Drew at the Movies

I realized last night that I've watched a bunch of movies (both theatrically and at home) in the past couple of weeks. So I think it might be time to do a few reviews.

Eagle Eye
I don't know why, but Shia LaBeouf irritates me. Maybe it's because he's in everything, and maybe it's because he has a great agent (look at his female costars...he has an agent that rivals Dane Cook). But whenever he's on screen, I get a little irritated, and I'm sure that affected the way I watched this movie.

I came in with low expectations, and the movie didn't disappoint. I thought it was generic...to the point of being somewhat boring. I think it was an interesting idea, but that kind of idea is pretty hard to pull off, it seems, because you don't see it done well very often. The characters are both way too trusting of the woman on the phone (I won't spoil it even though the twist is dumb) and not trusting enough over the course of the film. And the whole "twin" thing didn't really work for me.

And in the end, I think the writers of the film just didn't do a whole lot of research. They wrote the movie the way I think I'd write a movie about things that I'm not overly familiar with - simply making assumptions about how things work. And that just comes off as lazy.

I'll give it 2/5 stars. If you're bored and want to turn off your brain, it has pretty explosions.

Traitor
Let me start by saying that Don Cheadle is awesome. I don't think there's a cooler man in Hollywood, and he's always doing something cool. He can play American, and he can play a wide variety of other nationalities. He can do comedy (Oceans' # movies), and he can do drama (Hotel Rwanda). He's one of my favorite actors, and he delivers in this movie.

But outside of that, there just isn't a whole lot to work with. If anyone's seen the episode of LOST from season one called "The Greater Good" - it's the same plot. Good guy Muslim is recruited to work inside a terrorist sleeper cell. It's an interesting plot, but I think LOST did it better, honestly.

I think it's funny that Steve Martin (yes, the comedian) came up with the idea for the movie. And that might be why it doesn't work the way I think it wants to. But the movie basically relies on Cheadle, and he's able to carry it.

I'll give it 3/5 stars because of it. It also features Guy Pearce, who's an extremely underrated actor if you ask me.

Lakeview Terrace
Roger Ebert loved this movie, and a lot of other people hated it. I'm probably somewhere in the middle, but I thought it was enjoyable. The plot revolves around an interracial couple that moves in next to a police officer with some issues, and it turns into a neighbor rivalry.

These kinds of movies are typically comedies, where one guy pulls a variety of pranks on his neighbor, and the neighbor retaliates in his own way. This movie, though, is not a comedy, and the back-and-forth between the two neighbors is a little more sinister but still realistic.

One of the interesting things about the movie is the villain, Samuel L. Jackson, is given just as much of the spotlight as the couple. You're supposed to feel sorry for his character, even as he does his best to terrorize his neighbors. You see him in private moments where he wonders what he's doing, and you're given an explanation midway through the film of his motivations.

It's actually an interesting examination, if not brief and slight, on the status of race relations in the country. The interracial marriage side of things is the catalyst for a lot of the action of the movie, and it's definitely present the rest of the movie. But while Guess Who's Coming to Dinner made it the key element of the film, Lakeview Terrace only exposes the racism when the goings get tough.

There were some annoying parts of the film - I never really felt sorry for Chris (the husband), and I don't think a lot of his motivations were warranted. I guess they felt like, if they were going to make Samuel L. Jackson's character morally ambiguous, they needed to do the same for his enemy. Also, I couldn't help but think that he looked almost exactly like GOB from Arrested Development.

All in all, I'll give it 3/5 stars too. It isn't great, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's worth a watch if you're interested.

District 9
I saw this movie with Tucker and Ashley on Monday, and they both loved it. But when I walked out of the theater, I really didn't know whether or not I liked it or not. And, as I sit on Thursday morning, I'm still not 100% sure about how I feel.

District 9 is a different take on the alien genre. A giant ship, not unlike the ship from V or Independence Day, arrives on Earth to hover over a major city. But instead of New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, or Tokyo...the ship lands over Johannesburg in South Africa. And instead of arriving with guns blazing like in alien invasion films, the alien ship arrives in disrepair, and many of the aliens are starving to death.

So they're taken down to Earth, immediately below their ship, and they're put into slums outside the city. In an obvious connection to apartheid in South Africa, the aliens (called "prawns" in the film) live in terrible conditions, and they're hated by the human citizens of the city. Life for the prawns is significantly restricted, and the film begins with the attempt to forcibly "evict" all of the aliens to a sort of "concentration camp" facility far away from the city.

The movie focuses on an employee of MNU, a corporation that is put in charge of watching over the aliens in the city. Because of this, you get to see a lot of aspects of life in this world - from human intolerance to the deep secrets of the slums themselves.

And while there are a lot of very intriguing aspects of the movie, at the end of it, it's a chase-based action film. And I wondered, as I was watching, how the movie would've worked if the alien part was taken out.

All in all, I think it was a pretty solid film. I don't think it was the A+ movie that Ashley said it was, but I think it was innovative and thought-provoking. I wasn't sure how the short film (Alive in Joburg, directed by the same guy who directed this) was going to translate into a feature film, but they kept a lot of the same documentary-style elements. And I really liked that they did that. It's cool that Hollywood (Peter Jackson, in particular) saw a great short film, and they allowed the director to bring his vision to a mainstream audience.

These guys (Jackson and the director) are rumored to be involved in a potential Halo movie - I hope that happens because I think it would be done well.

Final grade - 4/5

Inglourious Basterds
I'll be honest. I don't really love Quentin Tarentino as much as a lot of people. I think Pulp Fiction is really good, and I enjoyed Kill Bill Volume II. But at the end of the day, I don't really care for the rest of them. I think his films really appeal to film buffs (they're full of references to classic films, both domestic and foreign), and the over-the-top parts of his movies don't work for me.

But I still think they're worth seeing - the only film of his that I haven't seen is Jackie Brown, which is probably the least heralded of Tarantino's films. And we decided to see this movie the day we moved into Ashley's new condo.

And it's long. It's a bit slow. It's extremely tense.

But I think it's also a very-well-made movie. I actually saw it a second time when I visited Fort Worth a couple weeks ago, and I enjoyed it much more the second time around. Basically because, when you're watching it the first time around, you're pretty much waiting for something bad to happen in every scene.

First of all, there are only about five real scenes in the movie, and it's 150 minutes long. Do the math, and each scene is about 30 minutes long. And there are three major instances in the film where something unfortunate happens, but the other shoe doesn't immediately drop. So you're just sitting there, seemingly forever, going through all the possible scenarios in your mind. And since its' Tarantino, you're going over over-the-top scenarios as well.

And so most of the movie, you're waiting to see who's about to die or who's about to show up and ruin everything. And don't get me wrong, it's an interesting cinematic experience, but it's a lot like eating spicy foods. Sometimes it's just so much self-inflicted torture that you can't enjoy yourself.

That's why I definitely enjoyed the film more the second time around. Since I knew what was going to happen, I was able to enjoy the film for what it was. I was able to prepare myself for everything that was coming, and it really made the experience a lot more satisfying.

Like all of Tarantino's films, it's simply beautifully done. The casting was great, and the acting was just superb. Brad Pitt did a great job, and I fell in love with Melanie Laurent as Shoshanna. But Christoph Waltz, in his first American film, really steals the show as an SS soldier named Hans Landa. Every single second he's on the screen is tense, and he has a really brilliant way of giving his character a gentlemanly politeness for such a horrible man.

His performance, alone, makes the movie worth seeing if you ask me. I wholeheartedly expect him to get an Oscar nomination, and I can't imagine how he won't win. He was just great.

And that's why I'll give it 5/5 stars. As long as you go in with the correct expectations (that it'll be tense, that it'll gross you out at parts, that it's a Tarantino-styled film, and that it's 75% subtitled), I think you'll really enjoy it.

All in all, I didn't really hate any of these movies, and depending on your mood, you could probably like all of them. In fact, you'll probably need to be in the right mood to like any of these movies. Because you probably have to be in the right state of mind to see District 9 or Inglourious Basterds.

Feel free to post your own thoughts on each movie - I'm always interested in seeing what other people thought about things I've seen.