Frozen

Simple set up for this one. Three Students go on a skiing trip somewhere in New England and get stuck on a ski lift after the park closes down and are left to freeze to death. The scenario is brought about through mis-communication between the Ski lift operators, where the guy that let the students on for one last run gets called away from his post, he lets the guy that takes over know that there are still 3 people to come down and to wait for them before he shuts the lift down. The catch is, he was bribed with cash to let the students on this late for their last run, and if he had said there are still 3 people on their way up, things may have been ok for them, but the operator could have got into trouble, but we wouldn’t of had a movie called Frozen, maybe a short called “The Ski Lift and the weak willed operator”. So the relief operator see’s 3 skiers/boarders, pull up at the bottom of the mountain and assumes they are the last 3, and shuts the lift down.

Splice

Splice feels like an interesting & simple idea that had a movie squeezed out of it. Wouldn’t it be awesome to make a movie about what would happen if you spliced human DNA with DNA from an animal, and made some half human half animal type creature?  Good idea, but the movie doesn’t quite live up to that premise. I try not to be so overly “to the point” critical when I have watched a movie and decide to write about it, but there is little else I could say about this flick. So where do you go from this idea without going into Hammer type territory? They tried to keep it realistic and very human, there was no kind of fantasy with this story, and regardless of how fantastical the premise might be I’m not a bio scientist so I have no idea whether this would actually be possible to splice Human DNA with animal DNA. But if it were, Splice tries to present this in the most rational way possible.

21

I usually get a good feeling from the glamour of Las Vegas even when it’s on screen. I’ve only been to Vegas once as of this writing and it was only for one evening, but the place is incredible. The amount of people all doing the same thing as me, the sounds, the lights, the buildings. Even if you don’t gamble, it’s a great place to visit. The Oceans movies are great to watch not only for the intricate & engaging plotting and top notch acting by some of the best screen actors in the business, but the Vegas setting is just awesome to invest your attention in. 21 gave me this same feeling at times, I enjoyed watching it mainly due to it being set in Vegas for the majority of the movie, but that wasn’t quite enough to put this movie up there for recommendation.

The Kingdom

The 80’s brought us a plethora of Vietnam war movies, some of them were incredible and could easily stand up as some of the best films of the decade, Platoon, Casualties of War, The Killing Fields, Full Metal Jacket,  and some less highly regarded but awesome flicks such as Bat21, Uncommon Valour and Good Morning Vietnam. Growing up in the 80’s and having parents cool enough to let me watch war movies meant that many of these flicks, particularly those mentioned, remind me a lot of my child hood and I have a warm place in my heart for them. So in the future when I’m in my 50’s I often wonder if I will have the same affection for the plethora of middle eastern set ‘war on terror’ movies that have come to grace the 00’s as their decade of prevalence (for obvious reasons). I think so!  Movie’s such as Body of Lies, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, Lions For Lambs, are all excellent movies that I think will come to stand as some of the best war movies that define my 20’s and 30’s.

Devil

For a game of football/soccer to work you need all the right people (players) in the right places. you need a goal keeper to stop goal attempts, a line of defenders to prevent attacks reaching the goal, a line of mid field players to feed the attack, strikers to receive the ball and finish the attacks. You also need a coach/manager to organise and strategise with the team, a referee to keep control and a lineman to call off-sides. If any one of these vital elements were missing then the game will either become horribly unbalanced, or pointless to even continue playing, but the sport as we know it is free-form to a degree. Imagine a carefully pre-determined game of football/soccer where all the players must be in exactly the right positions at exactly the right times in order for the game to work as planned, even when it feels completely unnatural then anything like this would actually happen. That is how this movie works through and through, it’s a strange analogy I admit, but the situation, the events are so contrived that you have to accept the story within the story, told by a narration over the movie, that the devil himself has the power to pretty much influence anything he wants, down to the finest detail.