Movie Review: Lucy

When I had first seen trailers for this movie, I had hoped it would be one of those groundbreaking type of movies for women, that didn’t quite happen, but it wasn’t half bad, or half good either, really.  The story revolves around this woman who is in Taiwan and living it up.  Her so-called boyfriend of one week handcuffs a mystery case to her arm and sends her into a building to deliver it.  It doesn’t get better for the main character from there, nor the audience, really.

The story felt familiar and then I realized there was a movie with that guy from the Hangover, Bradley Cooper, with a similar premise, Limitless.  After that discovery, it kind of felt anticlimactic.  The entire movie has over the top antics and action sequences, a good summer blockbuster, but the story didn’t have much staying power.  The idea that humans only access 10% of their brain and then allowing one person to access the rest through recreational pharmaceuticals makes it less palpable. 

I wanted to enjoy the movie, but the lackluster reviews set me up and once I saw the movie, it just never drew me in or blew me away.  I want to like Scarlett Johansson, but outside of the Marvel world, this character didn’t have enough charisma to make her interesting. In a way, having the character portrayed as clinical instead of human made it ever harder to feel connected to the story or character at all.  As Lucy becomes smarter, she becomes less human, but there was so little time with “human” Lucy that it all felt very put on.

I can’t, in good faith, recommend this movie, but for $7, not $12, it might be worth seeing.  Either way I’m more excited about the Guardians movie coming out this coming weekend.

The Bosnia List

One good thing about being in a book club is that it encourages me to read books I would normally never pick up.  My sister, who is currently stationed in Bosnia, selected this book.  The topic of the book, as Muslims, makes it resonate that much more.  Sadly, the author’s attitude shine through the book, making it more about how he is a 12-year old in a 30-year old body.

The novel is broken up into present and past segments.  Mr. Trebincevic was 12 years old when Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovic decided that ethnic cleansing was the way to purge Muslims from Serbia.  What follows is Mr. Trebincevic account of things as seen through his eyes at 12, but also how he never once let go of the feelings of hatred that were placed.  I won’t deny that what he lives through is not devastating.  Watching people who used to be your friends turn on you and try to kill you would scar anyone, but that is what therapists are for.

The information, taken out of the blind revenge Mr. Trebincevic displays throughout, is horrifying.  Muslims were corralled and quarantined, killed at the drop of a hat, brutalized for fun and all in the name of an insane leader.  Sounds familiar?  It should, and yet as even I look back, few if any nations stepped in to stop any of it from happening.  What I learned most from this book was that what happened in Bosnia was allowed to happen by the nations of the world.  And while I would hate to talk politics further, what is happening in Israel seems eerily similar, save that the Muslims there are able to fight back, though they’re fight Goliath, who has the backing of some of the strongest nations in the world.

There was a curious discovery I made early on in the book, while his family was Muslim in name, it didn’t sound like they practiced any of the tenants of Islam and this made their punishment almost that much worse since they were hardly Muslim at all.  By the end of the novel, the only thing that Mr. Trebincevic did that followed Islamic rules was not eating pork.  He did not pray five times a day, he did not fast during the holy month, he did not seem familiar with reading the holy book.  This colored the book further for me.

I feel like a history book might have been a better source of information than Mr. Trebincevic rabid vengeance and his desire to tell of anyone who did him wrong.  At one point during the narrative, his father and brother are taken to a camp, presumably to be killed, yet neither of them exhibited the same blind hatred that the author did.  I can’t presume to understand how he might have felt, but he had no forgiveness in his heart and had no gratitude for surviving the harrowing experience.  Instead of being thankful for being alive, having a great job, parents that sacrificed everything so they could have a decent living, Mr. Trebincevic did nothing but grouse and complain about how unfair his life had been.  I am sure there are hundreds of thousands of Muslims who would gladly have traded places with him.  It is hard to sympathize, or empathize, with an author when he displays such a great amount of arrogance.  It isn’t until the very end of the book that he sounds, still petulant, but realizes he might have been the lucky one.  You think?  If you read this book, the information and story of Bosnian Muslims deserves to be told, I just wish it had been done by someone who wasn’t so unpleasant and ungrateful as Mr. Trebincevic.

Movie Review: Purge: Anarchy

The Purge came out last year, a new idea on the future in horror movie form.  The first movie centered around a family who sold security systems in America for the one day a year when all crimes were legal, including murder.  The idea was a population control mechanism, though it didn’t seem to always work out that way, being a way for people to kill others.  The movie alluded to crime dropping significantly because of this one day, letting people act out their aggregations in a ‘healthy’ way.

The only flaw of the first movie is that it followed one family and the revenge the neighbors wished to enact upon them.  In this sequel, the original is a distant memory and now the world is acclimated to this activity and the viewer follows the lives of several different groups who are being pursued for being out and not at home during the annual night of the purge.

The different groups that are followed were rather stereotypical, yet they still added a little variety through the narrative allowing them to buck the norms that would be expected for each character.  The person who you might think would be the first to die, isn’t who you expect and it flies in the face of a lot of what we expect.

What this sequel did that built off of the original is it gave context to the first movie, to what society would be like if this were a reality.  If the world turned to this, there would be order in the chaos, but there would be those who would realize that this is a way for the government to control the lower classes, as they were the ones who were purged more than the wealthy.  The story took some eventful turns which kept me engaged and interested throughout.  This is a nice entry to the horror movies that have come out in 2014.

Movie Review: Snowpiercer

In most cases I don’t go in for the triple AAA Hollywood action movie.  When I go to the movies, while I do like to be distracted, I want it to have some semblance of order and not just be over the top.  When I read about this movie in Entertainment Weekly, they made it sound like it was a new-age action movie, something I’d never seen before.  That wasn’t entirely true, but it wasn’t wrong either.  The movie delivers enough story to make the over-the-top action seem like a second element to the story itself.  There may be SPOILERS below, if you plan on seeing this movie and want to be surprised.

The premise of the movie centres around a train that is travelling around the world, which has turned to ice for reasons that were never established.  Chris Evans plays Curtis, a man who is stuck in the back of the train, what would be considered steerage of the Titanic.  The train is comprised of different sections where people who paid more live in the lap of luxury, and those who don’t, they are relegated to live in poverty.  With the outside world gone, the class system is preserved in this train.  Curtis leads the back of the train forward in an attempt to take the train and no longer be cowed the affluent. 

The story unfolds with a delightful ensemble cast supporting Evans, including Tilda Swinton playing a love-to-hate villain as well as Octavia Spencer as a crazy mother separated for her son.  There was also a father-daughter combo who were playing a very curious role of seemingly addicts, but the addicts were collecting the drugs for use as an explosive as opposed to abusing.  When Evans finally gets to the end of the train, the story twists again, revealing the plot that he was set up to come forward from the beginning and must now decide to inherit the role of the man in the engine room or not.  The movie ends in a chaotic sort of way, perhaps to give us hope that the world hasn’t ended, but it still looks bleak.  A very unusual action adventure that kept me engaged and guessing.

Movie Review: Deliver Us From Evil

My penchant for wanting to see horror movies gets tested time and again.  You’d think at some point here I would learn my lesson, but lucky for you, alas no, and I went to see this latest scary movie.  For some reason, I often feel like scary movies should come out when it’s cold out.  Like summer horror movies seem odd, unless they’re set in a summer setting.  Regardless, Eric Bana is easy on the eyes and that alone makes this movie passable.

There really isn’t much new to this story.  Though the story claims to be based on true events, little of it seems startling.  In essence, it almost flies in the face of the concept that reality is more frightening than fiction, because I’ve been more frightened by fiction (and my sister’s pants) than reality, sometimes.  This movie doesn’t even compel me to research how much of the story was Hollywood-ised vs. the original.  I do want to say that if any of those things were real, even one, then I sympathise and apologise to Sgt. Sarchie for any defamation of character or integrity.

Have you seen the Exorcist?  Okay, then you know what you’re getting into.  If you want to be surprised, then stop reading.  Basically, this movie is about a disbeliever (Bana), who starts experiencing crazy, unexplainable things and is brought back into the fold of Catholicism once he realises that only the power of Christ compels you.

What makes this movie so overdone is that there is nothing new to it.  The scares are just that, and I did cover my eyes every once in a while, but at the end of the movie, I didn’t feel scared and it didn’t stick with me.  The story actually unfolds in an interesting way, but the ending is so anticlimactic, sort of, that it makes the build-up seems like a waste.  I understand that endings are hard and based on true events, perhaps they didn’t want to make something out of thin air, but I felt like there were so many more questions besides what happened to the main police officer, especially when there were so many other loose ends.  This movie could have been better, more closed, but it wasn’t and that’s why I can’t actually recommend it.  With no other horror movies out, this might be your only option.  For $7 at AMC, it wasn’t a complete waste.