I had never actually seen the entirety of Team America: World Police until today. From the creators of South Park is an absolutely hilarious, offensive, politically themed action movie parody, complete with their song “Montage” in which the lyrics describe what a montage is during a montage. Also included is “America, Fuck Yeah!” and quotable lines like “Derka derka derka.” Also, the film includes perhaps one of the most disturbing sex scenes, ever. Did I mention that there are only voice actors, because everyone is a puppet? Completely over the top, but not without a valid message.

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Before I get to the review proper, I need to point out that we are now living in a day and age where any random person can be driving down the road, look up, and see the words KICK-ASS plastered on a movie theater marquee.  Much like Pluto being booted from its planetary status, it seems the word “ass” no longer counts as profanity.

Unlike other comic book movies, the film Kick-Ass and the limited Marvel Comic series of the same name were developed simultaneously. Even so, there are some significant differences between the comic series and the film, which I will touch on as they arise. The story begins with New York high-school student David Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) asking himself, and the audience, why no one has ever tried to be a comic book-style superhero. In spite of the fact that he has no special powers or tragic past, and has to purchase a superhero costume on the internet, Dave genuinely wants to help those in need and make a difference in his community, no matter how small or large the task may be. Sadly, his first attempt to “fight crime” doesn’t go very well and he ends up being stabbed, then hit by a speeding car. After several surgeries and some recovery time, David gets the superhero itch once more, dawns his green tights, and saves a man from a group of thugs trying to through him a boot party. This time, with his awkward fighting and damaged nerves unable to register pain, Dave is marginally successful and his valorous act is recorded on video and uploaded to the internet where Kick-Ass, as Dave calls himself, becomes an instant celebrity. Later, Kick-Ass is saved from some drug dealers by ex-cop Damon Macready (Nicolas Cage) and his eleven-year-old daughter Mindy (Chloe Grace Moretz) who were inspired by Dave to take on the costumed personae of Big Daddy and Hit-Girl respectively. This is where the danger and Dave’s ineptitude in his chosen hobby are highlighted as both Big Daddy and Hit-Girl are not only well trained with weapons and in martial arts, but the duo is not squeamish about using lethal and bloody force when dealing with criminals. Witnessing the carnage raining down upon the drug dealers by Hit-Girl gives Dave what addicts would call a ‘moment of clarity’ and he promptly returns home, hangs up his tights, and swears off crime fighting. Unfortunately, the damage has already been done. New York crime kingpin Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) knows that a costumed vigilante has been offing his men and, with his new found internet fame, Kick-Ass is about to feel the full force of this crime lord’s wrath.

While the comic series and movie both share the same set-up, what turned me off to the comic version of the story were the details regarding the Big Daddy and Hit-Girl characters. In the film, it is revealed through a wonderfully artistic scene that Damon Macready was a cop that was framed for drug trafficking by D’Amico’s organization and spent several years in jail. During this time, Macready’s pregnant wife fell into a deep depression and committed suicide, although doctors were able to save her unborn child, Mindy. When Macready got out of jail, he took Mindy in and began her martial and combat training so the two of them could one day bring down D’Amico’s criminal empire. Thus is Macready’s motivation for turning his young daughter into the Punisher; an act many parents in the audience, and Roger Ebert, would find unforgivably cruel and irresponsible. What saves these two characters, for me, is the loving father-daughter relationship the pair maintain in spite of their screwed-up revenge lifestyle. The comic book is actually far more bleak in that Dave discovers that the ex-cop Macready back story is just a lie that Damon told to his daughter to get her to want to learn about weapons and combat. Yes, in the comic, there really was no drug frame-up or maternal suicide.  Macready wasn’t even a cop.  He spirits his child away from her mother and turns her into a vigilante killer because he was board. Fortunately, Damon’s back story is legit in the film version, as it is confirmed during a visit from his former partner on the force Sergeant Marcus Williams (Omari Hardwick) and the movie is much better for it.

If you don’t mind some scenes of ultra-violence and you are not an up-tight, overprotective mother that would rather strangle herself than listen to an eleven-year-old fictional character say a few swear words, then I would highly recommend that you see Kick-Ass. Overblown controversies aside, this is an interesting story with well rounded and believable characters that is well told and well filmed with several genuinely exciting action bits that are sewn together with comedy writing that’s actually really funny. What more could you ask? The only real negative point that I can level at the film is that it has a tendency to lose its themes and ideas. As an example, the story starts off posing the idea of real people in a realistic world setting putting on costumes and fighting crime. The notion is that it’s taking the fantastical idea of ‘the superhero’ and grounding it in reality. As the film progresses, the situations and violence that occur become exceedingly more exaggerated and comic book-like with physics-shattering acrobatics and obscene amounts of bodily fluids. It’s like Director Matthew Vaughn introduced the very interesting theme of “What would super crime fighters be like in real life?” then got bored with the idea half way through and decided to make an over-the-top action movie instead. It’s still a good action movie, but any sense of reality the film might have had flies right out the window when the machine-gun-armed jet pack shows up on screen.

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Back in February after the release of Cop Out was bombarded with negative reviews from many different critics, director Kevin Smith took to Twitter to explain how reviewers were out of touch with the general movie going populace. His main point (and this is from memory because I am damn sure not going back through all of Smith’s tweets to refresh) was that reviewers did not appreciate the movie for what it was intended to be: a light buddy-cop comedy with throwbacks to its 80s brethen. Less than twenty-four hours after watching a movie that did successfully replicate a lost 80s movie (that would be Piranha, review forthcoming), I can safely say that may have been the intention here but a bad movie got in the way.

Taking the old buddy-cop formula, Cop Out does absolutely nothing else with it. Here we have two partners who are loose cannons, destroy things in downtown New York City, get reprimanded and suspended by their captain, and yet continue to investigate a theft and a drug-smuggling ring outside of their authority. As you can tell by that brief synopsis, there is very little original or defining here that you cannot see in the dozens of other buddy-cop movies. In fairness to Smith, Cop Out is not the warning sign of the apocalypse as some reviews might make it out to be. It has its moments but those are mostly contained in the final act, long after any patience you had has worn thin. The biggest flaw is that for a comedy, there is very little humor that does not revolve around Tracy Morgan acting like a ten-year-old or the Kevin Smith standard of dick and fart jokes.

Even though I rather enjoy Morgan in other projects, he is playing the same exact character as everything else I have seen him in. His shtick of a loud-mouthed, self-involved, aggravating manchild works in short bursts on 30 Rock and SNL sketches but only in moderation. Here we have the bulk of the movie where his character Paul is constantly bickering, whining, or just being inept to the point that I cannot fathom how anyone in production thought he could be sold as a cop, let alone one that is a tenured detective. And if there is anything that Bruce Willis can sell, it should be a gruff, city cop but he looks so damn bored here that I could not even buy that.

Aside from the A-plot about Willis’ character Jimmy’s stolen baseball card as it leads to a Mexican drug cartel, both detectives have problems at home as Paul is insanely jealous and convinced that his wife is cheating on him while Jimmy is desperately trying to pay for his daughter’s wedding with the sale of the aforementioned rare and valuable baseball card. Short of the dubious connection with the card and paying for the wedding, these side stories rarely factor into the larger narrative making things incredibly irritating as the already slow progress of investigating is slammed to a halt while Paul cries like a baby over his wife’s alleged infidelities.

Things would have been better served in the movie if the comedic aspect was downplayed while the action sequences were more pronounced. After all, think of other previous cop films like Die Hard or Lethal Weapon which worked as action films with a hint of facetiousness, not reversed. We know that Smith can do comedy damn well but he just was not on his game here so the only time I was not bored silly was during car chases, foot chases, or gunfights. In fact, all of those scenes had very little dialogue which means that we can place some blame on the pair of writers. But Smith should fire himself from the editing duties after this as even scenes or jokes that are threadbare to begin with are stretched to a painstaking length (which almost any scene with Sean William Scott fits here). The child in the backseat repeating others, Paul wearing a cell phone costume hours after it was necessary, a fake phone conversation to talk shit about two rival detectives, and more scenes all began badly but were drawn out to the point of potential self-inflicted harm.

I tried to go into this movie with an open mind as I have reveled in films designated as crap by others before. However, when I am praying for the movie to come to a quick resolution around the thirty-five minute mark, someone has clearly overestimated the entertainment value of bickering and toilet humor.

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If you read this site or have watched any of our episodes, you will know the level of respect and … love we have for Chris Nolan. Yes, PBF may have a sick fascination with Weekend at Bernie’s but even he does not particularly laud Robert Klane because WAB does not equal Dark Knight, Batman Begins, Memento, and now Inception on any level. Here we have a rare movie from a gifted filmmaker that is able to transcend multiple genres and their corresponding cliches and deliver one of the most intellectual films to overshadow anything else this year and probably many years’ films to come.

Even after watching the damn thing, the plot of Inception is rather dense but it boils down fairly simply even though it strips out the very nature of the film. Cobb is a theif trained in the art of extracting thoughts and ideas from a person’s head while they dream. However, he is tasked with a job that even many on his team describe as impossible: implanting an idea into one’s head that is conceived to be genuine by the subject. As a much more complex task than simple extraction, Cobb and his team go to great lengths to create multiple landscapes to coerce the subject into accepting the notion and considering it one of his own.

Like Nolan’s previous film, Dark Knight, Inception works on a great number of levels. The casting is spot on with each member of the principals bringing a grounding seriousness which normally is desperately needed in a film as ambitious as this. Leonardo DiCaprio portrays Cobb as a man who is both confident and broken, a teacher and yet still a student when it comes to affairs with Mal, his wife played by Marion Cotillard. They have a complicated relationship to say the least but the two exert a fierce chemistry as they mingle in the dreams. Everyone else including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Ellen Page, and Tom Hardy play their respective roles with poise and confidence that truly sell their characters and the skills they bring. The one thing that Nolan can be faulted for here is the utter lack of development that the characters receive other than Cobb and Mal. We see the inner workings of the group and how they react to each other but Cillian Murphy as the main target for their job receives far more heavy-lifting in the way of depth than the rest of the crew.

That does not really matter much as even though the film is billed as a tale of thievery, it is mostly about Cobb and his redemption. Cobb wants nothing more than to be reunited with his remaining family after a terrible incident and planting a seed of thought inside Murphy’s head is the only way to achieve that. DiCaprio superbly manages the barrage of emotions needed to sell this point of the story in his quest. Very subtle lines of dialogue that seem superfluous at first glance become very telling of Cobb and his guilt of the consequences of previous journeys into this world.

Visually it is quite stunning, likely even more so if any of you are lucky enough to see it in IMAX. Though the majority of the movie takes place either in the real world or in a dream state designed similarly, various effects infiltrate the dream world with pretty spectacular results, a good deal of which have been shown in the previews. The grounding of the dreams in reality makes for pretty cool effects as buildings crumble, water rushes through, and Gordon-Levitt has a zero-G fight with a henchman. Each of the stages of dreams are filmed in stark contrast with one another which not only alleviates any confusion that might be had but also gives a stark contrast between a metropolis during a storm, a swank dimly-lit hotel, and a vast snowy outpost, each populated by minions of the subject’s unconscious who act as our disposable bad guys trying to stop the team.

Unless you are in a Nightmare on Elm Street film, moving through the dreamworld does not often pose many risks. This is even acknowledged early on as one of the characters is killed in the dream only to wake up unharmed in reality. However, during the task as the characters are heavily sedated to prevent the destruction of the fragile dreamscape, they face an eternity of solitude in limbo if something bad should befall them. This clever workaround elevates the story from the simple failure of a mission to a lifetime of abstract despair as the unnamed thugs lurk with large caliber weapons. This as well as many other facets of the script show the care in which it was created, not only to create a fantastic sci-fi concept, but to move beyond a simple tale of dreaming to one with a true emotional core for our main protagonist.

I was worried that the narrative would be dense and as hard to crack as your normal David Lynch film called Lost Highway. However, the story is relatively easy to follow throughout with a nice dash of flashbacks and recollections to further develop the Cobb and Mal relationship. This is not however a film that you can check your brain at the door as elements are introduced, observed, and then jettisoned as the complexity of the storytelling increases. Of course, this is one of the smartest high-concept summer blockbusters in years so you should not dare miss a minute for fear that a key element will be shown which will change the outlook of the film.

Is Inception a perfect film? Not at all but Nolan’s biggest strength lies in creating an engrossing tale that will make you forget about any shortcomings during the picture as you are too damn entertained to care. I worry that, just like Dark Knight, subsequent viewings will show the cracks in the foundation and oversights in the story. These things though will not stop you from enjoying the film. Really, Inception really does not need validation of its efforts by random people on the interwebs like myself. The caliber of everyone involved should seal the deal.

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Inception
Straight from the mind of the God, err … Chris Nolan, himself comes this summer’s rescue from the hell of endless sequels and lackluster effects. I am so excited for this movie to the point that I am even considering a 12:01 AM screening on Friday morning. The fact that there is one was baffling but I would presume theater owners know that some people are actually anticipating this as opposed to the next big tweeny-vampire-ish movie.

Based on what I’ve seen, I am pretty sure that Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Ellen Page are just a few of the impressive cast in the film as it relates to the ability to invade people’s dreams. Almost every review I’ve read has been giddily positive and while I don’t know a damn thing about Inception and I couldn’t be happier. Who am I kidding? Midnight screening here I come!

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The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Here we have another film that I know little of but for very different reasons. Apparently loosely based on a short from the Disney of old, this is a story of Nicolas Cage who is in over his head fighting Alfred Molina so he recruits a young kid with an untapped potential of sorcery. Unlike other somewhat iconic Jerry Bruckheimer/Cage projects, this movie does not appeal to me as it looks like a slightly grittier version of other similar stories that might have Harry in the title (and not Harry and the Hendersons). I haven’t seen any Harry Potter movies to date, that entire sub-genre of whatever holds no appeal to me, and this looks like a watered-down version of a real summer blockbuster movie.

Maybe I’m wrong but I hope Inception beats the pants off of this in the coming days.

Predators
Starring Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, and Lawrence Fishburne, Predators features a group of humans, referred to as “killers” of varying origins who are being stalked in the forest by a group of rapid elk with laser sights … or predators.

Early reviews have been fairly mixed with one viewers gain being another’s displeasure. It is safe to say that producer Robert Rodriguez has been fairly hit or miss with his offerings over the past decade or so but hopefully this will fall into the hit category as this is not a kid’s movie.

Personally, while the first is a good action film, I can’t say the Predator series really has much going for it. This film is more or less a sequel to the original (possibly the second as well), ignoring the AVP films which apparently are garbage. Check out the trailer below.

Despicable Me
Featured the voice talents of Steve Carrell, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig and many more, Despicable Me is yet another computer animated tale that attempts to appeal to kids with silly shenanigans and to adults with recognizable talents behind the scene.

I wasn’t too impressed with the trailer for the film that was shown before Toy Story 3. It currently has good ratings at both Rotten Tomatoes and at IMDb but it is still early and with a number of reviewers having not published their thoughts, that could change. The trend of these celebrity-voiced kids movies shows no sign of stopping but between Shrek 4 (or Forever After of Requiem or whatever the subtitle was), Toy Story, Marmaduke, How to Train Your Dragon, and all the others, I believe a moratorium should be enacted, not only for my sanity but also for my wallet.

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Three years ago, a guy like me would have never had a concept of, nor would have cared about, a B-series comic book hero like Iron Man. Sure, he is a superhero featured in a barrage of comic books but Iron Man did not have the household appeal of the other more well-known comic book superheroes. With 2008’s feature Iron Man, that all changed as the wealthy son of an intellectual rose to stand along side the Dark Knight and the Man of Steel.

Picking up where the previous film left off, Tony Stark has outed himself as Iron Man and is subsequently dealing with the consequences of the injury that birthed his suited armor and the power it entails. However, as a man who has “privatized world peace,” Stark enjoys his adventures fighting the big baddies as much as his detractors like to point out the danger in his technology’s existence. When the son of his father’s former collaborator creates a powerful suit of his own, Stark is busy fending off other corporate slimeballs, frenemies, and disgruntled Russian physicists.

Iron Man is almost the polar opposite to a superhero like Batman. He may do what he does somewhat begrudgingly, but Stark is drunk on the power he exudes as Iron Man. He was a filthy rich playboy before the incident that caused shrapnel to circle his heart and a minor medical impairment does not cease those activities. He has the money, the technology, and the ambition to become the most important man in the world (suited or not). The film mirrors Stark’s lifestyle as instead of brooding shots of urban landscapes and harping on the disease of human nature, Iron Man the character and the movie are focused on spectacle and importance that being a superhero would likely carry.

Most of the main cast from the first film are back for the second installment, save for Don Cheadle taking over for Terrence Howard in yet another jarring recast. Robert Downy Jr. is still on his incredible streak of awesome movies and characters that was cemented by his first turn donning the Iron Man gear. His portrayal of Stark is a magical combination of cocky jack-ass with a dash of used-car salesman slime wrapped in a cozy shell of a guy that you would admire but probably would not be friends with (at least not for very long). Gwyneth Paltrow fortunately is given more to do this time around as she assumes controlling power of Stark Industries.

Scarlett Johansson and Sam Rockwell are along for the ride as a sexy double (or maybe even triple) agent and a wormy Stark Industries competitor respectively. Johansson might not have immediately sprung to mind as the best choice for Black Window but she pulled it off nicely with a good balance of strength to play off of Downy and kick-ass tendencies to take down a dozen guards in the blink of an eye. I especially enjoyed Rockwell though as the wimpy Justin Hammer, a guy so seemingly inept and wishy-washy that you wonder how even ascended to more than a janitorial supervisor. See also Galaxy Quest for another wonderful Rockwell performance.

The one new addition to the cast I was somewhat disappointed in was Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko. Coming off of a Downy Jr.-ish comeback, Rourke’s character was almost too one-dimensional comparatively to the rest of the cast and especially to Jeff Bridges’ villain in the first. As the scorned son of a former Stark Industries collaborator, Vanko seeks to avenge his father’s passing on Stark. This is all well and good but Rourke disappears for stretches of the movie and save for two very brief scenes when he is battling Iron Man, he role is mostly pedestrian as he tinkers with his physicist stuff. Also MIA quite a bit was Cheadle as Rhodey who steals an Iron Man suit and releases it to the government and Hammer because he feels Stark is a bit too immature to handle the power.

In all just like PBF commented on in a previous episode, Iron Man 2 falls into the same trap as Batman Returns. The core group of characters is greatly expanded to include new friends and foes taking time away from the existing cast and leading quite a lot going on. Fortunately, most of this is tied up within the actual story (the whole SHIELD subplot notwithstanding) but things could have gone much smoother with a more simplistic and straight-forward story.

Iron Man 2 is a solid picture though. Maybe not as solid as the first due to some of the small nitpicks that I pointed out but it is still an great couple of hours to spend with largely entertaining characters and stories.

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MacGruber, if you didn’t already know, is a Saturday Night Live sketch that parodies a little show called MacGyver, which ran from 1985-1992. It was beloved by Americans and Bouvier sisters alike. MacGyver never used guns, but rather he would fashion some sort of weapon out of every day items. This premise begat several phrases, such as “MacGyver it.” The SNL sketch usually lasts 30-90 seconds, and involves MacGruber and his partner Vicki St. Elmo trapped in a room trying to defuse a bomb. Hilarity ensues and the sketch ends with an explosion, as MacGruber is unsuccessful at his task. This is the latest addition to the sketch-turned-movie universe, which is quite a mixed bag of good and bad.

The premise of the movie is fairly basic. Dieter Von Cunth steals a nuclear warhead and wants to destroy Washington D.C. Cunth killed MacGruber’s wife, so the task of stopping him becomes personal.

I liked MacGruber a lot, for many reasons. One, is that the movie just outright hilarious. There were several scenes (pretty much the entire coffee shop scene, and the last graveyard scene) in which I could not stop laughing. And a lot of the comedy is clever. A lot of it is funny just because vulgarity is uttered with excellent timing and vocal inflections as well, so you get both the “intelligent” and “blue” humor. There are some lines that fall flat, but the film is more funny than not. Some of my favorite lines: “I am going to rip your dick off and shove it in your mouth. And that is non-negotiable.” “Dead at the age of who-the-fuck-cares.”

Another reason that I liked this movie is because it adhered well to the fact that it is a parody of something that exists, rather than thinking itself an original character in a movie that just happened to be on SNL.  This was really the only concern I had prior to watching the film; that instead of continuing to parody a show, they would try to give us a story about MacGruber as a real person. The film makers did nothing of the sort. Because of this, all the overused and formulaic action movie conventions that were employed actually contributed to the film rather than taking away from it. There was some SNLness in it, because it is a sketch after all, but it was well balanced. This made the sketch translate very well to a film. You even still get the goods that that make the sketch funny, inserted right where it is supposed to be, and thus very honorable to the sketch. I imagine that if there were a MacGyver movie (and there may be, but I will never know, because I will never see the fucker) it would be done this way (obviously sans the swearing and silliness). All that being said, there are no Oscar worthy performances, no deep character connections felt, but that was precisely the point.

Will Forte and Kristen Wiig are both hilarious as MacGruber and Vicki St. Elmo. Val Kilmer and Ryan Phillippe are fine as well, however their roles were not largely comedic.

This is without question one of the better SNL movies, as opposed to crap like Superstar, Stuart Saves His Family and very idea that there is apparently a script based on the Super Fans sketch, which I discuss on the latest podcast with our friends over at 3SMOV Radio. Thank God it was never made, but someone still needs to destroy it, as it is being read at the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, and some idiot may think it would be great to make it happen. But I digress. MacGruber!

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War movies are an interesting beast. Having never been in these situations, I am sure the real life events of these movies can range the broadest spectrum of emotions from anger to fear to relative happiness. Rather than stick with these basic, primal emotions, recent films (especially those on the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) have attempted to interject politics and the hand-wringing of whether it is right or wrong, mostly to the detriment of the film (at least for what I have read on movies like Redacted). Just like zombie movies, some films are made with a social commentary and underlying thought interwoven in the story while some are just straightforward tales about the subject matter. I am truly happy that Hurt Locker took the latter approach to telling a story about three men in an army of thousands who are just trying to make it through each day.

The vast majority of the movie takes place with the company of three men, each a member of the Army’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit in Iraq early at the start of the war. We meet them towards the end of their 365 day rotation as Sergeant First Class James takes over as a team leader for Sergeant Sanborn and Specialist Eldridge. Together, the unit sets out on seemingly regular treks to locate and neutralize explosive threats in the country. When not in the kill zone, they blow off steam by watching porn, drinking alcohol, and horsing around. Normally, the previous two sentences would warrant the opening act of a similar movie before a mad bomber, kidnapping, or other plot twist is introduced. Here though, that is about all we get in the way of story.

This is not an average film by any stretch of the term as classic film staples such as an over-arcing story line or character development are nowhere to be found here. We meet these characters, see them do their jobs, see them goof around, and then they go home. While there are some minor notes of change in the characters themselves, these can be easily chalked up to the hellacious environment they are surrounded by and the tasks that they perform. Almost like the Joker in a little known movie called Dark Knight, these characters are absolute. You are given sparse clues about their origins, we first see them in their “groove” so to speak, and they leave in largely the same manner that they appeared. Normally, this type of story would have critics chomping at the bit to declare the movie flat and devoid of any semblance to real-life but here I fathom that was the intention.

With authentic locations, barely recognizable actors, and the ol’ favorite shaky cam style of production, this film comes off more as a documentary than a feature-length fictional tale from Hollywood. And just like a linear narrative of a documentary, things do not unfold in a nicely packaged three act story. By jettisoning things like a begrudged terrorist bomber and A-list actors, you can forget at times that this is a movie and not found footage from a war-torn video camera. All of the actors were great in their performances of selling this notion. The lead, Jeremy Renner as James, has the acting chops and is charismatic enough to carry the film, but his relative anonymity makes you think you have seen him before but cannot place him. In fact, it was only after I scrolled through his IMDb projects that I realized I had seen him before as a fairly prominent character in 28 Weeks Later. What pulled me out of this non-fictional account of war were the quite random appearances by Guy Pierce, Ralph Fiennes, and … David Morse? These actors as well did remarkable in their brief roles but consider it jarring to see a group of unknowns being lauded by that guy from The Rock or the father from Contact. Weird.

While I may have decried other movies (cough … Diary of the Dead) for mostly contained components of the story loosely interconnected, it is fitting here as a slice of life for these soldiers in the battlefield. It helps that the major sequences are so terrific in their execution and so taut with anxiety and fear even as the scene ticks on for eons longer than you would find in a typical action movie. The opening scene alone is one of the shortest ten minutes of film ever as it is expertly crafted to the point that the notion of time becomes a luxury, especially for the characters. And politics is never brought into the mix as the characters never take time to ponder their actions and debate the merits of war. Whether their feelings of the topic were good, bad, or indifferent were not addressed. Nor should they be as this is not a movie with Romero-style commentary on life, war, and everything in between.

There are tons of things that I can talk about more but I will refrain as I enjoyed the hell out of this movie knowing little about it other than as a war movie that won Best Picture. As it stands of the nominees last year I have seen, Hurt Locker is deservedly a victor at least as a prime example that a film does not have to follow standard movie conventions to be great.

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It was a sad day in the House o’ Puck on Friday as it was announced that 24, one of my all-time favorites would be ending. While the show really hit its stride in the award-winning Season 5, it has been downhill from there with diminishing ratings and lackluster plot points. Still I will be sad to see it go.

The good news? 24 is that much closer to transitioning to the big screen! Now, we’ve already touched on this in a previous episode but this now seem to be closer to reality now that the burdens of the daily workload creating the show are drawing near. In the last few seasons, one of the big hindrances has been the show’s “real-time” format, but that was admittedly a stretch at times. A 24 movie means the chance to breakaway from a single location with a limited cast and boring filler plotlines. And of course, Jack Bauer kicking ass in a way that can only be done with large explosions and an $80 million budget. Bring it on says I.

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