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Since “Twelve Monkeys“, there is no need to make another “time travel” movie, as it was brilliantly done. But people will try, anyway.

IMDB Plot:

An ATF agent travels back in time to save a woman from being murdered, falling in love with her during the process.

Let me put this again: since Twelve Monkeys, which explained beautifully how time travel works, there is no need to another time travel movie (maybe saving “The Butterfly Effect“), but people still try. And I don’t see way.

The movie starts with a good idea: some sort of technology that can see the past. That’s the good thing. The story, then, goes around some governmental people tracking some explosion that killed thousands of people, including marines and navy people. That would be a good thriller if they kept things that way.

Unfortunately, the writers thought a simple thriller wasn’t good enough, so they decided to add some romance. And did that in a stupid way: suddenly, out of nowhere, the main character decide to go after some chick. And nobody question if he is not going too far, if he is really doing his job, that kind of thing that would normally happen in a government.

There is a problem, though: the chick is dead, and they are seeing her in the past. What to do now? Let’s send the main character to the past too! And, from there, the movie go downhill. Maybe if writers read something about time travel (the theories) and saw “The Butterfly Effect”, they would know that things change when you change the past. But no, things go all the same way, as if they guy was already there. Oh, and he saves the girl! How would he go back to the past and save the girl if the girl isn’t dead now?

Maybe it is me, but it seems that Denzel Washington is playing the same character over and over again: government/army guy, though, with a good heart, yada yada yada. I mean, this is what he did in “Man on Fire”, “Courage Under Fire” and “The Bone Collector”. Really tiresome. And, for some reason, all the actors follow his lead: all tired, no great acting…

Fun for the first time, even funnier to forget it two hours late.

IMDB plot:

A struggling salesman (Will Smith) takes custody of his son (Jaden Smith) as he’s poised to begin a life-changing professional endeavor.

Lets start with the fun part: Jaden Smith, who plays Will Smith character in the movie, is his real life son. Amazing that they didn’t call Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith real life wife, to play the wife in the movie too.

Anyway, it is an amazing movie. I can’t say it is because it is well written or well directed, but because it is inspired by a real life story, although a movie inspired by a real life story that is badly directed or badly written will suck anyway. But it is quite amazing what the main character, a divorced jobless father does to find his own happiness while taking care of his single son. And that he never let himself fall into depression no matter how bad things are.

Will Smith did a pretty good job on this movie. Some of scenes he did an amazing job just by his looks than by his words. And I guess it was a something he would like to do, as he pointed once on the “Actor’s Studio” about his relationship with his father and one scene on “The Fresh Prince of Belair”, when Will (the character) has to fight a second loss of his father (and it was one of the most strong scenes on the subject I can recall). Jaden Smith, on the other hand, isn’t all good in the movie, and I can’t blame this eight year old boy in his first experience in front of the camera. To me, he spent almost 3/4 of the movie with a pretty strong stomach-ache.

Two scenes were pretty touching, in my opinion: the first is when, after some days sleeping on a homeless shelter, Chris (the father) is putting his kid to sleep when the son put his hand on his father face and says “You are a good papa”. It is easy to imagine what a father that had to face what he faced till that moment and hear that would feel. The second is in the end, when the Will Smith gets the answer about the job. He doesn’t say a word and, yet, you can imagine exactly what is going inside him.

My guess is that Will Smith will be nominated for an Oscar for this movie.

IMDB plot:

A farmer, a smuggler, and a syndicate of businessmen match wits over the possession of a priceless diamond.

Let’s talk honestly: if you are a guy, would you see a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, remembering his old movies? I wouldn’t, but there was nothing better to do, so I hit the cinema. And, oh boy, how wrong I was. He is not the “looking good boy” anymore and now looks like a real actor. I can’t point when that happened because I didn’t watch “The Departed”, but it looks like he finally managed to follow Bad Pitt steps and get away from that image.

Ok, so the movie is quite violent, but I guess it isn’t unrealistic: as far as we know from the news about Africa, things are pretty terrible there. And that’s the basic plot for the movie: the continual war between the people for money, the raise of cartels and guerrilas to “recruit” (actually, kidnap) people to work for them.

The story goes about those guerrilas kidnapping people to work in diamond extraction, a dad that is kidnapped, a son that is “recruited” to work as a fighter in the guerrila, the father going after his son when free and a diamond smuggler trying to get out of Africa while his boss wants more diamonds from the war zone. In the middle of that, there is a pink diamond, the “blood diamond”, that can free everyone.

The acting is good, but somewhat weird. DiCaprio is acting is pretty good, as I pointed before. Djimon Hounsou, playing again another slave black man (as he did in Amistad), is good, although I didn’t get his motives for fighting for a son when his two daughters and wife were ok (and together). Jennifer Connelly, playing a reporter doing a job on the subject of the war diamonds, is so and so. But the problem is that, although those main actors work is pretty good, they don’t seem to fit together.

I just think the producers tried to “play safe” on their recommendations: although the movie says, all the time, the countries that are in war because of the diamonds smuggle their production to “safe” countries, the end message say that you should never buy a diamond from the countries in war. They kill their own message by pointing that a big share of the diamonds from the safe countries come from countries in war. Lame.

IMDB plot:

Jack owes an unpaid debt to Davy Jones and his army of sea-phantoms…his soul. Now, he must find a way to save himself from becoming one of them, and suffering forever.

The first movie of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” was somewhat good. Now, they thought: “Oh, you know. Maybe people think that isn’t enough brains in the story, so let’s add some twists”. And, in the end, the did a quite mess with the story, adding several different factions, each one fighting against each other, for something that you can’t even realize what the fuck is (and maybe not even the characters).

Johnny Deep character come from “crazy dude” to “gay dude”. His movements don’t look like someone that stayed under the hot sun for too long (as it was pointing in the first movie as the reason for him to walk like that), to someone that is simply that type of gay that have to act like little girls (and not all gays act like that). And the worst is that his character steals almost all the scenes, leaving the space for Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley characters. And the end is way terrible, in a sense that “there will be some sequel and you’ll have to watch it to understand why you lost two hours of your life watching this crap”.

Almost makes me want to download a botleg version and point that 1) it wasn’t worth waiting for a proper rip and 2) it was far away from worth going to the cinema.

IMDB plot:

Ethan Hunt comes face to face with a dangerous and sadistic arms dealer while trying to keep his identity secret in order to protect his girlfriend.

Oh, “Mission: Impossible”, the series, was pretty good. They did a lot of hard stuff and even sometimes you thought they were screwed up, but it was always part of the plan. Them, someone decided to do movies about the series and screwed everything up. In the first one, Brian de Palma did a pretty good job, bringing the series to the modern era, but still with a touch of the original series; in the second, John Woo added a lot of explosions and took away some pieces of the original series; now, in the third, J.J. Abrams managed to really screw up the series. There is nothing impossible anymore and the movie looks a lot like 007 on steroids: a lot of gadgets that can’t even exist in this reality coming from nowhere. Well, maybe there is some sort of “The Bourne Identity” on it (strong enemies, that can take a whole IMF team — and that’s why the original series was so good: one single agent was no match, but the whole team acted as one and could take anything).

“Mission: Impossible” is ruined as a silver screen production, unless someone put some brains in scripting and directing again. Right now, even “Die Hard” has less explosions and more brains.

IMDB plot:

A naive young woman comes to New York and scores a job as the assistant to one of the city’s biggest magazine editors, the ruthless and cynical Miranda Priestly.

A movie about the shallowness of the fashion industry, told in a shallow way. I mean, Anne Hathaway is doing the same role she did in both “The Princess Diaries”, except that from schoolgirl to princess she goes from normal woman to super model in just one talk. And the story doesn’t catch up, it is always just another round of models running in circles showing clothes and character development is pretty weak.

Even if you compare Meryl Streep from this movie with the Meryl Streep from The Bridges of Madison County you see how her acting is superb, but her character in this movie doesn’t have a reason to be that way (or maybe, again, it is just because of the poor charcter development).

I definitely won’t watch it again.

IMDB plot:

Introduced to a volunteer opportunity with the Doctor’s Gift Program, Katie (Mika Boorem) signs up for a trip to China, where she meets Lin (Yi Ding), a girl with whom she shares a birthday. Lin has a facial deformity that discourages her from ever showing her face, but her friendship with Katie helps her start to see life in a new way.

You know that movies that you start watching for no good reason and simply can’t turn off? Well, that’s what happened with me with this movie.

At first, the movie shows two different families: the American one has a good life; the Chinese was pretty poor and the husband finds a little girl in some bushes (probably rejected by her mum). The American girl is a rela in the butt, she doesn’t respect anyone and abuse her parents; the Chinese girl is shy, does a lot of hard work and is always trying to help her foster-father. While the American girl have everything, she acts like she hate her life; the Chinese girl, although living with a deformity, seems happy to be alive.

One of the scenes that impressed me the most is when the American girl start working in the Chinese hospital. She goes to the little kids ward, where they take care of little kids with deformities. And she just breaks apart. I guess it shown exactly how we are not ready to think that not everyone lives a “perfect life”.

My guess is that this is a movie to help teenagers to understand how big this world is, that there are people living with way less than them and still feeling fine. Or maybe it was just a try to make more teenagers engage on charity work around the world.

It was a nice waste of time, but I wouldn’t look for the next session (but would definitely watch it again if I couldn’t find anything else to watch).

IMDB:

A documentary on Al Gore’s campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide.

Going to the theatre to see a documentary may be kinda strange. We all expect to see documentaries on “Discovery Channel” or “National Geographic” or anything like that. But it really is a good movie about something we never realize: how much CO2 we are “dropping” into the atmosphere and how this is affecting the planet.

The amount of information about global warming is amazing. Sometimes you don’t realize this, but the presentation shows how damaged the planet is. It is really really an eye-opener for what we do without noticing.

But the movie doesn’t focus everything on the global warming. Sometimes, the speech is cut and a piece of the live of Al Gore is shown to the public. The reason is clear: to make you feel bounded to his life, so you feel some “connection” with him and, thus, his speech doesn’t fall on deaf ears. The thing is that this, sometimes, make you feel like he is going to run for presidency again. The word around is that he isn’t going into politics again, but we never know.

Now, there is some “american” related stuff. Almost all of his speech, although pointing to a global problem, he sometimes point to problems with the american economy and, of course, the american president. He doesn’t bash the chinese governance, or the European presidents, but he does bash the american president.

I just would like to point some things that could be updated in the movie: Gore points that Australia didn’t sign the Kyoto pact but, recently, Australia started talks about a new Kyoto pack. And he could add that US$ 25 millions where lost due poor power saving options on Microsoft Windows.

Anyway, it is a good movie, even if you don’t believe that the global warming problem is a real thing. Really worth watching.

From the IMDB plot:

A sheriff investigating the disappearance of a young girl from a small island discovers there’s a larger mystery to solve among the island’s secretive, neo-pagan community.

A movie from Nicholas Cage can’t be bad. Or can it be? Unfortunately, it can. This is another of those “weird things happening”, “something supernatural going on on weird place”, “family people involved”, “unsuspecting ending” and so on. All old cliches from mystery movies.

The plot is so weird that even Cage acting seems out of place. Sometimes he is so mad he could kick a woman in a face, a la Chuck Norris and, on the next scene, threat other woman like if she was a goddess.

Go see it if and only if you you are in really deep need for a mystery movie. Otherwise, go look something else.

From the IMDB plot:

Robert and Alfred are rival magicians. When Alfred performs the ultimate magic trick, Robert tries desperately to find out the secret to the trick.

Oh, a thriller with magicians. That’s new, even following old rules.

One nice thing about the movie is that every corner is a surprise. So, when you think you are finally solving the mystery, a new element is added to the history. Unfortunately, this added information happens on flashbacks, which cuts the story sequence. And those flashbacks happen without any indication, except when you put the pieces in your head; you never know for sure when they are talking in the past or in their “present”. And that’s weird.

Hugh Jackman steal all the scenes, showing a second class magician always trying to be the best, in a very convincing way. Christian Bale, on the other hand, acts exactly like he acted on other movies: the guy with seems to have a dark interior, hiding from everyone. You know, that attitude that gave him the hole of Batman in “Batman Begins”. The sad part, although well performed, is Michael Caine: again, playing the teacher, the nice guy that knows everything but never gives the whole information. The weird thing happens in the final scene: for some reason, Jackman acting goes downhill when Bale acting looks very very impressive. You finally start to believe in his character.

So, you have a nice script, good acting and full or surprises. The only down side is the cutting, really bad done. If you are in the theater and want spend some time and they have this movie, go see it without any worries [except, maybe, if your blather is about to explode in the middle of the movie, like happened to me].