Movie Reviews

I finished watching the last DVD of 24 Season 2 tonight. What a crappy way to end it. Guess I now have to start in on Season 3. It's pretty good for being a TV show. But there are a few things I've noticed about it. The daughter storyline is basically useless. Anyone that helps Jack seems to have a life expectancy of like 4-6 hours. And somehow really important events only happen on the hour. That said, I'll still start watching Season 3 at some point I'm sure. Overall I thought the first 18 hours were really intense. The next 3 were still good, but not quite as good. And the last couple of hours it felt like everything went off the tracks. Probably would have liked it better had they not done a cliffhanger type ending to the season. The biggest problem I have with the show is since everything occurs in 1 day, this Bauer guy must have a healing factor like Wolverine. Through the course of the 'day' he gets a huge self inflicted gash in his head, he's in multiple car crashes, he's in a plane crash (that's right, a plane crash), a long piece of shrapnel is embedded in his leg (which he subsequently just pulls out), and then the really bad stuff started happening to him. Yet through it all by the next hour the injury from the previous hour doesn't seem to bother him anymore. He must have a healing factor to the extreme.

Since I'm on the subject, guess I can float in reviews of some of the other movies I've seen recently. We watched Shopgirl not too long ago. It's different. It's based on a novella by Steve Martin (who also did the screenplay, and starred in the movie). I wanted to like it. And I don't regret watching it. But I didn't really like the movie.

While I was on vacation I got a chance to watch The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The short version of the review is "ZZZzzzzzzz". I can elaborate a big for the longer version. I remember reading the book as young lad. And this seemed really faithful to the book as I recall. I remember when it first came out everyone was comparing the movie to "Lord of the Rings". I didn't see it. Sure, both have characters on a journey who are given strange mystical gifts (by Santa in one, Elves in the other, which is a connection I hadn't really thought about before). It felt almost tedious at times though. And I never really felt like the characters were in any danger, even during the fight scenes. Possibly because I had read the book and knew how it was going to end, but it could just be that there's just too much in the movie that occurs out of the blue just to advance along the plot. And the whole religious symbolism feels forced. I mean really forced. To the point of it makes the rest of the events that occur seem useless. I'll bet it was that way in the book too, but back when I read it I would read just about anything and the quality and merit of the work didn't matter that much (heck, I remember back then thinking Runaway Ralph was great when I read that).

More recently I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Basically I watched this after seeing how much money the second on made on it's opening weekend. I figure there must be something to this. And there is. Haven't seen the second on yet, but the first one was a lot of fun. An adventure flick that doesn't take itself too seriously. The Jack Sparrow character was just flat out fun to watch. Although try as I might I never really bought into Orlando Bloom's character, I just kept seeing Legolas and was waiting for him to pull out his bow and arrow.

Finally, I've been watching the new Blade series on Spike. The guy playing Blade (Sticky Fingaz) doesn't quite pull it off as well as Wesley Snipes, but does a respectable job of walking around being terse and acting tough. The joy of this series is actually in the writing. Believe it or not, there's actually an underlying story, and it's not too bad. And I'll just say that Jill Wagner doesn't hurt the show (Yowsa).