Movie Rental Reviews

I'd like to comment on various movies I've rented in the last months. That is, the ones I can remember.

Ok. Here goes:

The Lookout. I enjoyed this movie very much. I won't give it all away, but a star high school athlete and friends are involved in a horrific accident that changes all their lives. The story follows the struggles of the former athlete, brain damaged from a head injury. He is disabled, takes memory retention classes, and lives in a small apartment with another disabled man, a blind guy, who sometimes embarrasses the younger man.

Periodically he visits his wealthy family, who do support him financially and just do not know how to deal with their son's incapacity. The boy has a job, as a janitor, at a local bank. He is befriended by some neer-do-wells, intent on using the disabled boy, with his desire for normal life and human contact, to rob the bank where he works. A local cop stops by the bank nightly to visit with the boy, and to bring him donuts.

The bank robbery job goes bad. The friendly policeman arrives, people are shot and killed, some injured. The boy takes off with the money, only to find the robbers have kidnapped his roommate, the blind man, to force him to meet up with them with the money.

The ending is charged and definitive, as the boy uses what skills he still has to save his friend and do right.

I enjoyed this movie.

The Kingdom: I watched only a few minutes before falling asleep on the couch. Violence. Stereotypic everything. Worth snoozing through or never renting in the first place.

3:10 to Yuma: Interesting well acted extremely violent movie. Typical western. Women are sex objects and doing all the laundry, cooking, etc. The men are wearing six shooters and looking for excitement away from family responsibility drudgery (the same reason many American men marched off to join one or the other side in the civil war) and money opportunities. One man wants to prove he's not a coward and make enough money to save the farm. Woohoo. Like that isn't a tired plot shaper.

So he signs on to help deliver a notorius stage coach robber, with vicious gang still on the loose, to the train station in Yuma. Almost everyone else in the group is killed along the way. Big surprise and there are not many surprises in this script. This guy persists to the bloody end to impress his son, who has snuck out of the house and followed the group. The robber's evil gang kills this man just moments after he has delivered the robber to the train, which earns him a hefty salary, and while he is leaning against the train car, the 3:10 to Yuma.

The notorious robber, apparently touched by the father/son drama, father now dead, kills every member of his own vicious gang himself, gets on the train again, allegedly heading off for a hanging--his, but whistles for his horse in the last scene, who is seen trotting after the train.

Blood and gore. A man's movie, about men, for men. A "look how noble we violent men are" type of movie. Skip this if you have a brain you want to use while watching your movie rental. If you're just turning off and tuning out, slipping a movie into the DVD player and don't mind the blood and gore associated with the testosterone worshipping script, it's ok for that.

Around the Universe: At least I think that's what the title was. This was a long musical, set to a Beatles sound track, about the Viet Nam era. The scenes were beautifully and imaginatively choreographed to the music. Some scenes coupled with the music were very moving. But I lived through that era. I do not know how it would affect younger generations. I recommend it.

The movie follows a young Brit, conceived by an American soldier overseas during WWII, who comes to America in search of his father. The boy is caught up immediately in the American unrest of that time--the hippy movement, the anti war movement and the war itself, churning on while claiming untold lives and minds.

Sunshine: I enjoyed this 2001 A Space Odyessey type movie, destined to become a cult classic. The storyline follows astronauts in a spaceship sent on a mission to fire a nuclear bomb into Earth's fading sun, hoping to trigger continued fission so that the Earth could continue to exist.

The spacecraft is finally nearing the sun's orbit on it's seven year journey. A craft sent earlier on the same mission, failed, and was never heard from again.

This is not meant to be a suicide mission. They have a garden in the center of the craft, full of lush plants to recycle carbon dioxide into oxygen.

However, as they slingshot out of Mars' orbit, they pick up a distress signal from the first craft to take on this mission. They debate on whether they should stick with the mission or divert to the disabled spaceship of their colleagues. Arguements pursue. In the end, they decide that with a second bomb stil on board the disabled craft and intact, that would give them two shots at saving Earth. So, they divert.

The first mistake is immediate. The scientist who does the calculations for their diversion forgets to reset the sheilds, for only a few seconds, but the damage is critical and starts a fire that consumes the oxygen garden. Two astronauts go out to attempt to repair the shields, damaged when the sun's intense rays hit the craft. One makes it back inside, before the rotation that puts them again in direct sunlight. The other fries.

Now their mission to dock with the other craft is a necessity for survival. They dock and find the oxygen garden in the old craft intact. There is dust everywhere, which, turns out, is from human skin sloughing off. Suddenly the two crafts undock. There is almost no time to for any of the four on board to exit back to the working ship and only one intact space suit. One man agrees to stay, a death sentence, to unlock the docking door. They put the physicist, the crucial member of their team, in the one space suit. the other two wrap themselves in insulation, and both doors are opened on both spaceships simulataniously. The theory is that they will be sucked towards the other spacecraft door. Space, at this point, in the sun's shadow is freezing.

The space suited physicist makes it as does one of the insulation wrapped men. The other drifts off into space. The man left behind in the disabled spacecraft, who has been obsessed with the brightness of the sun, sits in the viewing room of the old craft and removes his protective glasses. And fries.

Then the surviving astronauts aboard the spacecraft discover the two crafts undock was not accidental. There was one surviving crew member, the captain, on the old ship, who entered their craft and then undocked the two crafts. He has gone mad from years alone on the disabled craft and does not believe humans should alter the sun for their own benefit.

There is much discussion among the survivors about oxygen levels and that now only three members can make it to the point where they disengage the bomb ship for the sun on the oxygen they have left and that nobody will now make it home. They decide they must kill at least one crew member to preserve oxygen levels but find the crew member responsible for the original shield adjustment error to have already killed himself.

In the end, they make it to the sun, shoot off the bomb, and the craft itself crashes into the sun. It's a good movie, I thought. Very different.

That's it for now. Have fun at the movies.