Bendable Blog

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.

Yes I watched a chick flick without a chick around, it’s sad I know.  I don’t know why I even download these movies, the odds are I’ll have to watch them again with my next girlfriend; I should just save myself the hassle of watching it twice by not watching it in the first place (uhhh sure).  So anyway, as much as you could probably tell from the title (He’s Just Not That Into You) it was a RomCom, for some reason I didn’t put two and two together (that is my story and I’m sticking with it).

As you could probably guess from a movie staring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Kevin Connolly, Scarlett Johansson, Justin Long, and Kris Kristofferson it’s actually a pretty well acted movie.  The plot was actually pretty different from what I would have expected.

Actually I think it’s probably best you don’t let your girlfriend see this movie, it may end all happy and whatnot, but there are all these things they say in the movie that will just make her start judging you and thinking that you aren’t really that into her.  Just keep her in the dark.

I started to write my review of Quantum of Solace as I was watching Taken and very quickly turned my entire attention to Taken, which explains my unusually short post on Quantum of Solace.

In the movie Taken, Liam Neeson plays a retired spook who just wants to be a bigger part of his daughter’s (played excellently by Maggie Grace (“Lost”)) life.  Against his better judgment he allows her to take a trip to Paris, and no sooner does she get there and she is kidnapped by human traffickers.  Luckily he is on the phone with her when this happens and he immediately goes into action mode to save her.

The spy stuff and the fights in this movie seem very plausable and real, he doesn’t get off the plane and have his “contact” meet him to give him a bunch of gizmo’s and weapons, he just uses his wits and his hands to work his way up the chain to the big wigs of the organization, not sparing anyone along the way.  He is a complete badass that anyone would want in their corner when the shit went down.

Again I want to say Maggie Grace was perfect in this role, at the time the movie was filmed she was about 25, but she is playing a 17 year old so convincingly that I thought I was wrong when I saw her.  I thought she was the girl from “Lost”, but then I settled on her just being some younger girl who resembles her.  At no point did I think she wasn’t a 17 year old.  Really surprising.

This is a fantastic movie and I’m surprised I haven’t heard more of it, everyone should see this movie. 10/10

I watched the latest Bond film last night and I was surprised how much I liked it, much more than Casino Royale.  I like how they are basically restarting the series with Bond being a lot less polished and not relying on gadgets as much.  My only concern was that it’s basically a sequel to Casino Royale and I haven’t seen it in a while, so I couldn’t remember all the names they were throwing about so much.

I believe I like this Bond the best out of all of them. 8/10

I had heard a lot of good things about Dead Space for the PS3, so I finally decided to rent it a couple weeks ago and beat it over the course of two weeks.  In the end it took me over 15 hours of game play, which I feel is more than enough.  When I was younger some games lasted only a few hours, and I beat one game on the demo machine in Blockbuster.  Fifteen hours is also not too long, I never finished long games like Final Fantasy 7 or Oblivion mainly due to getting bored with such a long game.

Some of the really interesting things they did with Dead Space that I hope show up in other games is the lack of a HUD cluttering up the screen.  All relevant information is displayed in the game world.  The weapons have ammo counters on them, there is a health indicator on the character’s back, and any actual menu’s show up as 3d panes in front of the character, as if a hologram generator was displaying it in the real world.  The game wasn’t exactly scary, though I imagine it could be for some people, but I found myself getting tense at certain spots when I wasn’t sure what was around the corner.

When you beat the game you can play on “Impossible” level with all the weapons and armor you collected from the first time, but I still don’t think it has a lot of replayability.

Definately worth a rental, 9/10.

I don’t know what TED is, or where this conference is held, but from the two video’s I’ve watched so far, I want to see everything they show there.

Siftables

Sixth Sense Tech

The folks over at MixThatDrink.com created a great tutorial for Skittles Flavoured Vodka which I had never though about until I read the tutorial.  Now I’m thinking I need to buy skittles.

A few weeks ago I saw Sarah Silverman on a show or something, and I remembered about her show The Sarah Silverman Program and decided to download the 3 seasons that have been produced so far.

While looking for her show, I found a stand up special called “Jesus is Special“, so I decided to get that also.  I also found a story about how she was boo’d off the stage on her first trip to the UK, because her show cost 50 quid and only lasted 40 minutes.  Apparently one of the hecklers yelled “I’ve seen longer clips on YouTube”.

Regardless I finished downloading all 3 seasons of her show and the stand up special.  I watched through the special, and if you remove the pre-recorded bits and songs it probably does only run 40 minutes.  The whole routine she never got any big laughs, only a few chuckles at certain points, I didn’t laugh once.  The musical numbers are the same type of “comedy” only in song.

Basically her whole schtic is that she is a jew, she has a vagina, and she tries to be edgy with racial comments.  By themselves I think there is a lot of comedy in these things, but it’s done so matter-of-fact that it isn’t funny.

So I figured she just isn’t great at stand up, not every comedian is.  I may be considered by most of my friends as very funny, but I doubt I could do a decent stand up routine.  So I tried her show, after I’d been watching it for a while, I had to check how much longer there was, and I was apparently only 12 minutes into it with about 10 minutes left.

I still figured she deserved another shot, not every pilot is good, and sometimes it takes a while for the show to grow legs, so I watched the second episode.  Unfortunately it was more of the same, unfunny humour that probably sounded really funny while she was high.

Apparently she is very smart, and I think I can tell that a bit, and something about her I find very alluring.  I think she is hot, I just don’t think she is funny.  Shame really.

Last night I watched the new Guy Ritchie film RocknRolla, which is basically a heist film set in the seedy London underworld.  The real estate market boom has caused underworld types to go from standard drugs and illegal betting to controlling how people buy land and get zoned.  There is lots of money to be made if you have your hands in every piece of the pie.

I won’t go into the details, suffice it to say two roughnecks get played by the local crime boss and end up owing 2 million Euros and have to hold up a money transfer to pay it back, which unfortunately belongs to even nastier people.

It was a fun movie with a decent twist, and very Ritchie-esque feel to it.  I disagree with some people that the Guy Ritchie treatement was put on a film that didn’t need it.  This doesn’t feel like Snatch, other than there is a heist and some anti-hero main characters.  What I consider the Ritchie treatment is roughly four stories which are loosely bound together by one thing and all the stories are told simultaneously and come together at the end.  This movie is very linear and the stories are interwoven in a way that makes sense for this sort of local underworld.

Summary: I think it’s definately worth it to go see, especially so if you like a good Guy Ritchie heist flick.