Jaq's 30 second guide to the latest DVD movies

[Jaqhama]

My short and brutal guide to movies I've watched on DVD so far this month.

GI Joe: Rise of Cobra.
A great film if you like CGI special effects. A terrible film if you like anything resembling acting. The plot...it had a plot? Must have missed that bit.

The Punisher: Warzone. Freaking excellent. (But then I'm a huge fan of this kind of movie.)The Brit guy playing the latest incarnation of Frank Castle is the best yet. Very violent. The bad guy(s) took their parts well also.A much better movie than the last Punisher with Tom Jane and on a par with the orginal Dolph Lundgren film.
The standard for this type of movie must surely be The Exterminator, with Robert Ginty?
My fave film in this genre.

Public Enemy with Johnny Depp. Depp is possibly the best actor of recent times. He can play any role well. He's certainly no slouch as the famous American gangster John Dillinger. Not the best gangster film I've ever seen, but worth watching because Depp is so great to watch. Christian Bale plays the dedicated FBI agent out to track Dillinger down and he's great as well.
I'd like to see Depp in a Dirty Harry style role one day.

Terminator: Salvation.
Christian Bale again. He's a good actor. The latest Terminator movie had so many tactical plot holes in it, it makes Swiss Cheese look tight.
But good acting all around and great effects if you like your CGI. At least the CGI didn't overwhelm the movie as GI Joe did the human actors.
There was even an Arnie looking Terminator toward the end of the film.

The Spirit. I can't say enough bad things about this travesty of a movie.
The investors must have been shocked to see where their money went.
I guess Samuel Jackson must have got most of it?
We turned it off two thirds of the way through.

Wanted with Angeline Jolie.
Angie looks great as always. Sexy and deadly in turn. Morgan Freeman also had a major part. But even they couldn't save the film. Stupid special effects and plot.
Another comic book adaptation; my friend Wez who runs the local video store and is a comic book fanatic assures me the comic series is far superior to the movie.
I should certainly hope so.

Sahara. The movie based on Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novel.
Not bad, not bad at all. The characters were engaging and the scenery was nice and it had a good pace. I didn't expect anything from it in advance and was rewarded with a decent action/adventure movie.
Nothing stood out as a whole but the whole worked together nicely.
Good family entertainment that you can let the kids watch.

Ice Age: Rise of the Dinosaurs.
Not as amusing as the first movie in the series but many great scenes and the character of Buck, the Bowie knife wielding (actually a giant T-Rex fang) stole the show.
Without Buck I fear the movie would have been dull indeed.
The kids will love this one though, they being less fussy than myself I suspect.

Star Trek...the Beginning.
I'm a huge fan of the original William Shatner show, so this film did nothing for me in the Star Trek respect.
As a pure SF movie it was great, and I know a lot of people thought it was a very good alternative history version of how Capt Kirk got his start in the Federation.
Most people who love their SF will doubtless enjoy the film a great deal.
I enjoyed it as an SF movie.

Well that's my 30 second movie reviews, sure many of you will disagree with me entirely. I admit to getting fussier as I get older.
CGI doesn't impress me at all, not unless it's backed up with solid acting and a decent plot.
A lot of the newer movies seem to feel that if they have great CGI viewers will ignore bad acting and non-event plots.
I'm not convinced that is so.

Cheers: Jaq.

[che2000]

Wanted was fun. But your mate Wez is absolutely correct - I read the original comic over the summer and was blown away by it (very, very different to the movie: just see what they do to poor S*perman and to poor B*tman & R*bin - very definate shades of Marshal Law).

[Lyn]

Nice idea...fun to read your quick takes. I'll have to work on my selection once I'm done with finals. It may take 30 sec to read, but I spend hours writing stuff like that! lol

[Jaqhama]

Just finished watching Inglorious Basterds.
Linda thought it was very good.
I thought it was very boring.
Some gore and violence.
Wayyyyyy too much talking.
And the characters did nothing for me.
Odd to hear a lot of other movies theme music played throughout.
This will either be a movie you love or hate.
In an alternative history timeline: A group of Allied Special Forces soldiers in WW2 are doing to the Nazi's what a lot of people would have liked to do to the Nazi's, including killing Adolph Hitler There's a couple of sub-plots mixed in. And one must think on the SS Officer not killing the girl at the beginning of the movie and how she ends up being pivotal to the end of the movie.
It's all very pulp fictioney...but man, shove some more action scenes in there for heaven's sake.
Not blood and gore: Action!
I'm not a fan of Tarantino movies, although I was impressed with My name is Modesty. You'd need to have read the Modesty Blaise novels to understand how well Tarantino did with that.

I also just watched Ong Bak 2: The Beginning, with Tony Jaa.
Beautiful background scenery. Produced, filmed and everything else in Thailand.
Tony Jaa reminds me of Bruce Lee in his fight scenes.
Ong Bak 2 is kind of a sword and sorcery movie, Thai style, with a lot of martial arts and very few, if any CGI special effects.
I recommend watching it in Thai with english subtitles.
I also recommend it because it's just so visually great. The costumes, the people in the background, the villages and sets, all very different to a western sword movie.
It's all very un-hollywood.
And not nearly as silly as those Chinese fantasy kung fu movies where people walk on water or fly over rooftops. I really hate that rubbish.

Ong Bak the original movie was not bad either. But I liked this one better.
Tony Jaa isn't a pretty boy, but he's a great martial arts actor.

[Jaqhama]

Drag me to Hell.
What a hoot of a movie. Lin and I loved it and laughed at it.
Schlocky horror at its best.
Make sure you're not eating anything while you watch the beginning.


The Mutant Chronicles.
Diesel punk SF at its best.
Dark and gory SF action adventure.
Resident Evil meets Quake.
Linda and I rate it as our fave 'dark' SF movie for some time.

[Jaqhama]

Resident Evil: Devastation.

Animated in the Final Fantasy style.
Very, very good. Possibly the best animated action SF movie we've seen.
The T virus has survived the destruction of Racoon City and is being spread around the world by supposed terrorists...but maybe the Government is not so innocent either?
A special investigator joins forces with a female SWAT cop and a survivor of the Racoon City Zombie infestation.
Plenty of action, many great scenes. This is what all animated movies should look like.
Pity the animated Riddick movie didn't use the same animation style as here.

[Jaqhama]

Linda and I have just watched: Gamer and Outlander.

Gamer.
Nothing special in the acting or story line, but worth watching if you're a fan of vid shooter games.
The old story of an innocent man framed for murder and trying to get free and re-join his family was dragged out again.
The guy being the champion shooter in the live action video game called Slayers.
Why couldn't the lead character just be a guy who likes killing people?
Convicts on death row are the participants of the Slayers game...yet they all seemed remarkably efficent with automatic weapons and CQB techniques.
Gamer was a good movie...but it could have been a lot better.
Some interesting ideas on the direction of video games and real life. Anyone familiar with the vid game Second Life will have a chuckle.
Same with players of Counterstrike, although Counterstrike the game is more realistic than the Slayers live action game in this movie.

Footnote: There's no first person shooter interaction in Gamer as there was at the end of the movie DOOM. The director really missed an oppotunity to excel there.
The FPS segment in DOOM is what really made the movie for a lot of FPS fans.
So in terms of video game translated to movie shooter action, DOOM still wins hands down.

Outlander.
An offworld soldier and his monstrous alien enemy crash land on Earth back in the days of the Vikings in Norway.
The Moorwen (alien monster) starts gobbling up the local Viking population and the offworlder soon joins up with them to go hunt and kill the almost unkillable creature.
Some good acting. Rather repeatative action scenes.
The soldier loses his laser cannon at the beginning of the movie and never goes back to look for it. Hmmm. That seems unlikely.
Ron Perlman had one of his shortest and worst roles. Not even sure why he appeared in the movie at all? Needed a quick bit of cash maybe?
Outlander is another remake of the Beowulf legend.
I'm not going to mention any more about what happens because that will spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it.

A quick take would be that Outlander is a mix of the 13th warrior and Pathfinder with an alien monster thrown into the soup.
I will say that we enjoyed it a lot more than that CGI Beowulf movie that came out about a year or so ago. That was bloody awful.

[Jaqhama]

Ok...I bit the bullet and wasted a dollar and rented Thunderbirds the 2004 live action movie.
And wasted a dollar is right.
This movie is so appalling I cannot even begin to describe how bad it is.
I watched most of it on fast forward, so as to torture myself as quickly as possible and get it over and done with.
Gerry Anderson had nothing to do with this movie and has been quoted as saying, when he watched it on DVD himself.
"It's the worst load of crap I've ever seen!"
How right he is.

Sylvia Anderson (She being the divorced wife of Gerry) was the person responsible for selling the rights of Thunderbirds to the movie company. She has been quoted as saying what a marvelous movie she thinks it is.
Thereby proving that she is either insane or was just trying to boost the sales of box office tickets to prove her finacial worth to the movie company.
How the directors could get a movie so wrong beggers belief.

I think they tried making it for the kids of today, rather than for the adults of today who loved the original puppet series when they were young.

One reason we liked Thinderbirds when I was a kid is because there were no kids in the show to start with. All the characters were adults.

I was pleased to see the movie company lost a lot of money. Hurrah!!!
Comments on the movie on a lot of internet forums is mainly in the negative.

It's hard to imagine just why the movie company tried to turn Thunderbirds into a Spy Kids type movie, as the original series was always very serious.
This movie is a campy version of the kind of films made back in the late 60's.
Like the original Casino Royale and Modesty Blaise. And neither of those films worked either.

No matter how bad you think this Thunderbirds movie might be, trust me, you'll be horrifed at this modern re-make of a classic TV series.
The special effects are mediochre and I've got to say that the effects in the original TV series looked more realistic than in this movie.

Apart from the names of the characters and the look of the machinery there is nothing of the original TV series in this movie.
The girl playing Lady Penelope almost got it right. The chap playing Parker, almost got it right. Unfortunately their almost excellent characterisations were quickly spoofed and camped up to lend them the same pitiful roles as the rest of the sorry cast.

One can only hope that the directors and producers of this abyssmal effort never get anyone to invest in a movie of theirs again. Unlikely as that occurence might be anyway.

Sylvia Anderson must surely be living under a rock somewhere, as how she could show her face in public after prasing this movie is beyond me.
Gerry Anderson apparently refused to take money to praise the movie or attend its debut.
Gerry at least has integrity.

Public flogging would be the very least punishment that everyone who had anything to do with this movie should have forced upon them.

I've seen shite re-makes and take-offs of vintage popular shows before, but the Thunderbirds 2004 movie takes the cake.
One can only hope they choked on it.

[H.P. Lovesauce]

Mirageman: if you watch only one Chilean martial-arts superhero film this year, make it this one.

[Jaqhama]

Mirageman: if you watch only one Chilean martial-arts superhero film this year, make it this one.

I've never seen a Chilean martial arts movie full stop, so I'll have to check it when I see it at my local vid shop.