Lots of movies

I'm so far behind on my movie reviews, I'm going to go the quick and dirty route. See below. No, I don't know why there's all that dead space in there.

Movie	Genre	Rating	Blurb
Flags of Our Fathers	War	Excellent	Heroes from battle of Iwo Jima are used to sell war bonds
Letters From Iwo Jima	War	Even better	That same battle from the Japanese perspective
The Last King of Scotland	History	Excellent	Forest Whitaker is amazing playing Idi Amin. A friend of mine asked, "King of Scotland? He is black?" ;-)
Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde	Horror	Good	Classic with Spencer Tracy
American Gangster	Crime	Very good	Great late 60s / early 70s feel in a different type of gangster movie
SuperBad	Comedy	Good	Funny, gross, silly, McLovin
Ratatouille	Comedy	Great	Animated tale of a cooking rat in Paris. Some of the graphics were terrifying - the rats looked way too real. Some were just striking, e.g. Ego's trip back to his childhood.
License to Wed	Romantic Comedy	Ok	Predictable but cute. Robin Williams is a blast, as he usually is.
Bad Santa	Crime Comedy	Raunchy	Yes, "Raunchy" is a rating. Very crude, with some extremely funny bits. Lauren Graham was great.
Waiting...	Comedy	Ok	Describes the wonderful work environment in a not-quite-fast-food restaurant
Kevin Smith Speaks	Lecture	Good	If you're a fan, it's fabulous. He does the lecture circuit, stopping at a number of universities. He's very engaging.
Babel	Drama	Very good	Interesting interweaving stories
3:10 to Yuma	Western	Good	Apparently a remake. Kind of has that feel of an old western. Gritty, but not to the degree of an Unforgiven.

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Too many movies

Balls of Fury review

This'll be brief. If you like old martial arts movies, or ping-pong, or both, this movie is very funny. Christopher Walken is hilarious, way over the top (unusual, right...), and eminently believable as the megalomaniac bad guy (yes, quite a stretch for him). Dan Fogler is funny, though I don't know I've seen him anywhere else. IMDB to the rescue again. No, not much that isn't brand-new. The real reason guys will enjoy this movie, though, is Maggie Q, who also made an appearance the earlier reviewed Die Hard sequel.

Worth a rental, especially if you have plenty of beer and maybe a ping-pong table available after the viewing.

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.

Fantastic Four review

Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer

Ah, it's nice when I'm not disappointed by a movie. Admittedly, my expectations weren't all that high for this one. A number of friends had said they liked it, but a number of reviews were reportedly negative, so I wasn't counting on anything brilliant. It wasn't, but it was very fun, and it had a number of things going for it:

• Great effects - Yeah, the man made of quicksilver has been done on film before, but this one was particularly well-done. The chase scene with the Torch trying to catch the Surfer was nifty.
• My favorite villain - Doctor Doom is back in this one, and the storyline follows one of those in the canon. I'm not sure how closely it followed it; I'm only aware of it from some old panels I remember seeing.
• Jessica Alba - Let's face it, she's a good enough reason to see a movie. She's entertaining in this movie, though it's still a bit disconcerting to see her as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Invisible Woman. Well, yeah - when she's invisible, you don't really notice those things, but you know what I mean.
  

Ok, that should be enough links to keep you busy for a while, assuming all this isn't old hat.

We get to see a bit of Michael Chiklis without his orange rock hide in a few scenes, so he does get a chance to do facial expressions and the like. I guess those are possible with all that make-up on, but I'd guess it's challenging. He plays a few scenes for laughs well, coming across as Joe Normal stuck in some very abnormal circumstances. There are a number of funny parts in this movie, but maybe you need to be a comic geek to enjoy them.

Nah. This movie was worth the regular admission price, and it's going to end up on a shelf with my other movies. If you're looking for a Summer adventure flick, this should fulfill that need.