Butchie Boy

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

Sorry about how late these reviews are. I usually write my review the day after I see a movie, but with the Christmas holiday and all, I somehow didn’t get the job done.

Here is what we saw:

Here are my reviews:

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Oh how I wish I could. Sarah Marshall, a TV cop, breaks up with her real life boyfriend, the sound man on the show. He still loves her but she has made it clear she is done with him. He mopes around for way too long then in order to forget, he heads for Hawaii, a place he and Sarah had always talked about going to together. Only problem, when he gets there Sarah is there too along with her new boyfriend, a perfectly loathsome British rock musician. This makes for all sorts of excruciating social situations. Our hero takes a shine to the desk clerk at his hotel and that love interest starts to develop. In the end he realizes the desk clerk is better for him than Sarah. The first half of this movie was so tedious Karen actually asked me to turn it off three times. We persevered and by the time we got to the second half it actually started to get a little funny, about three stars worth. But the first half was so dismal it would only rate one star. The final rating of two stars is the average of the first and second half.

Netflix – 2 stars

The Gift

Kate Blanchet plays a woman with psychic abilities in a small Southern town. She befriends one of her clients, a woman whose husband beats her up all the time. He threatens the psychic and tells her to keep away from his wife. When the nude body of a local debutante is discovered in a pond on the man’s property he is targeted for the crime. The psychic has led the police to the pond based on a vision she has had. He now has it in for her for any number of reasons. The cops are friends of this good old boy so the psychic is in constant peril. She realizes the man is not the killer based on other psychic clues she has had, so the real killer has yet to be discovered. There are lots of twists and turns in this movie and it’s pretty interesting.

Netflix – 3 stars

After the Fox

Peter Sellers plays one of Europe’s greatest criminals. When a shipment of gold is stolen in Egypt and has to be sneaked into Europe he is the only one the police and criminals can think of to do the job. Only problem, he is in prison. However he is a master of escape and when he gets out, he takes the contract. Posing as a film producer in a small town, he claims he is making a movie about the smuggling of gold. It’s the real gold of course. He plays on an aging actor’s and the town’s vanities and has them all working to smuggle the gold in. This is what Lance would describe as a wacky 60s romp. I checked this movie out because it is what Karen and I saw on our first date, way back when. Quite nostalgic.

Netflix – 3 stars

The Tale of Despereaux

Despereaux is a mouse who just won’t behave properly. He won’t cower. He is not afraid. He even draws pictures of cats on his school notebook. After so many infractions of being un-mouselike, he is banished to the sewer where he will almost certainly be eaten by rats. At the same time, the king of the humans has made many unhappy social changes because of the death of his wife. Despereaux befriends the Princess and through his adventures restores the kingdom to happiness. This is one of the best animated movies I have ever seen. Computer animation just gets better and better every day. I took Wyatt to see this when the others were busy.

Theater – 4 stars

The Day the Earth Stood Still

This was a remake of the 1950s sci-fi classic. Instead of threatening the universe with nuclear war, the universe now seems to be threatened by the environmental ruination of our planet. Klaatu comes to Earth to give us one last chance but when he discovers things are hopeless, he sets about ridding the planet of mankind, the polluter of all things. He is persuaded to give us one last chance at the end. I thought the movie was pretty good, but Zach thought it was dreadful.

Netflix – 3 stars

Here is what we saw:

Here are my reviews:

No Reservations

An uptight head chef at a gourmet restaurant has her world turned upside down when her sister dies in an auto accident and her niece comes to live with her. While she is attending to the business of the funeral and getting her niece settled in, her boss hires a new sous chef who has an entirely different approach to kitchen management. Sparks fly. There are problems with the little girl, having mostly to do with the chef’s schedule and the fact that there is only fancy food to eat and nothing plain and regular. The new sous chef befriends the little girl and they become real pals. This draws the two chefs closer together and guess what, they fall in love. Happy ending all around. The plot was contrived but you didn’t care.
Netflix – 3 stars

Burn After Reading

A CIA analyst who is married to a monster of a pediatrician gets fired from his job and decides to write his memoirs. She is having an affair with a guy in the State Department. This guy plays around a lot and is also having an affair with a training instructor in his exercise gym. The gym instructor is getting older and is obsessed with having some plastic surgery which she thinks will change her life. Her boss is fond of her and likes her just the way she is. She is oblivious to that though. She also has another friend at the gym, another instructor and these two are not romantically involved. The monster pediatrician decides to get a divorce and is advised to collect all the family financial data and while getting it from the home computer also gets her husband’s memoirs. The lawyer’s secretary who happens to have the disk in her purse accidentally drops it at her gym. You guessed it, the same one where our friends work. They find the memoirs and think it is sensitive material and go about “blackmailing” the analyst. That’s where the action starts. Once going, it’s uncontrollable and mayhem follows. This movie almost made a 4. It’s very much like Fargo, Pulp Fiction, or Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Very crazy. We really liked this movie a lot.
Theater – 3 stars

To Be and To Have

This French documentary was about a teacher in a one-room school and his dozen or so students. He is retiring at the end of the year and the school will be closing. Various kids have their problems and he is trying to help them while he is helping them to learn. Kind of sweet and sad. Karen liked this movie more than I did. I had to get up and have a break from it for about the middle third. Very slow.
Netflix – 2 stars

Max

Max is an artist from Munich and lost his right arm in the trenches at Ypres during WWI. He returns and opens an avant garde art gallery. He is Jewish and pretty well off. A young Adolf Hitler comes around peddling his artwork and Max gives him some encouragement. But he wants Hitler to loosen up a little and paint with his feelings. Hitler has to remain in the army because he has no other income. They realize he is a pretty good speaker and they recruit him to give speeches, mostly against the consequences of the peace treaty. You can see trouble coming a mile off. The movie is a little slow but not too bad. This is a Hitler in development and interesting to see.
Netflix – 3 stars

Bolt

Bolt is a movie dog who has super powers in his films, not unlike Underdog. The production crew goes to great lengths to make Bolt believe everything is real. Through a series of screw ups, Bolt gets boxed up and shipped to New York from Hollywood and sets out to get back home to help Penny, his costar, whom he thinks has been kidnapped by the villain of the movies. On his way back he picks up a couple of sidekicks; Mittens, a cat and Rhino, a hamster. In his absence he has been replaced by another dog but Penny still loves our hero, the original Bolt. Along the way Bolt discovers he really doesn’t have super powers but there are some great gags when he tries one of his tricks and they really work. He saves the day at the end of course. The makers of 3D movies, especially animated ones just keep getting better and better. Not only is the 3D spot on, but the story is good. We try to take Rachel to every 3D movie we can. This was the latest.
Theater – 4 stars

Here is what we saw:

Here are my reviews:

Shine a Light

This is the third Martin Scorcese “rockumentory” we’ve seen. It’s about a Rolling Stones concert in New York City. Except for some flashbacks to their early career the whole movie centers around this one concert. It is filmed beautifully and has quite a few of their songs, played in their entirety. For me, the most fun was the old stuff. I didn’t recognise many of the newer tunes. An old clip features a smoothe-faced, baby Mick Jagger saying he thought they had at least another year left in their careers. Another later clip shows him saying he thought he would still be doing this when he is 60. How true. He’s already 65. The best thing about the movie is Jagger prancing around the stage which he does from beginning to end. How he does it, I don’t know. Even back in about 1978 Dick Cavett comments he must lose about 10 pounds every show and here it is 30 years later. We also saw Scorcese films about the Band and Bob Dylan. Not that this one is bad, but I thought the others were better. They were more biographies with musical footage as a part of it. This was basically just one concert with some bio stuff thrown in to make it more interesting. This was released in IMAX format and we almost drove down to Davenport to see it on the giant screen.
Netflix – 3 stars

There Will Be Blood

Daniel Plainview is a silver miner who has a small strike. While stepping up his operation, he inadvertently strikes oil and that changes the course of his life. After achieving a certain amount of success he is visited by a boy who tells him there is oil on the family farm and gives him the location of the farm for $500. When Plainview arrives he bargains for the lease rights. The rest of the movie is about that well and the problems of making even bigger profits by building a pipeline. A lot of time is spent on the interactions of the main characters. The focus of the film, Plainview, is thoroughly unlikable. I think Daniel Day Lewis got the Oscar for this part because they didn’t give it to him for the better performance portraying Bill Cutting in Gangs of New York. The movie is muddled, boring, and progresses at a snail’s pace. Even cutting an hour out of it would make it still too long.
Netflix – 2 stars

Gangs of New York

When we ordered There Will Be Blood it made me remember this movie so I put it in my queue too. The movie tells the story of Amsterdam, the son of “Priest” Vallon, head of the Dead Rabbits gang. The opening is set in the slums of New York City in 1846. The priest is killed by Bill “The Butcher” Cutting, played by Daniel Day Lewis. The son is sent away to reform school. He’s released in 1862, just as the US is about to conduct its first military draft. Bill’s gang has pretty taken over and has allied itself with Boss Tweed. Amsterdam, now a man and unrecognised, joins Bill’s gang and quickly rises to the top. He hopes to kill Bill one day to avenge his father. After he is betrayed and wounded by Bill, he re-establishes the outlawed Dead Rabbits and the stage is set for a show down. During the gang battle, riots have broken out and the navy starts shelling New York City to break them up. Who ever heard of that in history class? Everything about this movie was so superior to There Will Be Blood you can hardly compare them.
Netflix – 4 stars

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

We like to take our granddaughter Rachel to the movies and this was our current choice. Chloe, a pampered white Chihuahua owned by a Beverly Hills celebrity gets left in the charge of the celebrity’s niece. The niece isn’t happy about it and when she gets invited to go to Puerto Villarta with her friends, she jumps at the chance. She packs Chloe into a carrying bag and heads off for sunny Mexico. In the evening when the girls are out partying, Chloe follows and promptly gets dog napped. She is sent off to Mexico City where she is destined to be torn apart in a dogfight. Her would-be killer is El Diablo. A well-meaning German Shepherd comes to her rescue and sets all the captive dogs free. He sticks by Chloe and agrees to try and help her get home. The niece, the sexy landscape architect, and his dog, a Chihuahua named Poppy are in hot pursuit. So is the villain helped by El Diablo. Most of the rest of the movie is the adventure of how Chloe gets home. Chloe runs into a con man who steals her diamond collar. In some of the best computer animation that I have ever seen, the con man, a rat voiced by Cheech Marin and his sidekick a colorful iguana, dog their steps too. In the end everything resolves itself happily, surprise, surprise. The first part of the movie was pretty slow especially for a kids feature. But the pace picked up towards the end.
Theater – 3 stars

Son of Rambow

A religious mother forbids her school age son to watch TV or movies so he gets to cool his heels in the school hallway while the class watches an instructional video. While there, he is confronted and intimidated by the school bully and forced into helping the bully with a video he is making. The religious boy agrees to star as the son of Rambo and as the project progresses, more and more people are drawn into it, among which is a pompous French exchange student who fancies himself as God’s gift to schoolgirls. The whole thing finally gets out of hand and ends up with our hero and the bully being injured. This was not that good a movie. It only had slightly better production values than the actors’ own production. I can usually tell if a movie is bad by checking the number of times I look at the counter to see how soon it is going to be over.
Netflix – 2 stars

Body of Lies

This is a middle eastern spy yarn. An undercover CIA operative is involved in various operations in Iraq, but gets reassigned to Amman, Jordan. They become aware of a safe house. He replaces the current bureau chief who seems obstructive to progress and becomes friends with his Jordanian counterpart. Someone jeopardizes the surveilance and during a chase of one of the suspects, our hero gets bitten by some dogs. He goes to the clinic where he meets and is attracted to an Iranian nurse who he keeps trying to befriend for the rest of the movie. All through the movie they are in pursuit of a terrorist mastermind whose signature is not taking credit for his bombings. There are various plans to get him. They are all more or less compromised by the agent’s Washington boss. In the end the nurse gets abducted and the agent offers himself in a trade. There is a lot of excitement at the end. There is a lot of graphic violence and cruelty in this show, be advised. In these spy movies you never know who will die and who will survive. I’ll leave you to see it to find out. This is a very high 3, possibly sliding up to a 4.
Netflix – 3 stars

Archangel

I put this on my list several months ago. By the time it arrived this week, I noticed it was broadcast on TV the next night. A scholar of Stalin-era Russia is in Moscow giving a lecture when an old man tells him he knows nothing about Stalin. He says he was one of Stalin’s military guards and when Stalin was on his death bed, Security chief Beria said they had to find a key. The soldier retrieves it from Stalin’s pocket. It opens a safe that holds a secret notebook. Beria and the soldier go to Beria’s estate and bury the notebook in an old tool box. In weeks Beria is dead and the notebook is forgotten. When the scholar leaves the room for a minute, the old soldier dissappears. From clues in their conversation the scholar tracks down the soldier’s daughter and then the soldier. He arrives at his apartment only to find him murdered. Together, he and the girl discover the notebook in the soldier’s remote storage shed. What’s in the notebook starts a chase that takes them to the remote city of Archangel. All the time they are being pursued by the police, a journalist, spies, and God knows who else, but people are dropping around them like flies. The riddle is solved at a snowy wooded dacha, but there is one more scene to be played out.
Netflix – 3 stars