Whoa! After more than one year I finally made it to the movies again. Not that I didn't want to go, but there was only bullshit coming in the past 14 months.
Since I have seen and loved the first three Die Hard films, I certainly was excited about a fourth part of it. Only thing that made me wonder, was the obvious fact of Bruce Willis getting a bit old to play the star of an action movie. After reading comments on the web about 'Live Free or Die Hard' I was sure to go.
The story is told quickly. It's about a super-nerd (Thomas Gabriel) who wants to settle a score with the US government. Getting filthy rich on the side wasn't a problem for him either. He employs all the best known computer hackers in the US to write special pieces of code, which each on it's own didn't raise any alarm. After obtaining the codes from each, he was killing them to remove the traces (and I guess to block the US government to get help from them). Setting his plan into motion, shutting down the traffic networks (traffic lights, trains, airports) made the FBI wake up. They wanted to talk to the known hackers to see who was behind that. Our well seasoned cop for big time trouble, McClane, was picked by his boss to go and fetch the hacker Matt Farrel. He arrived there right on time to stop the bad guys killing this hacker, too. From then on spiral goes quickly down to chaos - more and more networks get shut down by the bad guys, including electricity, and McClane and Farrel slowly figure out who is behind all this and why.
So, how did I like the movie and how did grandpa Willis fare? He fared pretty well, one could really buy the story of McClane, the hard cop once more. And the story was straight and quick and full of good old 80s action. I strongly recommend this movie to everyone into action movies.

The story in short is that he captured a *really* bad but powerful guy, who just told him "You made a mistake, I will go after your wife or girlfriend, when I am out of here", and 10 minutes later (in the movie) that guy escaped with massive support from a jet, a helicopter and plenty of guys looking like the best SWAT team.
Another 10 minutes later Ethan's wife was in the hands of the villain and Ethan had to steal some bio-weapon for him in exchange of the wife. After delivering the weapon he barely escapes and is coming to rescue his wife.

I had seen the first M:I movie and found it really great. The second one I didn't want to see, because of men flying around in slow motion (John Woo). The third one I wanted to see because of the trailers I've seen and the good overviews.
Good that I went. This was the most thrilling thriller/action film in a long time. It went straight as a ruler, kept me on the edge of the seat all the time and there were not many stupid scenes. The only (minor) thing that I didn't like was that they revealed to the watcher too early who the mole in IMF was. They should have kept that until Ethan was finding it out himself.
The fighting scenes were pretty well orchestrated, especially that first part where they were rescuing the captured chick. That was really great and made my heart race like wild. The untamed camera was matching quite well, too.
I missed a bit the 'sensuality' part, as they put it in the PG-13 rating, but Hollywood, doesn't know too well how to handle that, anyway. It's either overboarding orgies or asexual reproduction...

War of the World is the remake of the good old 'War of the worlds' movie after H.G. Wells' book (who also made The Time Machine, this time directed by Steven Spielberg).

This time the movie is centered around a selfish, unreliable dad, and his two kids who happen to be with him for the weekend (brought there by the ex-wife and her new husband) when alien machines, buried in the earth for a long time decide to get out of their hiding places. During the story Ray, the dad, has to fight off aliens, improve the relationship with his kids (especially the son) and find a way to get the kids and himself savely to Boston.

What makes this movie worthwhile is mainly the way Steven Spielberg did it. He tried something new, and it works pretty well: Instead of centering the movie around the action, zooming in on the aliens, on the killing, on the spectacle, he keeps his aim on the three main characters. You might get a good sight on the killer machines or the aliens, but very often you only see the 'monsters' in the background or you just see destroyed vehicles or dead people flying through the air behind them while they are on the run. The view stayes on the actors. This works pretty well and gives you a realistic feeling.

I liked this movie from the first to the second-to-last minute, there wasn't time to get bored, the plot was without any big holes, the action good, the effects technically good and not there for themselves. So I would give this movie 7 points. But what about the last minute? It spoils it all. Thank you, one more time, Hollywood for destroying a good movie by an overwhelming Hollywood-style happy end. ARGH! The dad and his kids have to travel many miles, aliens everywhere, soldiers and tanks flying to the left and right, the son even getting seperated from them, following soldiers behind a ridge (the soldiers' trucks and tanks coming back in fire an instant later), and STILL AND ONCE AGAIN, all of them, plus the ex-wife and her parents find each other happily re-united, all well and uninjured. BARF.

The Interpreter seems to be a thriller, about an interpreter working for the UN. She overhears a conversation between two hidden people. The short bit that she understands points to a planned execution of an african president set to come for a speech at the UN.
She gets in touch with the US Secret Service and they try to figure out what's going on. Is it really true? Will there be an assassination? Or did she make all that up? Who is behind it? During the movie we learn that the african president started out as a young freedom fighter, freeing his country for a bad tyrant, and then after being in power for some time, turned out to be a tyrant of the worst case himself.

Which brings me to the second layer of the movie. If you ask me, this movie is clearly pointing at Mozambique and Mugabe. This movie is an accusation against Mugabe. So either you go and see a thriller with an interesting plot, or you go and watch a political movie about one of the worst african dictators of these days.
By the way, the 'african' language spoken in the movie (Ku) is a made-up language. The director of the Centre for African Language Learning, Said el-Gheithy, was commissioned in January 2004 to create Ku.

Thriller about two guys who find themselves chained to opposite walls in an old shower room with a dead guy between them and the kidnapper playing riddles with them.
The killer, who is never to be seen, sends them little messages, already hidden in their pockets or in places in the room. Messages like the one telling the Doctor that he has to kill the other guy within the next few hours or his wife and daughter will be killed. Messages like two hidden saws that they find that are not good enough to cut the chains around their ankles but definitely good enough to cut through those ankles.
The doctor remembers having heard more about this killer, because he was once the main suspect himself. This killer loves to play such mind games where the abducted people usually end up killing themselves while trying to follow the game. Only one ever escaped.

The film is very tight, fast with a good story and I haven't found one second to catch my breath, and that for a film of 100 minutes. I really enjoyed it (if one can say with such a grisly film that one enjoyed it), but the strange thing is, I came out of the film and boom it was gone. I didn't feel anything special afterwards, I wasn't stunned, scared, awed or whatever. It's like I have seen the film 10 years ago, not 10 minutes ago. So I can't give it the 8 points that I would have given to it while it was on.

So far I didn't put a comment on here when it was a kiddie film, unless I liked it a lot (Ice Age, Kirikou). But I think I will start putting any film I have seen in cinema.

I decided to go and see that film after seeing the commercials/trailers on TV. It looked like smart fun, for grown-ups as well as kids. Since Lisa came after Christmas for a week, I thought that's a good chance to see it. It's a cartoon about a family of ex-superheroes (Dad is super-strong, Mom is flexible, like she can stretch her arms 10 metres) and their two teenage kids and a baby. Ex-superheroes because all the superheroes got sued by people that got hurt by them in the process of getting rescued, silly things like that.
Well it's completely imaginable that some American lawyers would come up with such ideas, just think of the granny that sued McDonald's because the coffee was too hot - give me a break!
Anyway all the super-heroes retired to live a normal live, secretly, unknown to be those ex-superheroes. But since Daddy is a bit of the body builder stereotype (all muscles no brains) he gets the family into trouble with a bad guy and they have to fight.
So apart from the story, which was okay, how did the film fare? I would say it was plenty of fun for Lisa, but it's not exactly what I would call a good cartoon, also recommendable for grown-ups. If you're curious about the film, see all the trailers you can find on-line, and then you have seen all the good stuff of the film. The rest is a bit boring and a bit too long.

National Treasure (what a title) is very entertaining film, written Disney all over it. No swear-words, no sex, no naked skin, no real violence, you can safely take your cat along and she won't get scared. But nevertheless it's still a well made film that won't leave you bored in your seat.

It's the last real film in this year, and I hope next year will do a lot better. National Treasure falls in line with several films that year that were really good, but not great (apart from Last Samurai, which is a great film, and The Village which is on the other end of the spectrum). I don't know why it was so hard this year for the film industry to serve a REALLY great film. In January when I have seen Last Samurai, I was so stunned by it, that I said, 'I think I have already seen the best film for this year' and oh boy was I right! When I look back on the films I have seen this year they were mostly good, but all had something that was lacking. :-/

This was the third film I saw, that was directed by M. Night Shyamalan. And the last one I will see. The first one was 6th sense which is such a great film, the second one was already a disappointment (Unbreakable), and now the third one is really just bad. Never again! There was absolutely nothing in that film that I remember as thrilling or exciting, and around half of the film I was debating to leave, and just stayed because I wasn't sure if Carinne liked it or not.

And their website? Can't say anything since it doesn't let me in. I am using Opera, and I *do* have the Flash player installed. Looking at their javascript, I can see they check on IE and on Mozilla. Trying it out, identifying as Mozilla, it works. So, just as the film is lowest low-grade, the programmer of the website is so, too.

This film is about a cop who gets on the case of a robot killing a human. Something that is completely impossible, thanks to the Three Laws, with the first saying that a Robot cannot harm a human.

I liked that film pretty well, it was smooth running popcorn cinema. There was just nothing awesome in it, but it was still not so bad. What starting bugging me a bit in the second half was the fact that I got so much reminded of the present US Administration and Bush and the illegal Iraq war and the 'war on terrorism' that I had a hard time taking the film for a film.

The robots suddenly turned against their human owners, mindless machines following the orders of the positronic supercomputer VIKI, that had decided that to protect the humans from each other they had to be arrested. Sounds so much like Bush and his war against terrorism and those (certainly not all, but too many) mindless Americans that still today scream against Germany and France for not supporting the war, even after so many high placed guys of the US (like Powell and Rize and the boss of the CIA) had to admit, that Iraq had nothing to do with Bin Laden and the attack on the WTC, and even after all that time not finding any hidden caches with Weapons of Mass Destruction. It sounds so much like Bush removing bit by bit so many liberal rights from the US-American citizens, saying it's all for their protection.

I always like to go and see Roland Emmerich films, that's real popcorn cinema to me. Since I liked the preview too, I was surely going to see it.

This film shows how the northern hemisphere gets thrown into a new ice age, thanks to global warming, that will melt most of the north pole's ice, which in turn will make the gulf stream stop. Chaotic weather, with tornadoes by the dozen, huge storms and temperature dropping by a hundred degrees in the centre of the three continent-wide storms destroy our civilization. The southern half of the US of A have to run for shelter in Mexico (where it's just snowing, nothing else), and the northern states just have to sit it out. Same in Europe and in Asia, which gets barely mentioned (apart from a few seconds in Scotland).
That's the first half of the film. I really liked that a lot! Great effects, and it all sounds not so wrong. There was plenty of stunning scenes, and a good tempo.

The second half of the film then simply became like so many other catastrophe films. The one scientist who was warning of what will happen, is in Washington DC, and his son is stuck in New York, sitting the winter storm out in the central library. Daddy has to go and rescue him. Certainly he will make it.

As usual with Emmerich (good for his wallet), the end was a bit too much Hollywood, too happy end, but okay. I just wish it would have been him finding his son and that group and them setting out (still on snow-shoes) to go to Mexico or wherever. End scene them disappearing into the snowy landscape. Full Stop.
But no, certainly the good US army had to fly in with their good helicopters to save the good people, and hundreds if not thousands of other good people that suddenly appeared on the rooftops of the skyscrapers of NYC. Where did they survive? No one knows. Why did they not set out to go to the south, like the majority of the library group? No one knows. Did they have the same knowledge as the remaining group in the library, being warned by the ONE scientist who understood what's happening about leaving? Definitely not.

After seeing the fantastic first part of Kill Bill, I was counting the days until I could go and see the sequel. Finally I was able to go, and then this. I was somewhat disappointed. It wasn't really outright bad, it wasn't really outright boring, but it was the perfect anti-climax to Vol. 1. Mr. Tarantino should never have cut that into two parts! If it would have been one long film, I think I wouldn't see the second part as I do now. After the first two hours of what is now Vol. 1 with its thrill, the violence, the speed of it, continuing a bit slowing (okay, forget the 'bit'), continuing slower paced, leading to the end, that would have been okay. But since the first part is now some months old, and with the expectations I had for Vol. 2, I felt a bit like the guy jumping out of the birthday cake "BOOO" and realising he is two hours early and no one is there.

The one good scene in it was that piece where The Bride got buried alive, until she walked into that café asking for water. And I like the piece where she tore out the last remaining eye from Elle. What I also liked (first I thought what the hell) was Bill's speech about super heroes and superman and what's the difference between Superman and the others. And what all that had to do with The Bride. That was a nice parable, and I could understand Bill on that point.

After buying Kill Bill 1+2 on DVD and watching them one after the other during a weekend, I can say that I was right with what I said after seeing the second part on its own in cinema. Seen together, Kill Bill is really ONE great movie. On that background, I still vote Kill Bill 2 on its own as a mere 6, but seen as the second half of a great movie cut into halves, I'll bump the 6 up to 9.

Since I saw the first trailers of 'The Last Samurai' I wanted to see that film. And I did see it ☺ The story is about an American veteran from the wars against the Indians, who left the army and works for Winchester, advertising their rifles as The Hero of the Indian Wars. But in fact he is a broken man, who drinks whiskey like horses drink water, to drown his memories and nightmares about killing innocent Indians and all the cruelty of those campaigns.

When he just lost his job (showing his disgust to the people in his drunkenness), he got offered a REAL job: Military Advisor to the court of the Emperor of Japan, helping together with his ex boss in the army to build up a modern Japanese army to fight against a rebel.

This rebel and his army fight against the official Japanese army. His claims are that he is defending the honour of the emperor and Japan, fighting against the bad western ways, upholding Bushido and the caste of the Samurai. He is therefore also refusing to use modern weapons, they have their swords and the long bows of the Samurai.

Captain Algren gets captured in the first battle, the whole regiment exterminated, and he is brought to the remote village in the mountains, where he is held captive over winter. In that time of recovery (from his many battle wounds, but also from his alcoholic problems), he learns about the ways of the Samurai, about the Japanese culture, about the real reasons for the rebellion, and he learns to fight like a Samurai.

He learns that there are two factions in Japan, Hashimoto leading the small group that wants to uphold the Japanese ways, and keep the western ways out, and on the other side is the group around Omura (MASATO HARADA) who wants to learn as much as possible from the western nations, buying their arms, making Japan strong. They also have the weak young emperor under their influence. The emperor can't decide on anything and just lets the action take its course, not speaking for or against any of the two opponents.

In the end Algren is fighting side by side with his new brothers in arms, against the army of the emperor, fighting against a larger better equipped army, fighting like a Samurai, at the side of Hashimoto, the leader of the rebellion. They lose the battle, and everyone gets killed apart from himself and the badly wounded Hashimoto. He then helps Hashimoto to commit Seppuku, dying as a true Samurai, the LAST samurai.

Tom Cruise then brings the sword of the last true Samurai to the emperor, reminding him with that of the true Japanese values. Finally the emperor speaks up and stops a contract just about to be signed, about the delivery of weapons from the USA.

How did I like this film? I think, I already found the best film of 2004! It is breathtaking, the story is well thought through, I would say, the dialogues were not out of place, Tom Cruise was excellent, the other actors just as well, and the Japanese girl is also very beautiful. It's a really heroic film, telling the story of honour in great pictures. The (happy) end of Tom Cruise not dying, is the only spoiler. In the first moment, that was a bit out of place (the usual Hollywood-happy-end), but for several reasons, it's okay this time:

1) When Tom Cruise was at that village in the mountains, everyone wanted him to get killed, since he was the enemy and he let himself be captured, but Hashimoto refused, saying that this American must have appeared there for a reason, he just cannot say which one. Well I think, the reason was the end of the story. Someone had to bring the sword to the emperor, reminding him of his duty to Japan as a whole, upholding tradition. Without that gesture, along with the right words, the whole fight and the death of Hashimoto would have been futile.

2) Hashimoto said just before he died, that Tom Cruise has his honour restored, meaning (i think) that he does not have to commit suicide.

This film is absolutely fantastic, a must see, but it's not a chick's film, mind you.