Live Free or Die Hard review

Live Free or Die Hard - Yeah, they're stretching for titles in the series now. Well, I don't remember what the other ones were, so maybe they already were stretching, but this is a bit too much of the whole founding fathers deal. The movie doesn't do anything with the founding fathers, though, preferring to stick with the buddy movie schtick with the wisecracking Bruce Willis and the über-geek Justin Long (you'll recognize him from the Macintosh ads... I was kind of hoping the PC guy would make a guest appearance, but no such luck).

The effects were fabulous, of course. The scene where they duck between two cars to avoid a third car flying through the air at them, and the one where Willis' character flips a car off a ramp to hit a helicopter, were very cool, although completely unbelievable. You really need to turn off your brain for a good chunk of this movie.

Willis is still fun to watch, and Long is a good foil for him. Kevin Smith makes an appearance as a geek's geek (more über than über... mehrüber? German's just about gone, sorry) living in his mom's basement. He's frighteningly believable in the role. The most fun to watch in the movie, though, is Maggie Q. Watching her kick, climb, punch and jump here way through an extended fight scene, my movie companion asked, "Who is she, Spider-Man?" I wonder who her stunt double was... no way it was really her.

All in all, this was an enjoyable movie. If you can watch it with beer, all the better.

Bourne Ultimatum review

Surprise, surprise - yet another action flick that gives you a little to think about. Not a lot, mind you, but it was very interesting. The Bourne Ultimatum has all the non-stop action of its less thoughtful siblings, but it manages to keep you thinking. The chase scenes were fun, with a lot of weird twists & turns thrown in, and the fight scenes were gritty and brutal, as befits the genre.

Damon does a good job, as in previous installations, as Jason Bourne, but Joan Allen is the real star of this movie. Her role as the "tough but too smart to be brutal without cause" officer in whatever clandestine group they're in (NSA, I think, but who knows?) is extremely compelling, maybe because it implies there are people in such organizations with consciences.

This movie is worth seeing, but you'll want to see the previous two installments first.

Cane Toads review

For the library's science movie night ("Is it REAL science or REEL science?" Cute.) this month they showed Cane Toads. It wasn't really science fiction or horror. It wasn't even really your usual movie; it was a documentary. The way it was shot, though, with the menacing background music, strange camera angles, and way-hyped-up voice-overs and interviews, it came across as a spoof of a horror flick. The blurb described it something like "a documentary the way Monty Python might do it." Yes, very much so.

The meat of the documentary was alternately interesting and hilarious. The cane toads were apparently introduced to Australia in order to control cane grubs that were decimating the crops. Unfortunately, cane toads and cane grubs run in different circles, so to speak; there was no real way the toads would be able to prey on the grubs. The toads are very adept at survival, though, emitting poison when they're bitten and reproducing at an amazing rate. They've taken over in much of Northeastern Australia, and many of the people there treat them like pets.

Highlights of the movie include:

• The (I think American) researcher who had the most hilariously dramatic stories about how the cane toads had ruined his life
• The footage of a cane toad scarfing a mouse
• A guy in a Volkswagon mini-bus swerving back and forth across a road to hit toads
• Shots of a pond filled black with toad tadpoles

They are ugly beasts, but they're really amazing, too. It sounds like no one has any real ideas on how to control their population without doing something as bone-headed as what got them to Australia in the first place.

After the movie, a guy from the Hogle zoo put together a lecture on the non-native species introduced to Utah. Most of them were pets that people got sick of caring for, with a bunch of them being frogs. I guess frogs and toads are good at surviving. I asked him whether any of those species were on the receiving end of some sort of abatement program like what we practice against mosquitoes. He said that it didn't think that was merited for those species, and that they were more nuisances than significant problems.

The movie is worth seeing, but if you have a chance to go to science movie night, you should take it. They're scheduled the first Tuesday night of each month, I believe.