Taipei
Yet another trip to the glorious Far East. Yet another trip on United, the flight was only delayed an hour and a half due to a plane replacement, but it’s better than the alternative.
The movies:
- Shrek the Third (6/10)- I think Mike Meyers is starting to lose his Scottish accent. Has the usual enjoyable potty humor along with witty writing, but compared to the first Shrek, the writing seemed to get a bit tired this time. As with all Shrek movies, every character has their background in fairy tales or literature. Justin Timberlake as the whiny, wannabe actor Arthur just seems to fit for some odd reason. Arthur gets bullied by Lancelot and makes a pass at Gwen when he’s leaving school. Typical All-star cast could have done with a bit more of the Monty Python writing rather than cameos by John Cleese and Eric Idle. More of the same Shrek, you’ll get more satisfaction out of the move if you’re familiar with Disney / Grimm’s Fairy Tales / Arthurian Legend. Less Filling, Tastes okay.
- Hot Fuzz (7/10) - What if the Brits spoofed every cheesy, “blow ‘em up” action film made with Simon Page as “Bruce Willis”, you’d get “Hot Fuzz”. It starts up with the supercop being reassigned to a small village in the country (think sending Bruce Willis to the middle of Kansas). The dialogue is pretty witty with a lot of dead pan jokes. It bounces from dead pan conversation to completely unrealistic scenes (eg. farmers have lots of guns…) There are some quite gory death and near-death scenes, but the special affects make many of them laughable. The pace of the movie is quite funny as the turning point of the movie is the “romance” scene where the two lead cops enjoy a night of “Bad Boys” and “Point Break”, and then proceed to re-enact many of those scenes in the climax of the film. There are a few scenes that I really don’t get (like the whole goose thing), but I chalk it up to something in UK pop culture. One thing that I did get, is that the premise of supercops vs. conspiracies can get pretty rediculous pretty quickly.
- Next (7/10, 8/10 for the line of temporal mechanics that this can stir a debate on) - I dig this movie only for a few scenes and a couple of concepts. Has there been a film that is shot is Las Vegas without Nicholas Cage? Anyway, Cage is a sideshow magician in Downtown Vegas who can see 2 minutes into the future. First, let me say that I love the concept of branch prediction (I don’t particularly care for the Wiki link as it’s too computing centric, but it will work for this purpose). He’s chased and enlisted by the FBI to track down a stray nuke. The main highlight of the flick is his precognitive ability. He uses it to win at blackjack, to avoid getting caught or shot and to meet the romantic lead. The action scenes and effects for seeing Cage’s ability at work are pretty well used. If you like time travel and paradoxes, this is a good movie to wrap your brain around, especially when the lead character keeps saying “everytime you look at the future it changes”.
