Bendable Blog

Even though the movie Domino is 4 years old, I hadn’t seen it due to it’s terrible reviews.  Unfortunately I seem to be drawn to terrible movies like flies to shit, so it stuck with me that I’d never seen it until just now.

The movie is the mostly fictionalized story of Domino Harvey (Keira Knightly), the child of a movie star who supposedly gave up modeling to become a bounty hunter.  There are some ridiculous things in this movie you could explain away as being mildly possible, considering pretty much every boy tries to learn to use nunchucks and throwing knives at some point it’s not too out there to imagine this woman succeeded in mastering both when she was 12.

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Another movie I grabbed while thinking about the Pixar movie Up, I just finished watching Step Up.  Step Up is about an inner city foster kid who hangs out with his friends and boost cars, but what he really likes to do is dance.  Through some convoluted story-telling he is sentenced by a judge to do 200 hours community service at a school for the arts.

This is where the movie basically begins…

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I just finished watching Fired Up! which was a lot better than I really expected from a movie about a couple highschool (American) football jocks who go to cheer camp in order to have sex with tons of chicks they’ve never met before.

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So as I said in my last post, I stayed up late to watch Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick, I really enjoy Pitch Black and Chronicles for the way they make you care for this anti-hero who mostly seems to be out for himself, and begruginly manages to help out others.

I think where Chronicles separates itself from Pitch Black, and possibly why it’s not so well recieved, is that Pitch Black seems a bit more grounded in some form of reality.  Granted it takes place on another planet which somehow orbits a binary star and a separate blue dwarf, and it has flying beasties that only come out at night (every 22 years) and murder the place, but the rest of the story is so very human.  It’s about how people make assumptions about a person’s worth, and how everyone is flawed in some way.

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I rented the Chronicles of Riddick Assault on Dark Athena game and while playing it I remembered how much I love the character of Riddick and decided to stay up until 4 A.M. watching Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick.

I forgot how much this movie rocks, there are so many greate scenes and fantastic special effects.  I just now had to look up how the shoulder dislocation scene was done because of how real it looks, apparently it’s because Vin Diesel actually did it for the crew while holding chains, but wasn’t able to do it with manacles on so special effects were added for that part.  Knowing the outcome changes some of the excellently played twists, but it’s still a remarkably enjoyable film to watch and it holds up really well 9 years later.

Summary: I always tell people who have never seen it to borrow my DVD and watch it, I think it’s a must see.

The Spirit is another Frank Miller screenplay (300, Sin City) that is shot in a visually different way (mostly black and white with hyper reds and brilliants whites in unusual places).  Everything about the movie seems “comic bookish”, the way people look, they way they talk, their names, the opening sequence of the spirit running across rooftops (running is so blah, how about he flips everytime he jumps).  Some of the names that take me out of the movie immediately are Sand Serif (Eva Mendes, who apparently has a perfect ass in this movie), Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson), Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega).  Samuel Jackson is pretty over the top in this movie, but everyone is, I think that was the point.

Summary: It’s worth renting if you like this sort of movie (Sin City), but you could easily skip it and no one will ever bring it up.

I have actually seen all the Punisher movies they have made, and they are all pretty bad (although I liked the last Punisher movie).  Punisher Warzone is very cartoonish, and probably hold very true to the original comics, which I never read.  This Punisher is brutal and unforgiving, and he obviously doesn’t believe these criminals deserve to go to trial, since he just blows their heads off as the cops try to arrest them.  It’s a little bit of the old ultra-violence, and really nothing I feel I needed to see.  What is really strange is if he’s been doing vigilante justice for 6 years, how is there are any criminals left?  I’d be considering a legit line of work if every criminal who goes up against this guy ends up dead.

Summary: Skip this movie, see virtually anything else instead.

Bomb It is a documentary about the rise of graffiti artists in Philidelphia, New York, and around the world.  It was very interesting to see the roots and some of the amazing art that people can put on a wall overnight.  I think it’s unfortunate that some of them feel it’s not proper art, and others that feel it’s not right unless it’s done illegally, also the violence that has surrounded this art seems completely unnecessary.

Summary: If you are interested in graffiti then find this movie, it’s pretty interesting.

Bangkok Dangerous stars Nicolas Cage as an assassin who is about to give up the job but wants to do 4 more kills all in Bangkok before he does.  At the very beginning of the movie he says you need to know when to get out, as soon as you think about getting out, you get out.  Then he proceeds to think about getting out and instead takes on 4 more kills.  Cage tries (I don’t think he has a choice really) to play the most wooden, uncaring assassin he could think of and it just seems fake the entire time.  Suddenly he starts to fall for a deaf Thai girl who doesn’t understand english, and he has second thoughts about everything.  It’s an expected turn in a movie like this but doesn’t feel real at all.

Summary: Skip this movie and watch The Jackal or Leon (The Professional) instead.

This is one of the many bad movies I’ve watched over the last few days, and I won’t be spending much time on them.  Babylon A.D. is set somewhere around 40 years in the future, where America has closed it’s borders for fear of terrorism and everywhere else is pretty much a warzone.  Vin Diesel plays a retired U.S. Army something or other who is now a mercenary.  He’s hired to take a woman from a convent to New York, but there is something special about this woman that everyone wants to get their hands on her.

I think the story is based on a book, and that would probably be ok, the story wasn’t terrible, the action sequences weren’t that bad, it was mainly the acting from everyone involved.  One remarkably bad actor (as always in my opinion) was so heavily made up I didn’t recognize it was Gerard Depardieu until the credits.

Summary: You can skip this movie and see Chronicles of Riddick instead and have way more fun.