the same conditioning that the scientists have been. It seems to be some sort of brainwashing technique. Palmer manages to maintain his sanity by gouging a nail into the palm of his hand while the conditioning is going on. He escapes and discovers just who the real villain is.
Video – 3 stars

Funeral in Berlin

A Russian, General Stok, who is in charge of security at the Berlin wall wants to defect. Palmer is assigned to handle the negotiations, but more is going on than meets the eye. He suspects that the defection is a ruse. It is. What the Russians really want is to capture a man called Kreutzmann who is a master of arranging escapes from the East. Kreutzmann in turn has demanded a passport and other ID that will establish him as Louis Paul Broum. The love interest in the movie turns out to be an Israeli agent who wants to keep Kreutzmann from getting those documents since they will allow him access to a Swiss bank account with assets that were stolen from Jews in World War II.
Video – 3 stars

Billion Dollar Brain

Ed Begley plays a deranged, patriotic millionaire who is obsessed with overthrowing the Communists in the Soviet Union. He is going to have a trial run in Latvia. Palmer who is now a PI instead of a spy accepts a job to deliver a package to an old friend in Helsinki. It turns out the package contains a flask of eggs that are harboring deadly viruses to be used as part of the millionaire’s plot. With his friend Harry goes to the millionaire’s corporate headquarters in Texas and discovers the millionaire has a billion-dollar supercomputer. With it he can keep all his plans running perfectly. As the insurrection approaches, General Stok once again appears. Always friendly with Harry he appears in a more favorable light this time.
Video – 3 stars

These three movies were made in the mid-60s in answer to the James Bond craze. They were based on books written by Len Deighton who was trying to portray a more realistic spy than Ian Fleming’s James Bond. There was a fourth book in the series that never got made into a movie, Horse Under Water. And a two other movies, Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in Saint Petersburg, that was never books. To my mind the unfilmed book might’ve been the best of the four books. Even though these movies were supposed to be more realistic than the Bond movies you can see that the producers were not going to give up too much of a good thing. Palmer hand cranks and expresses his coffee, listens to classical music, and is a gourmet cook. Even the opening and closing credits of the movies bear striking resemblance to the Bond ones. These were all pretty good spy yarns and it was a treat to see the technology of the times.

Traitor

Samir was in the special forces but is now traveling around Europe and the Middle East. He has affiliated himself with a terrorist group and teaches them some of what he knows. The FBI is hot on his tail. There is a big plan for a US operation. He is in contact with a CIA man but you don’t know which side he is on. The CIA guy is killed just before the big plan is to go into effect. There was nothing special about this movie, but it was suspenseful and moved right along. A solid 3

Netflix – 3 stars

The Contract

A teacher’s son is expelled from school and in an effort to sort out the problems the dad and boy go on a camping trip near their Pacific Northwest home. In the mean time a team of assassins is in the area on a job. The leader accidentally gets caught for some trivial, unrelated thing. While in the hospital he palms a nurse’s cell phone and contacts his men who come to his rescue. But another chance occurance gets him in an accident. The car goes in the river and he kills the marshall but washes up on the shore of a river, exhausted. The teacher and son see them coming down the river and go to their rescue. The teacher sizes up the situation and decides to bring him in. The rest of the team is on his trail, intent on killing him. Most of the movie is about what happens on that treck. Lots of gunplay and kind of a surprise ending. This is the first movie we have watched with Netflix’s streaming download. It looked slightly softer in focus that a normal DVD but I think you would have to have a hi-res TV to really tell. Downloading it was effortless and I think we will watch many more movies this way in the future.

Netflix – 3 stars

An American Carol

Based loosely on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, liberal documentary maker Micheal Malone is visited by 3 ghosts of patriotism; George Patton, George Washington, and the Angel of Death, a country and western superstar. He is shown the “error of his ways” and is belittled for being critical of the USA or its government. In a side plot, the Taliban are going to blow up an auditorium full of veterans who are there to watch, you guessed it, the Angel of Death. None of that pinko rock and roll here, just pure, patriotic country and western. It’s hard to figure out who this movie was aimed at. Any right winger who saw the Micheal Moore lookalike would be sure to stay away. The movie was deeply offensive to anyone liberal, just more of the Right’s pompous contention that anything but their brand of patriotism is not patriotism at all. Besides that, the dialog was mean-spirited, the acting was wooden and most of the jokes fell flat. Sort of like Mallard the Duck. Karen asked me to turn this one off too and turned to her novel for relief.

Netflix – 1 star

Ghost Town

In this comedy a man is killed when he is hit by a bus and while standing watching the scene realizes he is dead and that he is a ghost. Another man has a near death experience on the operating table but comes back to life. They tell them he was dead for seven minutes. As a result he discovers that he can see all the ghosts that are still hanging around. When the ghosts realize he can see them they are all after him to complete their unfinished business. The first guy that was killed tells him he can keep the others from bothering him if he just helps him out with his case. The first guy’s wife has found a new man and the ghost thinks the guy is a jerk. He wants our friend to break up the romance. Our friend is a jerk however too. He tries to help the wife and in the process falls in love with her himself. As she starts becoming fond of our guy she dumps the other suitor who in fact was not a bad guy at all. Our guy realizes he is a jerk and starts helping the ghosts reach closure. One by one he solves their problems and they pass on. A fairly average movie.

Netflix – 3 stars

Next

A smalltime magician in Las Vegas can see a couple minutes into the future. This helps him in his act and also allows them to earn a meager living playing blackjack. A terrorist group has stolen an atomic bomb and federal officials think that they’re bringing it into the country in Los Angeles. The head agent has seen the magician operate and realizes he is slightly psychic. She tries to recruit his help in finding the bomb. He’s not really interested in participating. Also, he has been having visions of a woman and with her he can see much farther into the future than just the next couple of minutes. He meets the woman and realizes she is something special but the bad guys are after them and they have to escape. When the bad guys capture the girl they use her as bait to get to the magician. At the end of the movie he stretches his abilities to their limit to resolve the situation. The movie was fairly tense and exciting, no great shakes but fun to watch. This was our second streamed video.

Netflix – 3 stars

Transsiberian

A religious couple on a mission in Beijing decide to take the Transsiberian Railroad home instead of flying. On the journey they meet another young couple about the same age as them who they have to share their cabin with. There is something funny about these people but they just can’t put their finger quite on it. When the husband misses the train at a stop the wife is forced to cool her heels in the next town till the husband can catch up. The other couple also leave the train to keep her company. They have to wait overnight and most of the next day for the husband’s train to arrive. To kill the time the wife and the man from a couple go to a remote ruined church to take pictures. While there, they get the hots for each other but before anything happens the wife comes to her senses. The guy is worked up however and won’t let it drop. He keeps making advances and she eventually unintentionally kills the guy. His girlfriend misses the train as it pulls out. Our couple gets a new roommate who turns out to be a narcotics cop. Apparently this run is the main route for smuggling drugs in Russia. And guess what the second couple was up to. This causes no end of problems for our heroes. Eventually they have to run for their lives. Lots of action here but in the end it seemed a little depressing. Worth the three however.

Netflix – 3 stars