Sunday Movie Experience

It was my first SMEx and the weather was horrible, though i didn't let it dampen my spirits. We met up in Billabong before hand for the pre-movie beer. There was an unhealthy amount of guys with umbrellas but i decided to let that one pass.

In Hancock, Will Smith plays a lazy-drunk-bum who is lucky enough to have superhero powers. Its a pretty interesting concept and had a lot of scope for good superhero related comedy. The movie doesn't disappoint, with some great laughs in the first half of the movie and a pretty decent performance from Will Smith.

Unfortunatly this is where it started to go downhill, the second half of the movie took itself far to seriously and broke the formula which worked so well in the first half. Don't get me wrong, i still enjoyed the movie, i just think i would have enjoyed an entire movie of drunken superhero laughs more.

Technically Hancock has everything, some great laughs, a very attractive lady, decent action scenes, some drama, suspense and a couple of interesting twists. Maybe it was trying too hard to include everything.

Still if you have an evening to spare, there are enough laughs in this movie to make up for its inconsistant genre.

The Hoff says: Too bad I couldn't fly away when I was drunk

To abstract Manooh's thoughts about the movie: It's probably the longest commercial for a city ever.

The plot: Mathematical genius (Jim Sturgess as Ben Campbell) needs a lot of money to study at Harvard medical school. He is seduced by a classmate beauty to count cards in Las Vegas for his daytime teacher/nighttime "criminal" brain (Kevin Spacey as Prof. Micky Rosa). Everything seems to be honkey dory..

Sometimes you sense rudimentary attempts to make the movie deeper in a psychological way - showing the slow transition between fun and curiosity of gambling and the Las Vegas lifestyle to getting dragged too deep into it and finally completely loosing their own identity. But all of this is still shown through rose-coloured glasses. There are just not enough mind games, personal conflicts, psychological and physiological punishments. But maybe this wasn't the creator's intend anyway. Maybe they just wanted to focus on the dull card counting part?

Anyway, the movie seems to be just another contract work for a random director, "stick to the script and we are fine"-flair, without a personal touch. And with a below average Kevin Spacey (who might kept in mind the low skills of his co-actors) and Lawrence Fishburne's character drowning in the story, you can still enjoy the movie if you have low or no expectations at all.

That said I am left with head-shaking questions:
Why did they always go into the same casino?
Why did they use so obvious hand signs? and
How is a black wig and a fake beard keeping you disguised in a facial recognition software?

Viva Las Vegas!!

The Hoff says: I seem to have had some trouble in Las Vegas too

Being the new guy I was conned into writing this review by the non-Dutch part of the board. (Though AVL quickly agreed...) Anyway, about ten of us got together in BillaBong last Sunday to properly prepare for the movie. It was quicly clear that the weekend had been quite tough on everyone. Too much alchohol was consumed, Poland, the CMO's arm was on fire, and someone reminded me of a certain Christmas party two years ago. Good times.

The movie was entertaining. According to Wikipedia the new Hulk movie is a reboot of the previous one, made by Marvel Studios this time who reacquired the rights. (The previous Hulk movie (released in 2003) was in the making since 1990!)

Through flashbacks it's made clear that the main character, Bruce Banner, has undergone some kind of failed science experiment and now lives in hiding in Brasil. If Bruce gets too excited he turns into a slightly larger green guy, as seen on the movie poster. Inevitably this happens various times during the movie as the military, led by general Thunderbolt Ross, tries to capture him. Since military equipment is doomed to fail against the Hulk they experiment on a Russian guy hoping to create something that can match Bruce's transformed powers.

Aside of the power struggling there's a love story between Bruce and his former collegue/lover, Betty Ross. Betty also happens to be the daughter of Thunderbolt, making it all more interesting.

Kermit the frog says: It's not easy being green.

This being the first time there's a SMEx evening while I'm in Oslo, I was happy to join that big group of 14 who went to see the new Indiana Jones. I was promptly given the job to write the review, so here it is.

We follow Indy as he suddenly finds himself yanked into the middle of a Soviet secret mission, which revolves around the secrets of the eponymous Crystal Skull. It leads him (and not only him ) to Peru to eventually discover it.

Having been at the catch up event the day before was very conducive, if not essential, for me to enjoy the film, as it remains very true to the spirit of its predecessors and often requires a good recollection of them to succeed - it's got the classic classroom scene, the comic action scenes, disgusting crawling things , Indy shattering/ripping apart/in other ways destroying countless irreplacable artifacts, and generally lots of back-references. What it luckily doesn't have is annoying/screaming chicks/children (Temple of Doom anyone? Bleh).

The special effects are naturally more sophisticated, but the film luckily doesn't rely on them more than the previous ones to work. Of course the plot has the usual dose of supernatural forces - which brings me to my main gripe about the film: As the film closes in on the final showdown, what was probably meant as a tongue-in-cheek reuse of an old and tried theme increasingly comes across as too cheesy and very worn-out, and generally not creative enough for what we've come to expect from Indiana Jones. The showdown itself was a huge letdown for me, it really made me cringe. Many of the action scenes actually did - they are supposed to be over-the-top and slightly impossible (complete with thousands of bullets fired at close range and... missing), that's Indy for you, but the film makers really went overboard with some of them. I can only muster up so much suspension of disbelief before it becomes annoying and you begin to be insulted for being expected to believe anyone could actually survive *that*.

All in all, while you won't walk out of the cinema with that "now that was interesting!"-feeling which Last Crusade gave me (IMO still by far the best one of the series), it's certainly a flick you can enjoy if you liked its predecessors.

Hoff says: I won't have that many grey hairs when I'm 65!

We are in 2035 some 25 years after an outbreak of a deadly and unstoppable virus in Scotland. The government in London decided at the time of the outbreak to refit Hadrian's wall to prevent anyone and anyhing to escape from Scotland and let nature settle things by itself inside the confined area. This version of the wall is made out of steel and guarded by some rather effective fully automatic sentry guns so England's "Endlösung" proved pretty effective for many years.

But nature is smarter and the virus manage to cross the border and soon a team of soldiers and scientists are headed into the death zone with the mission to capture a method or knowledge of how to make a vaccine.

One know that "something" has survived the virus, and luckily for us, the spectators, the "something" turns out be true madmen that live in full anarchy with the acquired habit of cannibalism. These people must have seen Mad Max before the disaster because the hairstyle and behavior is back in high fashion. There are other groups of surviving people as well, and these people apparently preferred the worst aspects of the medieval and roman time epochs when they decided how to run their societies. All in all, action movie lovers have nothing to fear.

I do not really think the owners of the Bentley brand are too happy to see that their model gets outrunned by some homemade junk. I have lost faith in Bentley and will never consider buying it. I am also skeptical that the GSM network is still operational in 2035, but maybe we'll make everyhing backward compatible in the future.

Hoff says: This movie had everything except a beach, and... The Hoff