Montag's Movie Reviews

It all started innocently enough back in '01. Some company named 'Rockstar' put out a video game. It was like playing a cross between the best cliches of pulp detective novels and a combat system right out of the Matrix films. Some crazy fool turned it into a movie, and after seeing it tonight, I came to a few conclusions. One, the first video game was better than this movie. Two, this movie was still better than the second video game in the Max Payne series. Three, a few punches can put Max Payne in a hospital bed, but he can laugh off a shotgun blast to the chest from three feet away. If you're reading this, all you care about is 'should I bother seeing it or not?'. The short answer is, if you like stuff being shot up reaaaal good, go see it! If you're interested only in seeing Oscar-worthy movies, you'll probably want to skip this one. And for those of you sticking around for my humorous take on the movie... Max Payne is a man with a past. We know thi

I went to see Babylon A.D. tonight, and while intrigued, I didn't expect much out of it. I mean, it *does* star Vin Diesel. Sir Anthony Hopkins he ain't. I was pleasantly surprised though. It's a very good sci-fi movie that feels much like Blade Runner with a breath of fresh air. While it has the potential to be the next Blade Runner, it reaches, but never quite gets there. A better director, a larger budget, who knows what could have been? However, 'not quite Blade Runner' is still pretty damn good. Far better than Terminator 3 by a long shot. In the end, I liked it more than 'Children of Men', which might be a more professionally done movie, but in some ways this film felt like a far more real version of the future, if that makes any sense. Aside from a few things that pulled you out of the immersion of the moment, like the use of vehicles in the movie that would be as dated as a 1970's Cutlass Supreme is today. I'm not sure what the future will b

I finally got around to watching " The Golden Compass " and it was indeed interesting. I have this thing where I'm Catholic. It's kinda weird and cultish, but it works for me. Anyway, along with being Catholic and all, you have friends that are Catholic. Some of them hysterically denounced this film as anti-Catholic propaganda and said, in essence, that no good Catholic should go see it. Of course, this made me want to see it even more, as I'm a sucker for controversy ( that and I like to show that you don't have to be a walking, talking stereotype to be a good Catholic ). I'd read the first book when it came out a little over a decade ago. I was a bit younger then, and I didn't recall it having any particularly anti-Catholic agenda / propaganda, but looking at it now, a bit older and a bit wiser, heh, yeah, there's just a *bit* of it. It's a good film, maybe a 7/10 or so, so don't get me wrong, I rather liked this movie. That said, it is f

So after months of failed attempts to see this movie, I finally got around to it. I'd seen No Country for Old Men and it amazed me beyond words. Hearing some of the same sort of talk about There Will Be Blood , I figured it'd be worth seeing. It's an... Interesting movie. Let's put it that way. One sentence review: " Did you know that this was based on an Upton Sinclair novel? We'll remind you! Again! And Again! (oh, and we've got the totally kick-ass Daniel Day-Lewis in here too, btw) " For anyone who hasn't been forced to read an Upton Sinclair novel in high school, I'll sum up his style in short: " Did you know that there are horrible things going on in otherwise innocuous areas? How horrible you ask? Let me tell you! In graphic detail, at length! If you don't feel the urge to vomit by the first chapter, then I've failed as a writer! (oh yeah, and that phrase about 'beating a dead horse'? They were thinking of me when

Recently saw The Darjeeling Limited . It seems that the director, Wes Anderson, is turning into a bit of a one-trick pony. The cinematography is to die for, as always, but once you get past that... You realize that the story is a rehash of any other movie he's done. Some say ' Ah, an auter has strong recognizable style! ' and others counter this by saying ' But there's a difference between having a recognizable style and being formulaic. ' This film put me squarely in the latter group. It's like we've seen it all before. White people with family problems ( but certainly not money problems ) go through some semi-metaphorical journey and heal their broken relationships. The end. That's pretty much every Wes Anderson film to date. And what is it with non-white people always being used as foils for the main characters? I mean, I'm about as white as it gets, and if I'm noticing it, it's problematic to say the least. It gives the feeling "

Recently watched Azumi . My one word review: "Blows." My review involving a few more words: "Imagine a Japan peopled by walking cardboard-cutout stereotypes. Imagine a Japan where the same people that brought you the Backstreet Boys, N Sync and Brittney Spears bring you a fresh new act of young faces, singing... Er, assassinating their way to the top. An old priest tells a scarred warrior that to end violence, it'd be best if he'd go out into the wilderness, choose ten orphans, and make them into the next Backstreet Boys, er, assassins and have them kill off warlords that want to plunge the land into chaos. It's hackneyed. It's just bad. It's like watching Seven Samurai filtered through the eyes of Lou Pearlman . The acting is wooden. There is no characterization beyond the stereotypes the characters represent. Even the fight choreography is dreck - all the fancy editing in the world can't conceal the fact that the pop-stars, er, assassins are pro

Chigurh's gonna getcha! " No Country for Old Men " is easily the best film to come out this year and quite possibly the Coen brother's finest film to date. Yes, even better than "The Big Lebowski" (though indeed a very different sort of film). Some reviews may appeal to ethos, pathos and logos to get you into the theaters to see this film. I'll simply appeal to your sense of enjoyment. If you like seeing films and truly appreciate an excellent, intelligent and gripping movie, this one is for you. The plot is more or less this: A lone hunter (Moss) stumbles upon a drug deal gone horribly wrong in the outback of west Texas, finding a lot of dead bodies and two million in cash. Between the two, he wisely decides to take the cash. Unfortunately, two million dollars isn't the kind of money that gets chalked up by those who own it and so Moss finds himself pursued by a psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (pictured above), who in turn is pursued by sheriff Ed

I recently saw " Treasure Raiders ". Think "Fast and the Furious" meets "Indiana Jones". I can sum up the entire review in three words: Don't see it. It's... Amazingly bad. *Amazingly*. The director of photography should get some sort of award, and the rest of the people that made this movie? Don't let any of them near a camera. They'll end up going on trial for crimes against humanity, because I'm fairly sure that a film this bad counts as torture in most countries. Plot: American Professor / Conspiracy Theorist / Street Racer searches for un-named treasures in Moscow, while trying to balance grading undergraduate papers and street racing with his Porsche 911 Carrera. Along the way, he meets a "Conan the Barbarian" era clone of Schwarzenegger (it's rather uncanny, right down to the Austrian accent) named 'Wolf'. Wolf is a Very Large Man TM who tries to balance vigilante justice and street racing. Wolf drives a C

" Hard Candy " is a movie that starts out fascinating but two-thirds of the way in, runs the plot straight into the gutter. Led by two top-notch actors, Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page, playing Jeff and Haley respectively. Jeff is a photographer that likes to chat up young girls on the internet. Young as in '14 years old'. Jeff is thirty something. And when you come to find that the largest portion of his photographic portfolio is pictures that as he say 'legally skirt the boundaries' of child porn (so, yeah, this is the guy that made that infamous ADIDAS ad apparently), you start to feel icky. But he seems like a nice guy despite it. Haley is an innocent young girl that like to chat up men twice her age and flirt with them. A lot. She invites herself into their homes and grabs the dudes alcohol and starts pouring for the both of them. There's back and forth flirtation, and then Jeff passes out. The little girl drugged him. It's sooooo ironic! Supposedly

I went to see 3:10 to Yuma the other day with Louis, mostly due to the rave reviews it had been getting. Were they correct? Well... Yes and no. 3:10 to Yuma is an excellent film - of that, there's no doubt. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale do flawless jobs as the villain and hero of the movie. The cinematography is beautiful and actually makes Arizona look like a place you'd want to move to ( don't ). And as the Western genre goes, it's the finest example I've seen since the likes of " The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly ". So when someone goes on and on about the various bits that the movie excels at, you know that it means that there's something it doesn't quite excel at. The ending of the film makes No Bloody Sense. The story is Russell Crowe is a Bad, Bad Man TM . Christian Bale, is of course the Good Man TM . This is why we see his barn getting burnt down in the beginning of the film and not Mr. Crowe's. Bale lost a third of his leg in the se

Tonight, Jenny, Christine, Andrew and I went to see " El Laberinto del Fauno ". The experience can be easily summed up in one word: "Wow." It is an incredible film, and I have not seen its kind since... Well, ever! When I was a child, I read " The Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales " 1 - a collection of two hundred and nine fairy tales by easily the most impressive names in all of academia when it comes to German folklore. It is full of the kind of fairy tales you don't hear any more. The kind that Disney does not make. The kind that, if Disney made them, would still get an 'R' rating in the theaters. For an excellent case in point, check out the original version of Rapunzel: " On the same day, however, that she cast out Rapunzel, the enchantress in the evening fastened the braids of hair which she had cut off, to the hook of the window, and when the King's son came and cried, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down thy hair," s

Went to see The Fountain tonight. All I have to say is that a.), I have a very, very strong urge to shake Rachel Weisz to death, and b.), the movie was not worth paying to see. The fact that I even wrote the latter is extraordinarily depressing. From the man that made Pi and Requiem for A Dream, I expect heaven and earth to move when I see his next film. Even if it didn't, I would still be fairly happy, I think. Now, when the film I saw had the potential to move heaven and earth, metaphorically speaking, and failed time and time again... Man. I'm a huge Darren Aronofsky fan. Pi and Requiem for A Dream were works of art. As is this film. However, the first two had a plot that made the movie worth watching, even if they had not been works of art. This one doesn't. It's magnificently shot, directed, acted, everything - except when it comes to the plot. It has *potential* and it has it in spades. It has no end of *potential*. But when you get down to it, at the end of the

I play a fair amount of video games, but never played Silent Hill, so I really had no idea what to expect going into the movie. It's creepy, it's incredibly gory and incredibly violent, and it looks very good the whole time. After that, however, there isn't much. It's like a video game was directly adapted to the screen. In this case though, that's a bad thing. Faithful adaption of the video game it may be, but good film it's not. 90% of the time, I got the feeling that this would make a *lot* more sense had I played the game. In many cases, things happened for no obvious reason (falling somewhere, ending up somewhere) that didn't do well for it as a film. It wasn't the good kind of 'that made no sense' but rather the bad kind - just a character falling from one situation into the next, very much akin to going through different levels in a video game. That doesn't make a good movie though. Characters run around doing things you would do in a