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Reviews
Dollhouse (2009)
Off-the-charts awful
The whole thing was a mess. The entire cast is pretty. That's typical Joss Whedon. The set was beautiful. We got used to fantastic sets like the inside of Serenity, and the hotel lobby on "Angel". Dushku and Acker were there. That was nice.
The thing that was missing was the writing we got used to in Whedon's other series. There was no wit, no humor, no banter. The whole show was just a bunch of pretty people nancing around, hitting their marks, and reading flat, uninteresting lines.
I'd say I hope the show will get better, but then I don't remember one bad episode of "Firefly", "Buffy", or "Angel". I was hooked from the first minute to the last on each of those shows. I'm not the least bit interested after this pilot to know what happens to these people. I think I'll just watch my "Firefly" collection again.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Spectacular story, incredible effects, and strong performances.
I find it hard not to draw comparisons to "Forest Gump" after seeing this film. As a play, it would have been nice. If it had been made 20 years ago, it would have been forgotten by now. The fact that visual effects are what they are now will make this film an academy award winner that will resonate for decades.
I remember the way I felt when I first saw Gollum in "Fellowship of the Ring". I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The combination of motion capture and computer animation had made a real creature, but one far enough from human that it was still a bridge between something human and something cartoonish.
Artists say that the hardest thing to paint or draw is a human face, because any flaw will be immediately spotted by anyone. We are so in tune to the human face, movies that have attempted to duplicate it have, up until now, fallen flat.
When we see Brad Pitt in his late eighties acting boyish in this film, it is 100% genuine and believable. When Pitt is 19, he is just as believable. The effects are as ground breaking in this film as the dinosaurs in Jurassic park or the bullet-time slow-mo shots of The Matrix.
Now that I'm through going on about the visual effects, I have to say that the film does something amazing on an emotional level. It screams something to us we don't even want to whisper to ourselves in private: You're getting older! We've watched people grow old in films before, but we never believed it. We see people around us grow old, but we have time to adjust. We look around at pretty people and realize they are too young for us. We see our parents having trouble walking and hear about their medical problems, but we don't see it as unusual.
Watching an otherwise ordinary man grow younger is jarring. Believing what we're seeing makes it emotional. Ill never be the same after seeing a baby die of old age. The movie tagline is true. Life is measured in moments, not minutes.
Burn After Reading (2008)
Now I can forgive them for "No Country for Old Men"
I was angry when I finished watching "No Country for Old Men". The Coen Brothers know morons, not evil people.
In this amazingly written and directed film, morons walk freely among us, and then they die! The people at the gym, the guy at the CIA, the socially maladjusted doctor, the marshall who never drew his gun... They're morons. They're morons who would have all lived to a ripe old age, except that they met. Large concentrations of morons are very bad for each other.
We are led to believe for a moment that Malkovich's character may have some intelligence floating around in his booze-soaked skull, but even he, in spite of his toughness, is a moron.
Not one frame of this film is wasted. Nothing is the least bit predictable. The characters are believable, just like the teller at the bank who doesn't know how to use the computer is believable. This is the most watchable film the Coen Brothers have done since "Raising Arizona".
Bolt (2008)
Eye-popping 3D
The visuals are incredible here. The 3D makes you forget you're watching a cartoon. I'm 40, so Disney was, of course, a big part of my childhood. This film is way beyond anything I know from Disney.
The action scene that begins the film is like the climax scenes of three actions movies like Die Hard, Bourne whatever or a Bond flick, with incredibly well thought out choreography. The buddy film that follows is wildly imaginative, fun, and heart-warming.
The best running joke in the film is that, wherever you go in the US, there are three-pigeon groups with the exact same makeup: A fit, mouthy pigeon, a stocky simple minded and soft-spoken pigeon, and a completely moronic skinny, bug-eyed pigeon. It sounds dumb, but it works! Someone at Disney did what the hard-nosed executive in the first act of this film did: They demanded something new and exciting. The crew on Bolt delivered!
Fields of Fuel (2008)
The perfect scapegoat at the perfect time.
The media, under the guidance of the oil industry, has decided to make biofuels the scapegoat for the fact that the price of oil raises the price of EVERYTHING. Food has gone up in price, but so has concrete, and no one is running their car on concrete.
Bioethanol is a complete fiasco. The idea of growing a non-food strain of genetically engineered corn to ferment into fuel was doomed from the start. Every bit of the corn is destroyed in the process, while food crops are displaced and water is wasted. Fields of Fuel does not promote ethanol at any point.
The mainstream media has succeeded in making the oil companies out to be the good guys while they sell their toxic products at record profits, hold the entire world hostage and lie about available reserves.
Forget whether global warming is caused by people. Smog, water pollution, cancer and wars are the undisputed side effects of burning oil.
Don't take the side of the oil companies now. Please. We need to educate ourselves about which biofuels are good and which ones are bad. Lumping all biofuels together just gives oil companies an extension on their license to destroy our planet and control our lives.