world trade center

wow. not what i was expecting. i need a nick cage who is going to save the day not...whoops...spoiler alert....

be trapped in a pile of rubble for the whole movie. i mean, oliver stone nailed the tone i think, and i teared up a few times, but on the whole i was expecting something much different. Perhaps my expectations lost it for me, as expectations often will.

or perhaps it was the shitty bootleg i was watching. first it was in german till we switched the audio. then the cameraman in the theatre kept rubbing the mike against his jacket or something. in the dark scenes in the rubble it was too dark, and there was no detail--it added a gritty feel to it, but watching nick cage's eye glints for a whole hour is a bit much. then it switched back into german for another fifteen minutes, no matter which language it was in, and finally it cut out the best part of the movie when the crazy vet finds the cops.

so it could be either expectations or bad bootlegging. i say a little from column a, a little from column b.

but i think that stone made an honorable tribute to such an awful event. i still don't know what to make of the vet...i guess it was stone's little piece of commentary in an otherwise tame movie. well shot, well acted, just maybe not what i was looking for.

inland empire

i lived in the inland empire for four years. not the inland empire proper, which straddles the border of san bernardino and la counties, but a small oasis inside that concrete desert called claremont. but often we'd venture out. it has been called the porn capital of california, it has been called the crank capital of the united states.

and now david lynch is making a movie out of it. inland empire was shot completely on a run of the mill dv recorder over the space of several years. now i have never been able to finish a david lynch film, although i've really wanted too. and i was going to watch twin peaks in college but it never panned out. i did see the seasame street version where a bunch of muppet birds had two beaks...i figure it's not quite the same.

since i lived there, and the review looks interesting, i figured i might give it a shot.

heroic bloodshed

SPL or Kill Zone is brutal, brutal, brutal movie. a hong kong noir with plot holes you can walk through. for instance, the kingpin (sammo hung) is arrested for murder because they find a tape of him beating someone with a golf club, but since someone else shot him, they had to let him go. but i guess i needed to suspend disbelief.

the plot of the movie is this group of cops who will do anything to bring this brutal kingpin down. when their captain is diagnosed with a brain tumor, a new straight edge is brought in to take over. my favorite part is when the at-all-costs cops confront the new guy, after a quick little fight, and with some orchestral music, convince him that breaking the law is okay, in this instance.

everyone dies at the end, except the bad guy, and he's been emotionally destroyed. brutal.

that being said, the fight scenes are wicked. the fight between the straight edge cop and the knife wielding maniac in white is awesome, only second to sammo hung vs. straight edge guy. pretty intense, and pretty brutal.

zoolander's based on a book.

i found out today that brett easton ellis, author of american psycho, sued ben stiller, mastermind behind zoolander after the movie came out. this was because a year before the movie, bee (as i like to call him) wrote a book called glamorama. in this book, a dimwitted male model becomes entangled in a fashion based terrorist organization. interesting ben. very interesting. they later settled out of court.

still, i love zoolander. and i like american psycho (the book) as well. so i'm very interested in seeing how glamorama is. it's been dipped in two layers of creamy potential. so buy it for me. it's on my wishlist.