It's Complicated
Grade: C+ (Rent it)
Review: Terrible premise; but astonishing actors like Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin make this watchable and entertaining.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Edge of Darkness (2010)
Edge of Darkness
Grade: B- (Watch it)
Review: Good acting and exciting story. Mel Gibson does a great job playing a cop who's looking for his daughters killers. The conspiracy theories make this thriller very exciting, but while the ending is brutally righteous it leaves few unanswered questions that make you feel there was a little more to this story.
Grade: B- (Watch it)
Review: Good acting and exciting story. Mel Gibson does a great job playing a cop who's looking for his daughters killers. The conspiracy theories make this thriller very exciting, but while the ending is brutally righteous it leaves few unanswered questions that make you feel there was a little more to this story.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Green Zone (2010)
Green Zone
Grade: B (Watch it)
Review: A fiction that is sadly too close to the tragic reality of the Iraqi war case. This is an action/thriller movie, but marketing this movie as an action movie was a moronic decision. The core of this movie is attempting to get to the heart of how unreliable intelligence about WMDs was cherry picked and used to start a war. An unnecessary war that has caused the loss of American life and wealth; it has cost us more than 1 trillion dollars and undermined our moral high-ground, our credibility and foreign policy for decades to come.
Movie explores a handful of fictitious characters who clearly have the corresponding real person (the name in the brackets is the real person).
- An opportunistic war cheerleader journalist (aka Judith Miller) who was used as a useful idiot by the administration to make the case for war.
- Incompetent administrator (aka Paul Bremer) who disbanded Iraqi Army and singlehandedly helped the start of sectarian violence and prolonged the conflict.
- Veteran intelligence officer (aka Jay Garner) who was pushed aside and his warnings and ideas for managing post occupation Iraqi were ignored.
- The “reliable” Iraqi informant (Rafid Ahmed Alwan aka 'Curveball') a conman that simply lied to German intelligence in order of getting his immigration status (green card) fixed.
- Main character (aka Richard "Monty" Gonzales the Army chief warrant officer charged with finding the WMDs) who believes in our reason for going to war but quickly becomes disheartened by false intelligence as he visits an empty site after an empty site.
Grade: B (Watch it)
Review: A fiction that is sadly too close to the tragic reality of the Iraqi war case. This is an action/thriller movie, but marketing this movie as an action movie was a moronic decision. The core of this movie is attempting to get to the heart of how unreliable intelligence about WMDs was cherry picked and used to start a war. An unnecessary war that has caused the loss of American life and wealth; it has cost us more than 1 trillion dollars and undermined our moral high-ground, our credibility and foreign policy for decades to come.
Movie explores a handful of fictitious characters who clearly have the corresponding real person (the name in the brackets is the real person).
- An opportunistic war cheerleader journalist (aka Judith Miller) who was used as a useful idiot by the administration to make the case for war.
- Incompetent administrator (aka Paul Bremer) who disbanded Iraqi Army and singlehandedly helped the start of sectarian violence and prolonged the conflict.
- Veteran intelligence officer (aka Jay Garner) who was pushed aside and his warnings and ideas for managing post occupation Iraqi were ignored.
- The “reliable” Iraqi informant (Rafid Ahmed Alwan aka 'Curveball') a conman that simply lied to German intelligence in order of getting his immigration status (green card) fixed.
- Main character (aka Richard "Monty" Gonzales the Army chief warrant officer charged with finding the WMDs) who believes in our reason for going to war but quickly becomes disheartened by false intelligence as he visits an empty site after an empty site.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Repo Men (2010)
Repo Men
Grade: D (Skip it)
Review: A futuristic dystopia where health-care is really out of control. An organ transplantation is reduced to a high interest equity loan; if you don't pay than organ is repossessed and patient dies. Even if we let Goldman manage health-care it is unlikely it would degenerate to this unrealistic scenario. Movie has some gory scenes that serve no purpose. The ending twist is interesting but unfortunately doesn't make up for the unrealistic boring story and poor acting.
Grade: D (Skip it)
Review: A futuristic dystopia where health-care is really out of control. An organ transplantation is reduced to a high interest equity loan; if you don't pay than organ is repossessed and patient dies. Even if we let Goldman manage health-care it is unlikely it would degenerate to this unrealistic scenario. Movie has some gory scenes that serve no purpose. The ending twist is interesting but unfortunately doesn't make up for the unrealistic boring story and poor acting.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Brooklyn's Finest (2010)
Brooklyn's Finest
Grade: C- (Rent it)
Review: An interesting cop story with huge potential. It follows independently the life of three NYPD cops; a street cop few days before retirement (Richard Gere), an undercover cop deeply infiltrated into a drug gang (Don Cheadle), and a narcotics officer (Ethan Hawke). Each characters is struggling with their demons and dealing with their specific family challenges of a cop life. The movie builds up these stories (similar to Crash) but unfortunately after all the build up it delivers a conclusion that seemed rushed and unsatisfactory.
You would expect something better from Antoine Fuqua the director of the Training Day. I sincerely hope he doesn't start delivering bomb after bomb like M. Night Shyamalan.
Grade: C- (Rent it)
Review: An interesting cop story with huge potential. It follows independently the life of three NYPD cops; a street cop few days before retirement (Richard Gere), an undercover cop deeply infiltrated into a drug gang (Don Cheadle), and a narcotics officer (Ethan Hawke). Each characters is struggling with their demons and dealing with their specific family challenges of a cop life. The movie builds up these stories (similar to Crash) but unfortunately after all the build up it delivers a conclusion that seemed rushed and unsatisfactory.
You would expect something better from Antoine Fuqua the director of the Training Day. I sincerely hope he doesn't start delivering bomb after bomb like M. Night Shyamalan.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
She's Out of My League (2010)
She's Out of My League
Grade: C (Rent it)
Review: Nothing memorable but it had some funny moments. It is worth renting.
Grade: C (Rent it)
Review: Nothing memorable but it had some funny moments. It is worth renting.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Shutter Island (2010)
Shutter Island
Grade: B- (Watch it)
Review: Flawed but worthy. It was fun and suspenseful to follow the characters. Scorsese directed this well; however the book adaptation doesn't seem right and sometimes was very hard to follow all the side characters. After first part of the movie it became predictable. Overall an interesting movie.
Grade: B- (Watch it)
Review: Flawed but worthy. It was fun and suspenseful to follow the characters. Scorsese directed this well; however the book adaptation doesn't seem right and sometimes was very hard to follow all the side characters. After first part of the movie it became predictable. Overall an interesting movie.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Grade: C- (Rent it)
Review: Very few funny moments. Incredible waste of A class cast. I guess it mocks and increase awareness about black physiological operations and torture in military.
Grade: C- (Rent it)
Review: Very few funny moments. Incredible waste of A class cast. I guess it mocks and increase awareness about black physiological operations and torture in military.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Up in the Air (2009)
Up in the Air
Grade: A- (Watch it)
Review: An outstanding achievement; excellent story, script, acting, and directing. The whole cast did a superb job. George Clooney is a natural playing a corporate downsizing professional, Vera Farmiga is excellent in her role (BTW: She is incredibly sexy), and Anna Kendrick is really convincing as an inexperienced, overachieving and idealistic annoying young worker. Simple, yet very powerful life drama. Although it probably lacks memorable dialogs, with no second wasted on nonsensical fillers, and every scene being very natural (probably too real for some) you cannot help it but feel that the result was very elegant.
This is by far the best 2009 movie - I feel bad that I didn't watch it earlier. It just shows how bad marketing and unattractive title work.
Grade: A- (Watch it)
Review: An outstanding achievement; excellent story, script, acting, and directing. The whole cast did a superb job. George Clooney is a natural playing a corporate downsizing professional, Vera Farmiga is excellent in her role (BTW: She is incredibly sexy), and Anna Kendrick is really convincing as an inexperienced, overachieving and idealistic annoying young worker. Simple, yet very powerful life drama. Although it probably lacks memorable dialogs, with no second wasted on nonsensical fillers, and every scene being very natural (probably too real for some) you cannot help it but feel that the result was very elegant.
This is by far the best 2009 movie - I feel bad that I didn't watch it earlier. It just shows how bad marketing and unattractive title work.
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