Saw V

This may be the least exciting part in the Saw series.

Don't get me wrong, there is blood and guts a-plenty, but there is also a lot of talking. And I mean a lot. Time line wise, this is even more confusing than parts III and IV, which are happen parallel each other. This is before and alongside those two. I think.

Anyway, this is cop against cop. The not-so-nice-guy (Agent Strahm) and the I-am-so-mean-I-don't-ever-smile-(and-if-I-would-it-would-probably-be-creepy)-guy (Mark Hoffman) are kind of hunting each other. Just to be clear, Hoffman is the bad guy in this scenario. This was established at the end of part IV. I think.

While this happens, a group of people have to go through their own private hell. They only stop to figure out their connection and what Jigsaw meant to go against their instinct when it is too late for most of them. Whether or not the last one standing actually survives is not quite clear. (Also irrelevant.) An ambulance gets called on her behalf but that is the last we get on that situation. This person is played by Julie Benz.With dark hair that looks totally like a wig.

In the end, Agent Strahm is asked to trust in Jigsaw to trust him when he tells him that the only way out alive is to climb into this hear casket filled with shards of glass. Strahm, of course, hasn't learn anything from hunting the culprit(s) and - in a fight - throws his new nemesis Hoffman into said casket. Hoffman is saved, Strahm is being squashed to death.

5/10

In Bruges

Ray's first job as a professional hit man goes terribly wrong. He is supposed to kill a priest, but when he does he also accidentally kills a little boy waiting for his turn to confess.

Together with Ken, Ray is sent to Bruges to 'lie low' for a while. There they both await further instructions from their boss Harry. While Ray is miserable and bored, Ken is happily playing the tourist.

Then Ken gets a call from Harry telling him to off Ray. When he refuses and sends Ray off on a train to save him, Harry comes in to take care of the situation himself.

Then Ray (involuntarily) reappears in Bruges and things don't quite go as planned for Harry.

Funny with weird situations galore.

Even Colin Farrell is good in this.

8/10

Baby Blues

Postpartum depression is a bitch. Here, a mother suffering from it while alone with her four children on a secluded farm, takes it out on her young ones. Her truck driver husband is on the road and the oldest son is left to fend for himself and his younger siblings. Sadly, this proves to be too big a task for young Jimmy.

He watches in horror as mom kills them off one by one, starting with baby Nathan. He ends up injured himself before stumbling away, hiding under hay, in the chicken coop, in the house, while desperately trying to raise alarm.

Eventually, he manages to lock her into a room...with a hatchet. Not the luckiest break. After he survives the hatched and a tumble down the stairs, mom comes after him with a shotgun. He eventually saves himself with help of an old gas oven and a book of matches.

Children die. Stay away if you cannot take that.

6/10

Big Fan

Paul is a die-hard NY Giants fan, hanging out in the parking lot of the stadium with his friend Sal, because they can't afford the tickets. Paul still lives with his mother, works as a cashier of a garage and spends his working hours composing little speeches to give when calling into his favorite radio show, where he is known only as "Paul from Staten Island".

When he and Sal run into their favorite Giants player Quantrell Bishop one night and follow him into a night club before going up and talking to him, what starts as light banter turns ugly when Bishop, who is intoxicated at this point, realizes that the two fans have been following him. Paul gets beaten to a pulp by his hero and spends a few days in the hospital.

He has a difficult time coping and deciding whether or not to pursue a law suit against Bishop, who has not been playing because of pending legal issues in connection to the beating. The Giants, meanwhile, cannot seem to see any land without Bishop, which prompts Paul to tell the police he 'can't remember' the incident and basically shutting down the investigation.

When his lawyer brother initiates a law suit without telling him, his name gets published in the papers and his radio talk show nemesis 'Philadelphia Phil' makes the connection that the victim is actually the regular caller 'Paul from Staten Island', Paul's little life comes apart at the seems. He takes off to Philadelphia to confront Phil.

Nice little film.

6/10

Winged Creatures (aka Fragments)

This is the story of a random shooting spree in a diner and how the survivors deal with what they have been through.

The waitress, probably not a good mother to begin with, neglects her infant son and tries to get close to a doctor, who left the diner just before the shooting started. In fact, he held the door open for the shooter on his way out. In the aftermath, he starts giving his wife medication that cause her massive headaches.

The black guy, who apparently just go the news that he suffers from cancer, starts to have incredible luck and takes it into a casino where he wins massively before getting in bed with the wrong people and having his arm deliberately broken by them.

The daughter who loses her father goes all born again Christian (as if Dakota Fanning wasn't annoying enough simply by being Dakota Fanning) and tells tale of her father's bravery. Her friend simply stops talking altogether, until the very end when he finally makes her tell the truth about her father's 'bravery'.

Aiming to make you cry, which doesn't quite work. It is just too sentimental.

3/10

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Normally, I don't like musicals. That is, unless they are either very funny or hilariously ridiculous, which is to say that I like this. Also, it is about 42 minutes short. That helps, too.

Dr. Horrible, aspiring super villain, wants to to join the Evil League of Evil. Unfortunately, when he is in the middle of earning his place by committing a crime he gets stopped by his arch nemesis, Captain Hammer. Not only does Captain Hammer beat him off, he also gets Penny, the girl Dr. Horrible is in love with but was previously too shy to even talk to.

Captain Hammer is quite a tool (pun intended), who is basically in love with himself and only wants Penny because he knows Horrible is in love with her.

Penny's goal is to get the city to donate a building to be used as a homeless shelter. When Hammer gets the mayor to grant the request, he gets lauded as the hero. During the opening (and revelation of a Captain Hammer statue) of the center comes the big showdown between the two rival, from which Dr. Horrible walks away the winner, gaining entry into the Evil League of Evil but losing Penny, who dies in the shoot-out.

5/10

Bottle Shock

A light hearted comedy about the early days of Californian wine making, based on true events.

It evolves around an event that is now referred to as "Judgement of Paris". Apparently, the story of Steve Spurrier's travels to Napa Valley to bring American wines to France for a tasting (competing against French wines, of course) is only a very loose interpretation of what actually happened. This according to Mr. Spurrier himself.

Whatever the case, the film itself - true or not - is charming and has a pretty interesting cast. Spurrier is played by the always wonderful Alan Rickman. Besides him it features Bill Pullman, Chris Pine, Freddy Rodriguez and a very brief appearance by Bradley Whitford (brownie points!).

Chris Pine looks pretty awful as a young surfer dude (but, unsurprisingly, gets the girl). Other than that, the stellar cast makes this worth a watch - possibly more so than the story itself, which is more or less reduced to classic US patriotism.

We showed them French people!

4/10

The Midnight Meat Train

Photographer Leon (Bradley Cooper) is out one night to take more significant photos, because gallery owner Susan Huff (Brooke Shields) didn't like his initial batch. He encounters a threatening situation and takes pictures of a street gang, rather than helping the woman they are about to assault. But he gets some awesome pics out of it and she gets away because he does eventually alert the bad guys of the surveilance cameras. The woman is a successful model (obivously) and is never heard from again.

The police is not interested in Leon's photos (luckily, Susan Hoff is) or the fact that he saw her right before she disappeared. The model becomes one of many victims by a big ass butcher (Vinnie Jones). Leon gets obsessed with disappearing stories and starts following the butcher. We all know how that is bound to end.

Some random thoughts:

Leon lives with his girlfriend in a rather stylish, if smallish appartment. He appears to not really make any money and she is a waitress, no idea how they get by.

It is based on a Clive Barker short story (and those are mostly awesome), so it could only have ended with some creatures in the subway tunnels.

Vinnie Jones is awesome!

Bradley Cooper is not.

3/10

JCVD

I was never a Jean-Claude Van Damme fan. Actually, I was never much of an action film fan and my least favorite action film stars were always Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Seagal because the couple of films I've seen sucked, Van Damme I always thought to be a guy that was beefed up because he suffered from short man syndrome.

But this, ladies and gentlemen, is genius.

Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as Jean-Claude Van Damme having a very bad day. He lost custody of his daughter, suffers from jet leg, all his bank and credit cards are maxed out, his career is stalling and the post office he walks into is being robbed. To everyone on the outside it looks like he is the robber barricading himself up with a group of hostages while the real bad guys use him as a deflection.

The film is drained of color and brilliantly hilarious with JCVD trying to save his own hide and keeping the hostages safe by building up a relationship with one of the robbers, who is a big fan (as is all of Belgium, apparently).

To add to all the weirdness, Van Damme holds a lengthy, tearful monologue about 1 hr into the film, for which he is lifted out of a scene.

Watch this!

8/10

Taken

If you want a plausible story and/or interesting dialogues, stay away from this. This is pure action.

Liam Neeson, former CIA agent, retired to spend more time with his estranged daughter. There are, of course, her jaded mother and the super-rich step father that can easily drop the dough to buy her a horse (yes, that's right, folks...a horse) for her 17th birthday. Makes it hard to compete if all you can offer is a karaoke machine.

Anyway, daughter goes to Paris (actually, all across Europe, but *ssshhhh*, don't tell daddy, because he worries too much as it is) and gets kidnapped by an Albanian group of girl trafficers on her first day there. Neeson - being former CIA - knows how to kick some serious ass and comes down on the gangsters with a vengeance - leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake - to retrieve his darling girl.

Sadly, Neeson's immense acting talent is totally wasted here. Why he would do action film after brainless action film I do not know.

My biggest beef with the movie? Neeson goes to Paris and passes himself off as local police without speaking one single word of French. Not a one. And the best part? Nobody questions this...in a country where they eliminated all words of English origin from dictionaries and people will pretend not to speak English, even if they do.

Why anyone would need a sequel is beyond me.

1/10

Pontypool

You may have noticed by now that I watch a lot of horror films. In recent years I came across quite a few interesting ones (as in: they do not follow the apparent standard formula many genre films do) and a lot of those are Canadian products.

Canada gave us some real gems in that regard. The Cube series, the Ginger Snaps series, The Brood, or the classic Black Christmas to name a few.

With Pontypool, we get a zombie flick in which you don't actually see much of the zombies. As an avid reader using my imaginagion to draw up pictures of people, places, scenes is not a new concept. In films, however, rarely anything is left to you. What a breath of fresh air to watch a film that does not present bite-sized pieces of familiar patterns.

Almost the entire film takes place inside a small town radio station, where talk show host Grant Mazzy and his crew of two get disturbing reports about mobs going rampant all over town. Throughout the whole film we, the viewers, know as much or little as the characters in the film. We learn what is happening outside from frantic phone calls.

Eventually, the zombies reach the station, as does one Dr. Mendez, who seams to have had an unknowing hand in starting the outbreak. Even the infection that produces the zombies is out of the horror movie norm. What we see of the outside crowd is mostly hands and, later, shapes through dirty, bloody glass. The epidemic does affect one of the women working for the radio station and we do get to see how the affected act. In full detail.

This film is very, very interesting.

8/10