Well, after a long waiting period, we have finally gotten the blu ray for “The Road”, a movie that I had long anticipated, as I’m sure many others had, after reading the novel by Cormac Mcarthy. It’s one of the most moving, simplistic yet powerful books I’ve ever read, and I’d recommend that anyone put it on their “to read” list right now if you haven’t read it yet.  For those that have never heard of Cormac Mcarthy, he also wrote No Country for Old Men, which as you know was turned into a major motion picture success that garnered a lot of critical acclaim and put the talented Josh Brolin on the map as a great actor.

The movie The Road has so many things going for it that it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, it is based on one of the best books of this decades in my opinion. They knew they had a good basis for a movie, and that they couldn’t screw it up, because to screw it up would be a huge disservice to such great writing.  Second, they had two of the most talented, distinguished and wide-ranged actors out there today. I’m talking about Viggo Mortensen, who is spectacular in pretty much everything, and Charlize Theron who is as talented as she is beautiful.

The story is really a post apocalyptic one about a disaster that makes the world a very hostile environment to live in. Everyone that is left, which isn’t many, is left to fend for themselves in a foodless, sunlight-less, cold and grey environment. We don’t know what happened to make the world this way, but that does matter. Because what the story is really about is the love story between a boy and his father.

The boy is played by an Australian actor, of about 9 years old approximately. You’d never know he was Australian by the movie though. He is a talented kid who isn’t over the top or cheesy at any point in the movie. Gazing into his big blue eyes and genuine affectations, you really believe this is a child who is scared and has never known any other world except that dark and hostile one he was born in to.  We feel for this child, as we did in the book, and the kid really does a great job at making us feel those same emotions, being true to his character and conveying that same innocence and good nature that children are apt to have.

It’s a heart breaking story, but so well played and convincingly so by every actor in the movie that you feel their pain. You feel the warmth when they have one moment of relaxation, of lightness and joy and full bellies, and you feel the bleak hopelessness that is their reality when everything seems to be  going wrong and they continuously have to be on the move from gangs of cannibals. This movie conveys what the book did – a story of hope in humanity even when most of the race has gone crazy.  Still, I must say the book is better than the movie.

I bought my husband the Fight Club Blu Ray DVD last Christmas, and we just now got around to watching it and checking out some of the extras.  We’d both seen the movie when it came out around ten years ago, and the movie itself definitely holds up, I can tell you that. Sometimes with movies that are ten years or older, that you have really fond memories of, just don’t hold up when you watch them again and you’re ten years older.

Not sure if that’s because your perspectives and life experiences have changed so much, or what, but I’ve often found that movies don’t hold up, the longer it’s been , the more likely it won’t hold up.

This one though, did. Brad Pitt does a great job with what he does best, which is the wacky, eccentric characters, which is truly his niche, although he is often considered a leading man because of his Hollywood image.

Edward Norton probably does one of his best acting jobs in the movie, besides his superb acting in American History X as an ex skinhead who murders a black in cold blood and pure hatred.  Ed Norton is Jack, and Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, is his alternate personality (as we find out for sure in the end of the movie).

We both noticed a lot of flashes of Tyler Durden in the movie leading up to the ultimate revelation that he is in fact the same person as Jack, Norton’s character, who suffers a psychotic break after lack of sleep and life events that he can’t deal with in his ultra uptight personality.  My husband and I both wondered how we were so clueless when all the facts pointed to it in the movie all along in the second watching. It was almost like watching a different movie because we already knew that they were the same person.

You notice that they are always in the same room together, and people’s conversations with Jack could be interpreted as conversations with Tyler. Especially Helena Bonham Carter’s character in the film, who is seeing Tyler/Jack. Her lines definitely clue you in, but somehow we were both clueless when we first watched this movie ten years ago!  The soundtrack is great, the sound itself is really awesome.

At some points, we thought it might blow our speakers out, but they were fine. The sound and picture quality are really superb on this Blu Ray, so if you’re thinking of buying it, it’s worth it. There are also some great extras, and the commentary features Brad, Ed, and Helena, which is awesome for commentary to have all the big names in it.

I am a huge fan of Stephen King books, so when the Dead Zone series came out a few years ago, I was curious about it, but never got a chance to actually see it until recently since it was added to the instant options at Netflix.

I watched the first and second episode last night, and I must say I’m disappointed with the way the show was executed. I understand that the show is filmed with a low budget, but they still could have hired better supporting actors for Anthony Michael Hall’s decent portrayal of Johnny Smith.  He plays the nice guy come psychic who discovers he has psychic powers after his brain is injured in a bad car accident that leaves him comatose for several years.

He awakens after years in a coma, only to find that the love of his life, Sara, has moved on and married the sheriff of their small Maine town.  His mother has died, and he’s missed out on a lot of the latest news, as his new friend and physical therapist has filled him in on.  Some of the dialogue is actually witty, with his physical therapist telling him that Clinton got busted for getting head in the oval office and that a black man is the greatest golfer in the world, but most of it is just dumbed down and predictable.

It needs to be a lot edgier, and a lot less cheesily filmed. Every time Hall’s character has a flash of something when he touches someone, time slows down and we see everyone frozen in motion ala Matrix style.  This has the effect of alienation for me, since I picture his flashes as a short, inferred glimpse into the future, not one where he can freeze frame the scene and see what’s going on.  The original movie with Christopher Walken did just that, gave you short bursts of scenes that he now had insight to, and that seemed to be a more effective use.

Dead Zone seems like it was filmed by Disney. It’s too safe, and too predictable to be a worthy telling of Stephen King’s edgy, early days writing. Wish I could have given it a better review, believe me, but it’s just not “smart” enough to hold one’s attention raptly as it should.  By the way, I’m reading one of King’s latest novels now, Under the Dome, and I’ll have a review of that soon. It’s a long one, well over 1,000 pages, so it may be a little while!

Ok, finally a movie that we rented on blu ray, that was actually watchable (every blu ray we rent lately from Netflix is somehow not playing on our Sony blu ray player, and sometimes we have to return them twice to get a working copy, not sure if it’s our player or the DVD’s they’re sending us but it’s really frustrating).  Not only did the blu ray of Shutter Island, the latest Scorsese film noir endeavor, play ok on the player, but it also was a really good, really entertaining movie.

Leo DiCaprio did a great job, as did the rest of the supporting cast. Even Mark Ruffalo, who my husband and I were surprised to see in a relatively big name movie, did a really good job as Leo’s partner Chuck.  The movie is based on a book that I had read already as well, and incidentally, I wasn’t all that big of a fan of the book.  Dennis Lehane’s writing style just isn’t my thing.

However, I love almost every film that Scorsese has ever done, and I’m a big fan of Leo’s acting abilities and have enjoyed him in everything he’s done, so I was pretty sure I’d like the film adaptation of the book.  The movie Shutter Island is about two federal marshals, Teddy (DiCaprio) and Chuck (Ruffalo) who set out to investigate the appearance of a Rachel Solando, a patient at a high security mental hospital called Ashcliffe on Shutter Island.

They soon begin to encounter fishy stories and potentially bizarre experiments that they believe may be carried out on the criminally insane patients at the hospital. Ben Kingsley plays the head doctor in charge, Dr. Cawley.  As Teddy investigates, he begins to suspect that a lot more goes on at the facility than meets the eye, and he can’t stop having delusions of his dead wife, played by Michelle Williams.

He also has repeated delusions about his days at a nazi war camp as a soldier, his murder of unarmed German soldiers along with the rest of his camp, and the ghostly images of a little girl that supposedly was Rachel Solando’s little girl that she murdered (one of three children she murdered).  Throughout the complex weave of Teddy’s experiences and run ins at the island, one does begin to wonder how all of this will come together. I did kind of wonder if I hadn’t read the book if I would have figured it out before the end.

The creepiness and eerie feeling of the book is kept in tact in the movie, Scorsese does a great job of getting a passionate performance out of Leonardo, and the whole supporting cast is pretty much top notch. I’d recommend this one, whether you’ve read the book or not – a very entertaining ride!

So we rented the movie with Milla Jovovich, who is a surprisingly good actress for being a model-turned actress I must say, called The Fourth Kind.  The movie professes to be based on a true story, with “real footage” interlaced with dramatized scenes by the actors. Well, I got news for you, the “real footage” or actual footage as I think they may have termed it, is also actors staging a scene, but oh well, this movie was a fun ride.

Although I must admit, I felt a bit misled when I googled a million things on the internet to find out if Dr. Abigail Tyler or her story in Nome, Alaska was true.  Couldn’t find a darn thing, and I’m a pretty creative googler when it comes to finding information I want to know about. It’s all basically the same as the Blair Witch project, a movie that seems fairly real, which contributes to it’s spookiness, but it’s all really a sort of hoax where people are talking for months after about it, trying to argue about whether it’s really based on a true story or not.

One thing that my husband and I learned by watching this movie is how funny it is that humans really want these incredible stories to be true, to believe in something fantastic like this. The truth is, well, a lot less boring and mediocre, and that truth is that this movie is 100% hooey.

Good hooey though. When you take away the fact that this movie was somewhat misleading in it’s premise that it was based on a true story, what you have is a really good, fairly original story that keeps you glued to the tv and wondering if there is any truth to it. Heck, it’ll have a lot of people googling for a while too.

The story goes like this.  Dr. Abigail Tyler is a psychologist in Nome Alaska whose husband was recently murdered in their own bed while she was in it. We see the supposed “real” Dr. Abigail Tyler, a sickly looking, pale thin woman “in real life” talking to the director of the film in interjected scenes throughout.  We also see a lot of “footage” that was filmed of the unexplained events which supposedly plagued Nome Alaska in the nineties.

Sleep studies reveal that a lot of residents of Nome have been experiencing the same thing .They see an owl outside their window, and they can’t sleep, they have this terrible feeling of unease. When the Dr. draws the connections, she puts some of the patients under regressive hypnotherapy where they suddenly go into a trance and speak some unknown Sumerian language and go all devil-voice on us. I’m surprised they weren’t spitting up pea soup too.

The scenes are well done, filming “side by side” with the “real footage”, which happens to go out in the middle of filming.  It’s all very effective at creating that eerie feel.  The story is gripping, and as we get further into it, we see there is more than meets the eye.  I’d recommend this movie if you’re into the other worldly types of stories and the science fiction stuff, it’s definitely worth it. Just don’t get faked into believing it’s based on anything real, it’s not.

So I just saw the James Cameron epic 3-D computer generated wonder that’s gained so much notoriety for being the first of it’s kind, both in CG sophistication and in it’s 3-D splendor.  I didn’t of course get to see it in real digital 3D though because we rented the blu ray DVD, but nonetheless, some of the graphics were quite impressive. I must admit, I still got the feeling that I was watching Shrek once in a while, like I was just watching a cartoon. At no point did I believe that the Navi were a real people or did their plight seem totally real to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I was moved, but not on the level I would have been if the acting weren’t over the top or even high quality in this movie.  I felt like the actors and actresses were mailing it in a bit, like they didn’t even believe in the movie’s message, which seemed forced at times. For example, the precious metal they were after on the planet Pandora was called unobtanium. Now I get that the story is all symbolic, but at times I felt like it relied on a dumbed down approach at getting it’s message across.

The message was actually two fold in my opinion. It was about man’s hell bent nature on self destructing, at his lack of respect for earth or the interconnectedness of all beings, animals and humans, and plant life, in the world. It was also symbolic of the white man’s ruthless taking of the land from the native Americans so many years ago, and of pointless wars that still rage today over things like natural resources like oil and diamonds.

The CG was amazing at times, but at other times, it still felt “drawn”, very computerized. I wasn’t fully immersed in this fantastic planet of Pandora. I think I may have felt differently if I had seen it in 3D, as so many people told me it was really magical to watch it that way.

The script was pretty horrendous, and at times, I thought that even Sygourney Weaver, who is the heroine in one of my favorite movies, Alien and Aliens, laid it on too thick.  The creatures were very imaginative though, with their sleek, snake like skin and multiple working parts. The idea of connecting to the tree of life and the flying creatures (they choose you, you don’t choose them), while admirable as a symbol of the interconnectedness or all beings, was a little cheesy for me too.

All in all, this movie was entertaining, but I found some problems with really getting into it and suspending all reality, and for me that is what makes a fantasy movie great.

So, here’s a movie that I was actually sort of excited to see. When I popped it in, my husband told me within the first five minutes that it was going to suck, but I didn’t think it would, I thought that those first five minutes were interesting enough to create a basis for something that I might actually like.  Let me first start off by saying that the only decent acting in this was by Paul Bettany, who plays the angel Michael. Everyone else pretty much stunk up the screen with their over acting, including and perhaps mostly Dennis Quaid.

I had high hopes for this movie with a theological theme. Here’s the backstory.  A motley crew of “survivors” are stranded at a gas station and diner out in the middle of the desert when the apocolypse strikes.  God has become fed up with the ways of man and decides that mankind is an experiment that has gone awry and needs to be decimated.

He destroys most of the world, and then inhabits the people’s bodies with “angels” who actually look more like demons with jagged teeth when they become inhabited.  Those at the diner don’t know what’s happened except for it seems like they’ve been cut off from the outside world.

One of them is the pregnant Charlie, who happens to be carrying a child that she didn’t want and was going to give up for adoption, but it’s good she didn’t because this child is supposed to be the savior of man.  Michael is an angel who disagreed with God. He thinks that human kind deserves a second chance, and the messiah for mankind should not be killed (the unborn child), which is a task that God has given him and he has disobeyed, allowing the baby to be born.

I won’t even bore you with the ridiculous details of this thin plot line and the ridiculous scripting.  Suffice it to say, you’ll be either bored or laughing at the dialogue and situations and that is why this movie got an overall bad rating from most who watched it. This movie could have been so good, it’s an interesting subject matter, and some of the special effects are actually kind of cool. The execution just sucks.