An old man dies, a young girl lives. Fair trade.

Sin City came out on video last week. For the most part I've been doing well with my, shall we say, problem of compulsively purchasing DVDs. But with Sin City there was no debate, no question. Yes, the movie is depraved, ultra-violent, has no moral redeeming value, and is overly stylized. It's also brilliant.

Yeah, I guess I could turn on my BS generators and come up with something about how this movie explores the dark parts of people. A movie that is really distilled savagery and emotion. It is those things, but I don't find it meaningful in that space. What I find meaningful is its style, originality and feel.

When I recommend this movie to people I tell them they've never seen a movie that looks like this one does. I know that to be true, because no other movie ever made looks like this one.

Once again my life is saved by the miracle of lasanga.

I sprained my ankle on Friday and spent a lot of the weekend couped up in my place trying to get it to heal. I got a little stir crazy and started browsing the free HBO on-demand movies cable serves up. I started watching Garfield without too many expectations.

My poor expectations were mostly met. This is really a throw away kind of movie. It had some good bits, but on the whole the movie was just on auto-pilot. The one redeeming thing was the voice work of Bill Murray. It wasn't great, and wasn't anywhere near Bill's best work, but Bill far from his best is still entertaining. Guy calls Bill Murry the comic genius of our time, and I'm really inclined to agree.

Honestly, Bill's involvement in this movie is the only reason I gave it any time. Murray is the kind of actor that will cause me to watch a movie that is otherwise crap, just to see what he can do with it. With only his voice, he couldn't do much with this one. But his dry wit did add some charm.

- They say there's no more room.
- There's always room.

Hotel Rwanda sat around my place not being watched for a long time. I traded in the other two netflix movies at least a few times each while it just sat there, not being watched. It wasn't because I didn't think it would be good. I knew it would be fantastic, that was clear from everything I'd heard. But I also knew it was about genocide. And for me, watching an excellent movie about genocide isn't something I feel like doing every day. I knew it would be a hard, depressing watch, seeing one more example of the horrors we are capable of.

Sure enough, I got most of what I expected. This movie is undeniably excellent. Any yes, it's also hard and troubling to watch. That said, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. The movie keeps as positive a feel as it can. Not focusing on the horrors of what's going on, but instead focusing on the positive things that Don Chealde did. How he kept everything together, mostly through sheer will, and helped save a huge number of lives.

I'm not sure if I'd call this movie an important movie to watch. Sure, it reminds us of the horrors humanity is capable of, but how many reminders do we need of this? It's important for us to understand these things, but I don't think this movie is a pre-requisite for that. But think about how I'm framing this. It isn't about if this is a good movie that is full of quality, that's a given. The question in my head is is this a movie that everyone should see just to help us understand humanity better. I don't know, it's on the edge. But just that I'm debating it should tell you all you need to know.

- Hey, listen. What angle are you going to play here?
- I am going to go with the balloon animal display. For the kids. And then when she comes near, guess who is the broken man, haunted past? How about you?
- I am going to go dance with the little flower girl. Oh, and I might be a charter member of Oprah's book club.
- It's all deadly.

The Wedding Crashers is a flawed, but hilarious comedy. I don't think it's for everyone (I'm looking at you Stephanie) but I had a great time. I think that mostly has to do with Vince Vaughn. This movie just winds him up and lets him go - and since he's my favorite comedic actor, that's all I really need.

But I mentioned flaws. There are four characters in this movie. The two guys played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson and the two women who are their romantic interests. After that there are lots of people in the movie, but they're all two dimentional charicatures. The problem with that is they can only be effectively involved in bit jokes. This means all the stuff that isn't between the four main characters just falls flat. So the comedy ends up being kind of stop and go, which keeps it from being a great comedy.

I had a great time. To the point where when I was reading quotes from the movie trying to remember some of them I just kept chuckling. Made me want to go see the movie again.

They are a product, no more, no less.

OMG! I can't believe I'm actually going to write this. Yes, I liked a Michael Bay movie. I guess I'm being harsh. I enjoyed his earlier movies. I liked the first Bad Boys and The Rock wasn't too bad despite it's problems. But recently Bay has taken the bad things in those movies and let them magnify and grow for his other movies (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys 2.) The key problem with those movies is they are lobotomized amusement park rides. They don't even serve as good popcorn movies, they make so little sense and have so little internal and character consistency they just jar me out of the movie experience. I sit there doing a Jon Stewart style "waaaa?!!?"

But one night I was in kind of an amusement park ride mood, and I'd heard his most recent effort wasn't that bad. So I went to see The Island. In his review, Roger Ebert calls this movie a "double feature." I can't think of a better description for it.

In the first half, we get introduced to this new crazy world concept where all the people live in an untra-controlled environment. We find out quickly that they're all clones, used by their sponsors (wealthy people in the outside world) if they need an organ replaced or some such thing. This part of the movie is a sci-fi thriller as the reality dawns on the protagonists and they figure a way out of the complex, then try to integrate into society.

Then the typical Michael Bay E-ticket ride commences. There are silly chase scenes, getaways that only make a little sense, a curious absense of police and authorities when it's convenient and characters that are sometimes smart and sometime idiots as the script requires.

The first part was great. I wish they'd make a whole movie about it. It had lots of sticky ethiical issues embedded in it, and I wished it was based on some high quality novel I could go read to explore the area more. Alas, it's not, but I'm sure there are plenty of science fiction novels out there that explore this space well. But the most surprising thing about this part of the movie is that it is smart! I kept having questions about how it was all set up, or why they did things a certain way in clone world - and the script was smart enough to answer them quickly and reasonably. I thought maybe Michael Bay wasn't really behind this movie.

The the second half started, and his fingerprints were everywhere. Sweeping shots of the protagonists staring off to the horizon with the wind in their hair. Chase scenes that are exciting, and spectacles, but don't make a lot of sense. Show downs between main characters reselmbing the wild west at high noon. It's like a Michael Bay paint by numbers book. But it isn't as lobotomized as his other movies have been. Since he's already done some great exposition in the first half the second half is all about fun and resolution (like a good amusement park ride.) By doing this he avoids being insulting with his plot points the way he's been in the past (most notably with Armageddon.)

Final verdict: I wholeheartedly recommend the first half of this movie. The second half is fine for what it is, and doesn't sink the movie for me. How you balance the two will likely be a function of your tolerance of e-ticket ride movies.

Notes:

1) The product placement in this movie was intense. It was so up front it was distracting. I know you want to create a future where you see actual branding, and you don't want to make them up on your own, but it was jarring how much product placement they did - and that detracts from the movie. Any time you do something overtly enough that it reminds the viewer they're watching a movie, you lose some of your effectiveness.

2) Apparantly there's a lawsuit against this movie from some guys who made a little campy sci-fi movie 25 years ago named Clonus. An article I read claimed the two were shockingly similar, and the lawsuit claims copyright infringement. I figure I should see for myself, so Clonus got added to my Netflix queue.

Bob's Gone! He stole his car!

Bottle Rocket ended up on my netflix queue long ago and finally made it to the top recently. (As an aside, the queue is my favorite netflix feature, it's worth a good chunk of the monthly fee all by itself.)

As expected, it was all that great. It was a lot of fun. And it's clearly a Wes Anderson movie, with interesting work by the Wilson brothers. Part of the Wes Anderson fingerprint is the ridiculous amount of whimsy in this thing. From that standpoint nobody is better then Anderson, but that's not everyone's thing in watching movies. I enjoy it, to a point, and this one didn't really win me over.

That said, for a first time filmmaker making an independent movie, I can see the talent that has led to a successful career.

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