Real Movie Views

Ever since that embarrassing moment on Oprah’s TV couch Tom Cruise has slipped a horrible slope in the public eye. However a steady set of good performances has lead up to another great Cruise film, but not in the all out action epic you might expect.

Valkyrie is the story of one of the last attempts on Hitler’s life before his demise in world war two. Tom Cruise plays a colonel in the German army, who gets disfigured after an attack in the desert which leaves him with one eye and one hand. His belief in the war is crumbled by what is happening to Germany and how he knows it will be perceived after the conflict.
Cruise joins a group of other army personnel who feel that something needs to happen to stop the war. After a few botched attempts Cruise and a great supporting cast, mostly British manage to set off a bomb with Hitler in the room.  Unfortunately the attempt does not go to plan – although you kind of already know how Hitler dies.
Tom Cruise is back to his best with a very convincing performance on the big screen. You can tell he’s thought hard on how to revive his career and this one does the job, looking forward to the next masterpiece Tom!

In this prequel to the Underworld franchise, we follow Lucian from birth to his liberation from slavery under the vampires, where begins in earnest the centuries-old war between Lycan and vampire.

Starring: Michael Sheen, Bill Nighy and Rhona Mitra

Movie Release: January 23, 2009

Genre: Action/Fantasy/Horror

Running Time: 93 minutes

Visually this movie is stunning.  With seamless CGI effects, dramatic lighting and perfectly choreographed and suspenseful fight scenes, director Patrick Tatapoulos pulls all the thrillingly eerie feel of the previous Underworld movies into this third installment.  The costuming is at times brilliant and at others merely awkward, but one supposes vampires get to flaunt fashion in any manner they choose.  The actors’ performances were, while not mind-blowing, more than adequate to the occasion and one suspects that Michael Sheen (Lucian), Bill Nighy (Viktor) and Rhona Mitra (Sonja) have quite a bit more in them if given the proper script.  In short, each technical segment of the movie came together to produce a film of fair-to-good quality which the easily satisfied moviegoer will find quite enjoyable.  If that sounds like praise so faint as to be damning, that’s because it is.

Where this movie fails is in the story.  The writers took an approximately twenty-second flashback from the first movie and expanded it into an entire script.  Stunningly, they manage to do this without giving Underworld fans a single scrap of new information.  At the end of the movie, one knows no more than what one already saw in the twenty-second flashback.  Rise of the Lycans can be best defined by what it does not have, and that is never a good sign.  It has no additional backstory.  It – inexplicably, due to the first movie’s proof of his importance during that timeline – has no Kraven.  It has no Kate Beckinsale, not even an expansion on her backstory, though we know this, too, happened at that point in the timeline or thereabouts.  It’s a movie about war and it has no war.  One blink-and-you-miss-it battle and the occasional short fight scene do not a war movie make.

Rise of the Lycans offers little more than a love story, and one the viewer has trouble working up excitement for as we’ve already seen the interesting bits.  The main focus of the plot is to instruct the viewer, with agonizing slowness, that Lucian and Sonja are deeply in love.  We don’t get to watch this happen either, however.  The viewer is introduced to the story after the fact.  Once we’ve been treated to eighty minutes of heartfelt assurances of this forbidden love, Sonja is killed.  We already knew this would happen.  We’ve even seen the death scene in a previous movie.  It is boring.  With the casus belli in place, the movie wraps up with Lucian on the verge of open warfare with vampires for personal reasons and leading Lycans with more general social indignities fueling their vengeance.

All in all, a decent movie but a poorly written and redundant story.  Rise of the Lycans lives to disappoint.

It was probably incredibly easy to cast the always-wooden Keanu Reeves to play the dispassionate alien Klaatu for this botched and completely flubbed remake of what is considered a classic, not only of the science fiction genre, but of film in general. With the remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” Hollywood once again looked to its past in an attempt at mining some creativity and turning it into dollar signs. Creative license for sure, since they couldn’t even seem to keep the basic premise of the Earth standing still intact.

The special effects seemed to be the only thing the directors and producers worried about. Be damned with the story and with the plot. Characters? Who needs characters, they’re just backdrops to the big scary robot and mysterious glowing spheres which have apparently been hidden around the globe since the 1920s observing the human race and the condition of the Earth.

“Your planet?” Klaatu asks of the Secretary of Defense, played gamely by Oscar-winner Kathy Bates, despite a script with the dimensional diversity of a piece of drywall. Of course, the director made Bates play it clueless. As if anyone intelligent enough to serve in the White House… oh, wait… never mind…

Any way, that gets us to the… female lead… played by Jennifer Connelly. Who tries, she really tries, to bring some life to this character, as a spunky and respected astro-biologist. They keep the idea of her being a single mother, with a deceased soldier husband.

But this film team manages to lose the humanity of the relationship Klaatu developed with the boy in the original film – which was one of the prime driving factors in the original for Klaatu to change his mind and give the human race another chance to clean up its act. And they give the audience a little boy who is so mouthy and unlikable that if in Klaatu’s position, would have caused any sentient being of any species to accelerate the plans to eliminate the human race from the planet, instead of halting them.

All in all, “The Day The Earth Stood Still” is so awful in direction, its script, and its plot, that no amount of “gee whiz” CGI animation can save it.

The tagline of The Ruins is ‘terror has evolved.’ Since the monster of this movie is part of Mayan folklore and is thus ancient, this slogan makes no sense. It does sound cool, though. Four Americans – two guys and two girls – are vacationing in a Mexico resort. Instead of staying put at the pool, where they can drink margaritas and paw at each other, they take a side-trip to an archaeological dig. The ruins are a Mayan step pyramid located deep in the jungle, and getting there is such a hassle that only people who are either very determined or very stupid would bother. Since this is a horror movie, it’s not hard to figure out what category our heroes fall into. Upon arrival, they are greeted by a bunch of screaming Mayan locals who herd them to the top of the pyramid. The Mayans surround the ruins and our heroes are trapped. Their surroundings: a well, a few tents and a bunch of vines with pretty red flowers. Things fall apart quickly, mostly because of stupidity. A jaunt into the depths of the well leads to a broken back. A pair of legs get broken, and then amputated, in a lovingly sadistic scene that takes forever. One of the characters starts cutting herself with a knife, revealing tiny little vines swimming about in her bloodstream. Turns out that the vines are carnivorous and can talk, sort of – they imitate cell phones ringing and American tourists having sex quite well. The Ruins is part of the Stupid American Tourists Must Die genre, a horror movie that features foreigners killing Americans traveling abroad because they’re Americans. This movie doesn’t work for a lot of reasons, but it boils down to the fact that a carnivorous plant is a pretty goofy movie monster. The special effects – such as they are – consist of moving vines. Wow. None of the characters ever rise above the level of road kill; good thing, because the movie is hard enough to sit through as is, and if we cared about the characters it would be impossible to watch. It’s interesting that the rise of Stupid American Tourists Must Die genre has coincided with the fall of America’s image abroad. One of the characters in The Ruins has a speech that boils down to this: we’re Americans. Nobody messes with us. Not unless you’re a man-eating plant, anyway.