Total Recall (Verhoeven, 1990)
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This movie has been on my “To-Watch List” since it was released but I never got around to it. I think I initially wanted to watch it because some of the special effects looked kind of cool and later on, I got more interested when I heard that there was a mutant woman that had three tits in it. I’ve seen enough movies with women with two tits, but never three tits, so it is definitely plus plus.

“Total Recall” is a sci-fi movie about a future where you can insert memories in your brain. If you don’t want to spend money on vacationing, why not just pay a company to insert memories of the vacation in your brain, and then it feels like you have actually gone there? A brilliant idea! If this was a real invention, I would totally go for it. I have only a handful of memories, that if I ever write my biography it would be just enough to fit in a flyer.

Now the movie deals with real and false memories, so we never know what is real and what is not. But it usually feels like the director actually doesn’t give a fuck either way, so it just uses Arnold Schwarzenegger badly acting throughout the movie. I usually like Arnold in the 80s and 90s action movies. Arnold had fucking manly screen presence in those days, before movie actors turned into limpy-wristed girly boys. But if I have to admit that Arnold in “Total Recall” is a bit shitty to watch, because he tries to have some range of emotions. I mean, he is great when he kills someone and finishes it off with a campy line (“Consider that a divorce!”, “I’ll see you at the party, Ritcher!”, “Hey Benny, SCREW YOU!”). Those are classic Arnold, but everything else he does was, just, bad.

Not really a classic sci-fi, but still fun. Plus, don’t forget, three tit lady. 

3/5

Dedication (Theroux, 2007)
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The first act is brilliant. Henry (Billy Crudup) is an author for children’s stories and the older Rudy (Tom Wilkinson) is the illustrator for the books. Henry is a complete mess of a human being. He is depressed, angry, rude to people, and has a lot of OCD. He has to sleep on the ground instead of a bed, and when he has panic attacks, he has to put heavy objects (such as books) on his body. The only one that seems to tolerate and understand him is Rudy, and in turn, Henry seems to look up to him as a father figure.

But the movie is not interested in that relationship, so Henry is killed off, and instead he gets paired off with a new illustrator, who is a young woman. You can see where this is going. It now follows a very predictable path. Henry and the girl can’t get along, then they can, they fall in love, something goes wrong, and you know the ending.

I might have loved the movie if they had stuck with what was given to us in the first and left out the trite girl saves lonely, depressed guy’s life and changes him. Not to say it still isn’t a well-acted, well-directed, and well-written movie, but the familiarity of the story keeps it average.

“Henry: Life is nothing but the echo of joy disappearing into the great chasm of misery.
Rudy: ... You've had better.
Henry: Life is nothing but the occasional burst of laughter rising above the inerminable wail of grief.
Rudy: That's my favorite.”

3/5

The Mosquito Coast (Weir, 1986)
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“The people in New York live on pet food and they'll kill you for a quarter. You don't dare take a walk for fear of someone sticking a knife in your ribs. Think about it. If you stay home, they come in through the windows! Ten year old homicidal maniacs on every street corner. They go to school! Hah! They go to school!”

Allie Fox (Harrison Ford) is a smart, eccentric, and restless man. Or as described by his boss as “worst kind of pain in the neck. A know-it-all who is sometimes right”. He is angry at the state of America and is always ranting about how it has fallen. It would have been harmless rants of a small man, except that Allie Fox is much more than that.

He is the kind of guy that walks the walk. So he takes his wife and kids, and they leave America, and he travels to South America buys a plot of land somewhere deep in the forests, and decides to start from the scratch. His family are not as excited as he is, but they have a lot of love and respect for him, and they put their trust in him. If he says this is the way to live, then they will try their best to live it.

But when you move away to a jungle and decide to recreate civilization, it is not just eccentricity, but a sort of madness. And when you make your family live inside your sphere your madness, then it becomes a dangerous selfish act. He never sees his act like that though, Fox believes what he is doing, whether living in the jungle, or at a later stage, living near the beach, a good act, an act that is beneficial for his wife and kids. He tries to help the natives who live in the jungle, but he does it from an egomaniac point of view. He is bringing civilization to them, Allie Fox, the great white man. He is not doing it through material benefit and he is not a lazy guy (he physically and mentally works the hardest), but maybe that is what makes guys like Fox so dangerous.

He is hardworking, brave, smart, but he is one foot outside of society. This is why society teaches us to conform, because non-conformity, when backed by intelligence and dedication, can be dangerous.

In a way, Allie Fox is very much like Tyler Durden. There’s your movie. Tyler Durden with a family.

“We eat when we're not hungry, drink when we're not thirsty. We buy what we don't need and throw away everything that's useful. Why sell a man what he wants? Sell him what he doesn't need. Pretend he's got eight legs and two stomachs and money to burn. It's wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

4/5

Stuck (Gordon, 2007)
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If I am ever driving late at night and accidentally hit someone, and I think they’re killed, I will probably leave the scene if I think I can get away with it. I know some people think this is immoral, but I don’t see how I being punished will anyway help the person. There are those who say how I will sleep at night, but I will probably sleep better in my room than in prison.

But here is where I would not drive away. I’m drunk and on drugs, driving home, and BAM! I hit a homeless guy, who falls through my windshield, and gets stuck there. I’m fucking not driving away from the scene with a guy stuck in my windshield!

In “Stuck” (now you know what the word is in reference to!), a young nurse is in the exact same position and drives home, so that the accident will not ruin her life. Once she enters her garage, she realizes that the man is still alive, but she just leaves him there. The movie then has a sort of “Misery” feel to it, with the man trying to someone pull himself out of the windshield, while the nurse remains remorseless. She even tries to get her boyfriend to help her find a solution to her problem.

Okay, you know what’s stranger than the concept here? The fact that it is based on a true story. Here is a quotation from wikipedia on the actual event:

“The incident occurred on October 26, 2001 when Mallard's car struck him; at the time Mallard was believed to have been driving while intoxicated by drugs and alcohol. The force of the impact sent Biggs flying through the windshield, lodging him there.

Mallard then drove home, leaving the injured Biggs stuck in her windshield, and parked her car in her garage. She then went inside, had sex with her boyfriend, and over the next day or so checked on the man still stuck in her windshield. After the accident Mallard did not notify the police nor did she get Biggs any medical attention.”

How insane is that? When reality is so insane, it seems that no matter how strange and ridiculous plots seem to be, it is still possible in real life. Except “Deep Impact”, Morgan Freeman, a black person, as the President of United States? That will never happen! (Pretend this review is written ten years back)

3/5

Kung fu Panda (Osborne/Stevenson, 2008)
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“I just ate, so I'm still digesting, so my kung fu may not be as good as later on.”

This animated movie sure has a lot of name actors and actresses lending their voices. It has Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Lucy Lui, David Cross, Seth Rogen, and probably the couple other names are also big names, but not instantly familiar to me. This is silly. Aside from Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman, most of the rest don’t really have that many lines to say. So why have Angelina Jolie et al in it? I’m not a big fan of such moves, because they actually take away from a movie. Not every name is right for the role and it seems to take away from better suited people who could do a lot more with their voices.

The movie is a lot of fun, but we need to understand that’s all it is. Don’t put it in the same league of some of the Pixar classics (“The Incredibles” and “Wall-E” for example), and it is easier to enjoy it. Aside from Pixar, most animated features have been usually forgettable, and I would say that “Kung Fu Panda” is funny and entertaining to watch, and I know that it has become a favorite of my younger brother and his friend. It is almost a biological fact that almost all boys like Kung Fu from when they are six years old to…I think 45 year old men.

3/5

The New World (Malick, 2006)
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Here is a movie with all ingredients of a beautiful film. But film is not cake, and it’s not ingredients alone that make a film exceptional to me. Here are the ingredients:

1)   Important soundtrack. You have Wagner and Mozart, for example. Impressive. Very epic.
2)   Lots of shots of nature. Open skies, trees, sunshines. So gorgeous.
3)   Voice-over, but spoken softly and poetically.
4)   It is long. You can not have anything epic at 90 minutes, has to at least be 2 hours.

None of these impresses me. Nor does the love story of two young people in conflicting tribes have ever impressed me. Whether it is John or the Pocahontas, I find them putting love above their people childish and not something that puts me in awe and wonder of love.

There are hardly any characters. Almost all of them are empty vessels, not even important or interesting enough to prop the movie along. But even the main characters are not more than just excuses for supposedly poetic voice-overs. Again, I am not very impressed with lines such as “What else is life but being near you!”, “You flow through me, like a river.”, “He is like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade.”

Here is another thing that leaves me unimpressed. The story itself. The cultural interest in Pocahontas started because the west loved the idea that a heathen savage could risk everything to save a white man, then be brought to England, to be thought English, learn how to dress like a white woman, and be baptized and renamed as a Christian. I admit that I’m still idealist enough to have such stories leave a bad taste in my mouth. A more apathetic person might not even notice such things, and more power to them.

The IMDB trivia page for this page has such trivia such as, "Native American cast members had to learn the Algonquin language. 3000 people speak this language today, many of whom were hired by producers to teach cast members." and "All actors were required to lose 20 pounds in a month and then went to boot camp where they learned to use artillery weapons and live like the settlers". Okay, with all this attempts to be authentic, did someone just forgot to tell Colin Farrell that Captain Smith was not Irish? I could barely even understand his garbled voice over because of his stupid accent. Oh yeah, let's have the crew members spend time in boot camp and learn Algonquin, but no one teach Colin Farrell to have a proper accent.

This review has so far being extremely critical, but that’s only to bring down the movie’s obvious self-importance. It is not to say the movie is not good. It IS done well, DOES have beautiful shots, and will certainly appeal to a lot of people. Not myself though. To me, beautiful can not be forced so much. It has to come effortlessly; otherwise there is a carefulness and deliberateness that to me undermines the beauty and poetic nature that it tries to convey. Wait, that last sentence of mine really does not make much of a sense, but whatever, I’m not getting paid for these reviews, so I’m not going to try to think that much harder.

Oh, one last thing. The girl playing Pocahontas was 14 years old. See, 14 year old girls are totally fuckable, but people just try to somehow not acknowledge that anymore.

2/5

How to Keep My Love [Nae namjaui romance] (Je-hyeon Park, 2004)
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If a movie released in 2004 does not have any user comments in IMDB or any external reviews from that site, there is a pretty damn good reason. The reason is almost exclusively that it sucks. And does not suck enough for it to be memorable. “How to Keep My Love” is an astonishingly average South Korean romantic-comedy.

I bet if you go to a DVD store in South Korea, and go to the romantic-comedy section, there will be dozens of movies like this. I am almost sure that if I wait a few days to write this review, I would not even know what to write because I would have forgotten everything.

Twenty something woman is part of a small group of friends who are sort of losers. Typical American sitcom friends, the kinds of friends who have not amounted to much, are good-hearted, and have relationship issues. The woman herself has relationship issues of sorts. She is with a guy for the last seven years and wishes he would propose to her, but suddenly, a famous actress falls into the picture.

Her boyfriend is getting close to her, so she gets jealous, and you have your typical famous actress scene where she hangs out with the friends and talks about how she never had friends, because she was acting since she was a child. You watch movies like this and whatever that crap with Julia Roberts was, and you think Angelina Jolie would have a blast in my house, playing cards with my friends and playing Wii Sports, because poor famous actresses, they just don’t live the great life we lead.

2/5

The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam (Mashayekh, 2005)
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It is only 15 minutes in the movie, and I have sufficient reason to dislike it. I figure I might as well start the review so I have something to do.

I appreciate Iranian-American director, Kayvan Mashayekh, making a movie about Omar Khayyam. The guy was a Persian powerhouse, mathematician, scientist, astronomer, and poet. There are very few movies and interest in important Persian figures, and it is great that an Iranian director does something in that regard.

But I would rather no movie on Omar Khayyam rather than have something like this. It is just so cheesy. They don’t even start from Omar’s era. But no, it starts from a modern Iranian-American family in USA, one of the sons is sick in hospital, and he tells the tale of Omar Khayyam to his small brother. Then there is one of those shitty visual ripples, and the move goes to Khayyam’s era (around the 10th century) in Persia, and they all speak in English. There is zero authenticity.

Khayyam is played by Bruno Lastra. I don’t know where Bruno is from, but it is certainly not Iran. It does not seem that playing Khayyam was that helpful to Lastra’s career, as I can see that in 2007, he had the distinguished role of “Italian Slickster #2” in “The Good Night”. I think it is annoying that an Iranian director fills his movie with non-Iranians to play the parts of Iranians. It’s not like the producers needed the star name or acting ability of actors whose portfolio consisted of roles such as Homeless Man, Singer, Diplomat, etc. If you are going to have crappy, non-name actors, might as well make then Iranians.

I’m now thirty minutes into the movie and now director Mashayekh has done a brilliant job of making me lose interest in Omar Khayyam. The whole thing is just so…American.

I’ll finish it and let’s see if there is anything I can add by the end of the movie.

Still 40 minutes left. The movie is mostly about Omar’s love for Darya, a slave girl. This movie is so bad.

Something else to get on my nerves. I remember the movie started by how throughout Persian traditional, there was always a family member who kept history alive through storytelling, and the title “The Keeper” is about people in Iranian families who keep this traditional arrive, like the big brother. This is especially stupid, since Iranians do have…books. You don’t need a Keeper that verbally retells the story of Omar Khayyam to the younger generation so it doesn’t get lost. He could just give the younger generation a copy of “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam“, his extremely famous book. I even have an English translation of it in my room.

The west does not have Keepers in their family to tell the story of Shakespeare or Homer to the younger generation, so why does the director think Iranians do? Is it just more exotic to think of Iranians like that?

Haha, cut to present Iran. Everyone is wearing black, people are selling carpets and vegetables on the road, and everywhere is goats. I guess, American-Iranians know as much about Iran as Americans

Back to Omar. “Does it surprise you I have so many followers?” I count ten people. If you don’t have enough money to hire more than ten people, don’t make such statements.

1/5

The Lizard [Marmoulak] (Tabrizi, 2004)
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Only a movie like this can be made in a complex and schizophrenic country like Iran. It was first approved by the government before released. Then there were complications over its released. Then released to a smash hit, being an instant sensation in Iran. For a month. It was banned. Actually, it says that in wikipedia, from my memory, I remember rumors of it being banned and then allowed again, and then again banned. It seemed there were two groups in the government, does who wanted it to be released and does that didn’t.

It is easy to see why it was banned. Reza is a criminal and when he is sent to jail, he steals a cleric’s robes, and escapes from prisoner. He wants to jump the border, so he travels by train to a village near the border, all the while in his robe. When he gets there, the village mistakenly assumes he is the new cleric sent for their mosque, and he has to pretend he is a cleric.

This means the movie makes a lot of jokes at the expense of clerics, and about generally taboo subjects, such as the clergy, praying, singing in mosques, and so on. It is no way anti-religious though, if anything, it is the kind of movies that warm people to Islam. The criminal-as-cleric is not an evil character and religion is never shown to be bad, just misunderstood. An early cleric in the movie tells Reza that there are as many paths to reach God as there are number of people. The movie seems to take this too heart.

The funniest parts of it to me are the two young religious men who follow Reza around. One seems to almost have a male-crush on the pretend-cleric, while the other keeps taking notes and asking strange questions, like how do you pray in the North Pole when there are six months night and six months day? Or how do you do the ablution (wudu) in space? Can man and woman touch in space since they are not on land? Yes, but it is better to get temporary married, just to be on the safe side. Good to know!

Talk of the town among Iranians in 2004, and it is still a movie you can be sure most Iranians have watched.

4/5

Low Heights [Ertefae Past] (Hatamikia, 2002)
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Movie was made in 2002, just a year after the September attacks. Iran also seemed to want to handle stories of hijackers. Ghasem (Hamid Farokhnezhad) hijacks a plane, not for political or religious reasons, but because he once to force the plane to go outside of Iranian borders, so he can be a refugee somewhere else. He has given up any attempt of life in Iran, and assumes he will be better able to provide for himself and his family in a different country.

The plane is a small plane (I’ve flown in similar smaller planes when I go to my hometown in Iran), and he decides to fill it with his family members. What he does is buy tickets for his wife’s siblings and cousins, and tells them that he has found work for them in another part of Iran. This means that around half the plane’s passengers are in his own family. He hoped that by doing this, it would be easier to hijack the plane. His wife is pregnant and he also has a sick young boy, and this is his last hope of taking care of them.

The director is not on new grounds. He made a similar movie several in 1997 (“The Glass Agency”) about a veteran who holds hostages in a travel agency, when he can’t get visa to fly abroad for his sick friend. I found that movie vastly superior as it was more personal and touching. Here he sometimes makes his movie a bit overtly melodramatic.

It is always interesting to watch movies about people who go to great lengths because of desperation, but I found Ghasem’s situation less sympathetic than others. He buys tickets for his family members, deceives them, and then hijacks the plane. That’s low, man, super low.

3/5