Hours

We watched this one today.  The last movie with Paul Walker set in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina.  Sad movie with Walkers's character's wife dying during childbirth, the child being born prematurely and needing a respirator, the drama coming from the electrical issues caused by hurricane Katrina.  Of course some looters come into the hospital and Walker's character has to shoot them.  Louisiana, the home of David Duke.  All in all it was a very sad movie.  Thinking about Walker acting mournful.

Hunger Games 2

So this is the second part of the Hunger Games trilogy.   I have not read any of the books.  This film was entertaining with Jennifer Lawrence and Woody Harrelson playing interesting roles.  The film made me think about the disparity between the wealthy and everyone else in The US.  It ends with the beginning of some planned rebellion.  It is kind of awkward when one of the characters knows nothing about a planned rebellion but then shuts the Hunger games down.

Nebraska

My mom was from Nebraska.  Sidney, Nebraska, a small town in the Southwest corner of the state.  If you wanted to fly there you would fly to Denver, then rent a car a drive Northeast to Nebraska.  I've been there a few times.  The last time was when my grandfather Louis Bert Neuman died.  I think that was 1989.  So that is mostly why I went to this movie.  And Will Forte in a serious role was interesting.  I really liked the mother in this movie, she reminded me of my mom.  Being "honest" often means just saying what's on your mind, which goes against the idea of if you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing.  It also reminded me of my mother as she was losing her memory I would often just go along with her ideas because it was too exhausting to correct her.

Delivery Man

This is Vince Vaughn's latest movie.  I enjoyed it.  Funny in parts and touching in others, they even squeezed a tear out of me.  It is the story of a guy that sells his sperm and it is used to conceive over 400 hundred people.  These people all file a class action suit to find out the identity of their father.   Vaughn's character stumbles into a meeting with all the people that are his kids that leads to a touching moment.  I think maybe they used montages with music a little too much, and the legal stuff was kind of silly.  But other than that it was a fun movie.  They wrap it up with Vaughn becoming a father one more time and all the half siblings being around for the moment.

Thor: the dark world

Good god y'all.  Thor the god of thunder that carries a big hammer fights bad guys.  And a love story too.  Gosh Natalie Portman, who doesn't fall in love with her?  She should be in a movie about a guy that doesn't fall in love with her.  That would be interesting.  Also, they should start testing for performance enhancing drugs in Hollywood.  Chris Hemsworth is a beast.  Come on Congress hold some hearings a la steroids in beisbol.  Any awards won will have to have an asterisk.  I have to admit I was tricked by Loki and Thor's act at the critical moment, you think Loki is the bad guy.

Abducted

We saw this one at the Asian film festival.  It is a Japanese film with English subtitles.  It was so bad that it ended up being almost good.  It was based on a manga.  Dude is abducted and wakes up in a shipping container bound and gagged, he frees himself from bondage but is still stuck in the container.  Dude starts communicating through the wall with other abductees, and they figure out they are headed for China, they were all on a plane that was flying over China many years ago when a mine explosion had forced a landing.  So they all have something in common.  Turns out vatos daughter is in the shipping container next door.  Oh, I forgot to mention the rock, the single rock that is in the container with each abductee.  The rock is DELHITO.  For days after this movie all I had to say was, DELHITO and my wife and I would laugh.  I'll try it right now and see if it still works.  Yep, we both laughed.  That alone makes it a good movie to me.

Gravity

Gravity was an interesting movie, mostly done with green screen, so kind of a cartoon, but with actors faces.  I liked the main character solving problems in her dream.  But of course it was Hollywood so the main character lives to fight another day.  Not that I wanted the character to croak, just that sitting there being aware of how broke our country, and underfunding education and space exploration programs, while we are still spending billions on the military industrial complex, and for spying on our own people, killing people in Afghanistan, etc.  Just kind of disheartening. 

This movie also featured George Clooney mostly as a voice.  In general, the movie was suspenseful and kept my attention. 

Prisoners

This movie starred Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenwhatsits.  Jake plays a cop with a neck tattoo.  I didn't think that was very realistic, and kind of pulled me out of the film.  But other than that it was an interesting film with twists that caught me off guard.  I usually have a hunch about what is going to happen in a movie and was pleasantly surprised to find out my hunch was wrong about this movie. They make you think one character is a bad guy but it turns out he is just a troubled victim.  Interesting.  David Dastmalchian does a great job in this movie.  He plays the troubled victim.  Of course Hugh Jackman's character mistakenly kidnaps someone after his daughter is kidnapped so maybe the theme of the film is mistaken kidnappings.  I enjoyed the rationalization of the actual culprit that they wanted to teach parents that god was bad after their son had died.  Victims being victimized by police and by the parents of the victims.

Lee Daniel's The Butler

This movie was an interesting overview of the Civil Rights movement in the US from the 50s through to today.  The film was inspired by a Washington Post article written about the White House butlers and their take on Barack Obama being elected president.  Forest Whitaker did an amazing performance as a long suffering fellow.  Oprah Winfrey was his pain in the ass wife.  Whitaker's. character showed the travails of the 30s through to the 50s.  His two sons were used as vehicles to show the 60s through to the present.

Elysium

This movie was made by the same fellow that did District 9, that was amazing, Neill Blomkamp, a South African.  This film was political in that it centered on health care and the inequality of its distribution.

The story is about a guy, Matt Damon's character, that gets a lethal dose of radiation at his scary industrial job, and does whatever he can to save himself, but he also learns that an old flame's child is sick too, and works to save her as well.  Damon uses an exoskeleton to help his deteriorating body.

What I really enjoyed about District 9 was the way the interesting world was revealed to us.  I wish that there was more of that in Elysium.  There was a scene where Matt Damon's character goes to his parole officer and that parole officer is a robot.  That is the kind of interesting stuff I would like to have seen more of.  I look forward to more movies from Blomkamp.  

Also the film locations that Blomkamp uses are very unique, Soweto for District 9 and I think a dump outside of Mexico City for Elysium.  He should do some filming in Detroit before they clean it up too much.

I think that this movie was a little too Hollywood in the end, the little girl gets cured.

The Wolverine

I have to admit that whenever I think of wolverine I think of the movie Red Dawn when the Ruskies invade 'Murica, and the high school mascot of the high school kids is a wolverine.  There is that scene where they all yell Wolverine.

But this is a movie about mutant wolverine that can't seem to croak and is indestructible.  In this movie a Japanese fellow, that Wolverine had previously saved during double u double u 2, that same fellow Wolverine saved from the atom bomb, tries to steal Wolverines powers and kill Wolverine in the process.

Of course there is some devious mutant that poisons Wolverine, and everyone seems to have guns in Japan, as if Japan were 'Murica with gun shops on every street corner, "I'll take some sushi, a pack of cigs, and an Uzi to go please."

This ends in typical Hollywood fashion, bad guy dead, good guy alive and with all kinds of girls fawning over him as he heads off into the sunset in a fancy jet.  Yeah!  Wolverine!

But don't leave yet, they give you a hint about the next Xman flick.

Pacific Rim

This was a very fun movie.  I have always loved the old Godzilla movies and the idea of Kajou.  I think this movie caught some of the weirdness from the originals.  I always enjoyed baby Godzilla and they hinted at this idea, and they also had very interesting characters.  One part that was interesting was the little Japanese girl that cried, Mana Ashida.  We watch Japanese dramas and that girl always cries in the show that she is in, so when we saw the trailer and saw that she was in the movie, we figured there would be weakness water coming out of her eyes, and sure enough there was.  It made me think of all the times I cried as a child and wished that I could've made money from those tears.  Charlie Day and Charlie Hunnam were good in this movie, Day's character was very interesting and sufficiently strange.

Star Trek: into darkness

Khan!  Is some white guy?  I liked Ricardo Montalbahn as Kahn in the previous version.  Nice accent, and he showed his passion for his people. It is too bad they did not use someone like Benicio del Toro or Javier Bardem for this role.  It would have referenced the older movie, respected the previous choices made.  I think their choice for Khan made the movie less memorable.  But it was still a decent movie, although it makes me worry about the choices they will make on Star Wars.

Zero Dark Thirty

This movie just pissed me off.  I was just interested in the killing of Osama Bin Laden, not all the fuck ups by our intelligence community.  The first half of the movie should have been videos of George Bush holding hands with our Saudi Arabian allies, then showing the nationality of the 9/11 attackers, mostly Saudis, then the invasion of Iraq, maybe some cut scenes showing the bank accounts of the family members of the 9/11 attackers increasing with Saudi money, then after about an hour of that stuff, give us the mission to kill Bin Laden.

But no, let's sit and watch bumbling bumble bees.  It would've been better to just show the Navy Seals train for an hour.  Saudi Arabia should be a parking lot.