Category Archives: Movies

Movie Review: In Time

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Nothing gets me into the theater faster than a good sci-fi premise, and the one at the core of In Time is about as good as they come.  Considering the massive marketing budget this film had, you probably know it already, but in case you are allergic to trailers, in this world humans are genetically engineered to stop aging at  25… and after that, minutes are currency.  The rich are immortal, and the poor live day to day.  And if it sounds like it might play out a bit heavy handed, you’d be right.  But you have to keep in mind that writer/director David Niccol is responsible for Gattaca and The Truman Show, both of which are solid movies, with the combined subtlety of a shotgun at 3 feet.

We saw 2 trailers for this movie over the summer.  The first looked like sci-fi chase porn.  With oooooo so sexy Justin(!!) front and center.  The second made the sci-fi premise more the focus: the glowing green arm clocks ticking away the seconds of the stars lives as they struggle to stay 25 forever.  The question for me was which of these 2 movies was I actually going to see…

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Movie Review: Primer

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The best no budget sci-fi movie you’ve probably never heard of.  Stop reading, and go find this movie by any means necessary.

From the description and reviews I knew this one was a bit of a crapshoot, but it had a bunch of pieces that often work for me: A budget of just $7k.  A real sci-fi premise.  Writer and Director are the same guy.  They screened it at OSCON years ago, but besides the Slashdot review, I don’t recall hearing anything about it when it came out 7 years ago.  But hey, it’s less than 90 minutes long and on Netflix, so why not?

I was absolutely blown away, but I won’t lie: this is a hard movie to follow.  This is very much an independent film from writer/director Shane Carruth.  He also stars as Aaron (and is the better of the two leads).

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Review: Tucker & Dale vs Evil

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Tucker & Dale do for Slasher films what Sean did for Zombies.

The name sorta says it all, doesn’t it?  Tucker & Dale are a pair of hillbillies with the worst luck in the south.  They just want to clean up their new vacation home, drink some beers, and catch some fish, but a gang of horror film stereotype college kids just won’t stop messing with them.  The film is a surprisingly awesome send up of the standard horror/slasher genre flick.  Where normally you would expect the hillbillies to be the force of evil that the innocent and attractive teenagers must contend with, Tucker & Dale turn the premise upside down, and then shake the crap out of it until buckets of blood and gore falls out.  And holy crap does it work…

The casting is excellent.  Reaper’s Tyler Levine and Firefly’s Alan Tudyk are our likable hillbilly stars.  Levine especially turns in a surprisingly innocent and warm performance given the nature of the movie.  By the end, you will feel for the guy.  Nobody deserves what is happening to him less.  My wife has a bit of a thing for Tudyk, so please accept my apologies as I say he sucked so badly, that I wish there was a larger and more intense version of capital letters that I could use to re-enforce just how much he should stay away from my wife.  Unless he’s married and faithful.  In which case he did a solid job and while I don’t think he got as many good one-liners as he deserves, he did great. 30 Rock’s Katrina Bowden is the super hottie female lead/love interest.  She turns in a decent performance: it was nice to see her used a little more significantly than the material she gets on TV where the joke essentially is that “She is Super Hot”.

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How to Apply to Pixar

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In the mid 90s, my dream was animation… but Disney had peaked and the heir to the throne was Pixar.  Plus, I loved computers.  I animated a pair of 60 second short films and absolutely loved every minute of it… although trying to render a movie on a PC that takes all night to render 2-3 seconds, and requires half of your hard drive to store a hundred uncompressed frames… well, the technology wasn’t quite up to my ambition.

But not this guy.  He animated a bit of a resume to try to get in at Pixar.  It’s clever and charming… and I hope it works out for him.  I guess my place in line will have to be after this guy.  Very jealous: when I toured the Pixar campus a few months ago I discovered a place filled with an amazingly positive energy, and an off the chart amount of brain power.

Movies: Moneyball

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I’m a bit of a baseball guy.  I go to the ballpark and watch my beloved Detroit Tigers play whenever I can.  I even have tickets to tonights game.  I read Michael Lewis’ Moneyball a few weeks ago and enjoyed it tremendously.  What’s there not to love?  An underdog ball team (the Oakland A’s) with no budget trying to take on the Yankes with a budget nearly 4x their own.  Billy Beane is a bit of a dick, but a likable one.  And the secret weapon is… Math!  A hundred years of tradition leading to on old boys network of baseball men valuing things like the RBI over more meaningful statistics like On Base Percentage.  One of the stars of the book is an economist.  It’s awesome.

Well Moneyball the book is a hard one to consider making the transition to the big screen. The book dedicates a tons of pages of itself to a baseball draft (the movie ignores that).  But that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a movie with a ton of ideas.  Ideas that would be awfully hard to visualize on screen.  Thankfully the movie mostly pulls it off… and while it has flaws, overall this is a really enjoyable movie, thanks no doubt to Aaron Sorkin, and Brad Pitt.

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