Movies – Page 54

XXX Movie Review

My Rating: A+ (Oscar worthy)
Directed by: Rob Cohen (damn, he’s amazing)
Cast: Vin Diesel, Samuel Jackson (rest pretty much non-significant)

How could I ever have missed out on this GREAT movie. Shit, it is SO awesome that I’m still feeling pretty dazed about it. Maybe it’s got something to do with Vin Diesel, he just carries off his roles with ooh-so-much attitude. That’s two Diesel-loaded films in a row now, after A Man Apart. This is one movie with so much attitude, and yet has a good story that you can actually believe. Vin Diesel is perfectly suited for such roles, for he can carry off the ‘tough guy with attitude charade’ while sleeping. Seriously, this movie beats the balls off pretenders like Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, or any Bond movie for that matter.

The story, in brief, about a daredevil and reckless man X (I forget his real name), who is recruited by the NSA to get information on a car racketeer who’s using his moolah to make biological weapons to spread anarchy in the world. No, he isn’t made a mad-despot who looks fake, Marton Csokas actually carries out that part well. The rest, well, this is one movie in which I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you. As for the rest of the cast, they are pretty much good at their job, but all seemingly fresh faces, but they do their parts well. Yelena was, well, more suited for a role in one of those flicks where they show mental chicks, like Gothika.

Kudos to the writer Rich Wilkes, he did an amazing job. The story actually makes sense, down to the very thing of biological warfare. I applaud him, for he carried this off without going off on a boring science lesson lecture, and without slipping into techno-nonsense that most other movies slip into. It’s good to see that sometimes, Hollywood does make sense. They could actually fit some humor (not much though) into it. Damn, he’s as good as the Wachowski brothers.

The other thing you can’t miss about this movie are the stunts – they’re breathtaking. Shit, there are so many AWESOME skydiving sequences in this one that I’ve lost track. Team that up with blowing cars, cool-looking submarines, and bike stunts, and you’ve got one stunts fiesta. The only past where the bike stunts get somewhat overboard is during the attack in a drug lord’s camp – it gets a bit too much at that point. Oh, and how can I forget the amazing locations shown. Never knew Prague, being in a country recovering from Soviet Union collapse, could be that beautiful.

One thing I hate about movies based in the immediate vicinity of Russia is the fake or over-Russian accents – XXX takes care not to go overboard on that count. And for all the geeks out there, there’s an MIT genius (who’s also there in XXX2, and looks like a fool in that one) who makes cool gadgets. Yet, in a sign of good scripting, it’s always the story that remains supreme in the movie, not the gadgets. That’s the way it should be.

I’d also seen XXX2: The Next Level a few days ago, and all I have to say is that it’s an insult to the original XXX. It’s a common thing for sequels to be bad, but the contrast doesn’t get more than this. XXX was full of attitude and amazing stunts, special effects and animation; XXX2 simply was a low-budget film pushed by moronic studio executives. XXX2 has a bare excuse of a storyline, corny acting, and pathetic and lame animation. Plus, Ice Cube is simply no replacement for Vin Diesel. Come one, Ice Cube doesn’t KNOW acting! :p All he can do is make a scowl (throughout the movie) and mess up the movie. Even Willem Dafoe was wasted in XXX2, just making him grin his teeth menacingly isn’t what the scriptwriters should’ve kept for this Oscar-winner.

Watch this movie for it’s stunts, if only for nothing else.

Note: It took me quite a while to track down the [ahem ahem] correct poster image for this movie. I guess Yahoo! Image Search AND Google Image Search have a bit of work to do, may I say, as far as filtering out adult content from search results is involved. Maybe the bosses at Sony Pictures gave a pretty clear diktat to their marketing team – choose a name for the movie which will get it a HUGE amount of results on search engines. Poor chaps at the marketing department, I think they took that order a BIT too seriously.

Update: I forgot to mention that I like Vin Diesel’s hairstyle, er, the lack of it, a lot.

General Blah

I did not mean that sort of a general. I just couldn’t stop myself from posting (and wasting time while I should be studying. It’s just that there were a few things I wanted to speak off on, and then, so many unrelated things also came clamoring in asking to be put up on the blog that well, I couldn’t think of any other post title. I know I sound pretty confused right now, because I am. Beware, this post has pretty unrelated items strung together. BTW, for quizzers, that’s Patton (brush up your WW II history if you don’t know who he is). Scroll to the bottom for non-gross info on how to get a new C++ compiler.

First up there’s Rach, who on his Yahoo! 360 profile page wrote that Green Day is among his fave music artists. It’s a universally known fact that Rach only listens to classical music (that too only CDs – because they’re better quality, or MP3s encoded at 56 kbps – because he doesn’t know the difference) / any crap movie soundtrack (like that of the Da Vinci Code, which, he claims, got nominated for an Oscar!). For him to say that Green Day is among his fave means he’s really ill. Somebody please get him back to his senses that it’s a PUNK ROCK band, NOT classical, even though he might have been deceived by Boulevard of Broken Dreams. That’d break his dream. It’s real scary, my court jester falling sick during these taxing times, I must say.

I also saw this real nice movie today, A Man Apart – it’s on the Mexican drug business. Well, it doesn’t match up to the standards of one of my faves (which sounds similar too), Man on Fire, but this one is good too. Sorry, didn’t pay attention to soundtrack Rach, but it’s not as good as MoF’s. Vin Diesel’s voice makes me feel he would’ve made a good Darth Vader (he’s about the same height too). It seems I like these movies with raw footage etc etc. More the gore the better. MoF’s scenes where Denzel’s character cuts the fingers off a suspect until he reveals information, and another where he stuffs a timed bomb up another suspects ass and interrogates until the suspect blows up – well, those sequences are amazing. Not that I don’t like others with a good story, like Ocean’s…, The Italian Job (this is my FAVE – I can’t wait for The Brazilian Job)….

I’ve also been lamenting the fact that I am a school student, partly because I have to give the exams, but mostly because I miss out on all the cool activities happening right now. There was iTrek which I could have gone to. And then there are future ones, bang in the middle of my exams, like DCE’s Troika and Innova, IIT-D’s Tryst etc etc. Tch tch tch… Speaking of exams, it reminds me that I had computers today which went well – not full, but it should be better than the first term.

Also, over the past few days I got quite a few calls from people saying that their (antique) Turbo C++ had its header file corrupted. All from the same school? Hmmm, smells like a virus on the loose. Anyway, my suggestion is uninstall the oldie, and download it afresh from Borland’s site. Or if you don’t want to use Microsucks Visual C++, then get something like Dev C++ from Bloodshed Software (no no, the page doesn’t look gory).

I guess that wraps it up for now…