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Something to Do: Movies

We have several good choices this time around, with the action/adventure selection being Limitless. The premise is simple; what if taking a drug allowed you to use 100% of your mind, rather than the usual 10%, but came with some brutal side effects. Everything in this film evolves from that simple starting point, and between De Nero and the trailer, I am figuring this for a must see.

The comedy winner this week is Paul, another Simon Pegg/Nick Frost humor extravaganza. They play two nerds on holiday going to Area 51 on holiday, where they run into space alien slacker Paul, who is trying to escape.

In limited release another action comedy looks tasty; Dao Jian Xiao, with the English title The Butcher, The Chef, And The Swordsman. Three interrelated stories involving various bladed objects made from melted down legendary swords with minds of their own, and the extreme emotions of the people wielding them. As you might suspect, this import is from Hong Kong.

If you are in the mood for a documentary, Nostalgia for the Light will be in limited release, telling the story of Astronomers looking for clues on the origin of life from the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Something to Do: Movies

This looks like a quality week to make it to the movie theaters! To start, we have two contenders for the Action/Adventure title, the first being Battle: Los Angeles. The next in a series of alien invasion movies that has gradually grown more intense over the last decade or so, given a serious boost with the advent of Battlestar Galactica, and refined by all the recent entrants from District 9, through Skyline, to Monster. For the hard Sci-Fi adrenalin junkys in the audience, this is the film to beat.

For the Fantasy crowd, there is a selection just as compelling: Red Riding Hood takes you through the implications the Twilight series pretended didn’t exist. I am really hoping Red herself turns out every bit as Buffy-like as I imagine her while watching the trailer, and reaks havoc on the innocent monsters.

In Suing the Devil, Luke O’Brien sues the devil for $8 trillion and the devil shows up in court to defend himself. The situation is just a bit unfair, since all of the best lawyers end up in hell when their life is over, and Malcolm McDowell as the Devil brings them with him. Again, a compelling movie with an amazing cast, and a lot to think about before the ending credits roll.

The fourth and possibly final choice for this weekend is the animated Mars Needs Moms! This Disney flic is the silliest of the weekend, but not necessarily the one with the fewest important points to bring to the table. The animation quality is what you would expect from that house: first rate!

Age of the Dragons trailer

The premise behind Age of the Dragons is a bit unexpected. Dragons are hunted for the napalm-like substance that fuels modern civilization, but Captain Ahab is chasing after the Great White Dragon that slaughtered his family. Yes, this really is Moby Dick done with dragons, and Danny Glover gets to be Ahab in this one. In theaters this Friday (or perhaps a year from this Friday, the release date data is a bit unclear) on a very limited run (along with The Adjustment Bureau and Rango in much wider release), and out on DVD two weeks later, which is where most of us will get to see it.

Also out in extremely limited release this weekend are the Korean film I Saw The Devil and the Thai movie Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I find it interesting that both movies have their official home page in Japan, which seems to be turning into a gateway to the rest of the world for Asia. In much wider release, Beastly is a story we have seen before, involving a callas guy who earns the curse laid upon him, and must now achieve a goal previously unthinkable to him to get his body back. Even though it is a bit derivative, I suspect I will be attending Beastly this weekend. I should have posted about all of these with my normal Monday Movie post, but here they are before they hit the big screen at least.

Something to Do: Movies

There are a couple of interesting choices this weekend, starting with The Adjustment Bureau, written by Philip K. Dick and starring Matt Damon with Emily Blunt. There is a way your life is supposed to go, and if you step outside that path the near supernatural members of the Adjustment Bureau will step in and make corrections to reality to sync your life back to their expectations. As with every other P.K.Dick story turned into a movie, I am guaranteed to be in the audience on opening weekend. Note that the official Dick site is not kept up to date as well as it should be, so it is leaving out several other potential film projects.

Ordinarily a week with one of Phill’s stories coming out on the big screen would be enough to keep me happy, but this time around we get more. Apollo 18 was originally scheduled for this week, but has now been pushed back to April 22nd of this year. With the tag line There’s a reason we’ve never gone back to the moon, it looks quite interesting. But the universe keeps things balanced, and Rango has been moved up from the 18th to the 4th of March. This animated western epic stars Johnny Depp and is directed by Gore Verbinski (they worked together on that Pirates of the Caribbean series of films). So it looks like I have two films I need to see this weekend, and I will do my best to make both.

Something to Do: Movies

The primary choice this weekend is Drive Angry, where Nick Cage escapes from Hell to protect his granddaughter after his daughter is killed. The alternate choice is Shelter, in which a forensic psychologist (Julianne Moore) discovers all of the multiple personalities in one of her patients were murder victims. They both border somewhere between thriller, a category I like, and horror, a category I don’t, at least when it approaches Slasher territory. If I do end up seeing one of these it will probably be Drive Angry, the adrenalin junky factor over ruling the actor quality factor.