Movie Reviews

I. Batman Begins:

Love, love, loved it! The best Batman movie, and possibly even the best superhero movie. It was dark andrealistic. I'm very much a fan of fantasy, but my biggest beef with most of them is not whether a storyline is plausible, but whether the director and actors made the characters and the story realistic within that supernatural realm. Consistency and attention to details are just as important as the script and character development. The development of Bateman's fighting skills through ninja training not only brought a sense of reality to Batman's fighting skills and prowess, but it also weaved in a magic quality throughout the movie. Bateman also developed Batman's character. You can literally see him changing with events that affected him. And I loved it that Batman isn't this great goody two shoes, he's a dark and angry man who learns how to channel fear and anger for the good of others. That's more realistic of a legend /superhero than a superhero who doesn't battle difficult choices on a daily basis. And finally, the best reason to watch this movie in theaters are the visual effects. There are beautiful, dark but artfully well done scenes of swirling bats and tibetan mountains....Two thumbs up and a big kick in the pants to watch this movie in theaters.

II. War of the Worlds

The last time I really enjoyed a Tom Cruise movie had to have been the one with the little kid who knows the weight of a human head. Cruise isn't a terrible actor, but he's not really an actor to me. He's become Tom Cruise playing the part of a character in these movies, and I've seen most of his tricks. He always tries to play intense roles, it would be nice to see him play a character that uses subtlety.

Regardless, this movie wasn't bad per se, but it wasn't anywhere close to good either. I agree with most of the critics, it felt like a rushed movie and I'm surprised that Spielberg allowed this movie to slip. First of all it's a typical feel good movie, and like I said earlier, the storyline can be fantastic, if the characters and the details support that fantasy. Unfortunately it doesn't. It's unbelievable how much devastation the movie shows, but Cruise and his family always get away at the last minute with barely a scratch. And they are always ahead, one step, of the aliens. Spielberg's attemps to explain how the aliens came to earth millions of years ago through people Cruise and his family just happen to stumble across during their flight is contrived and completely unbelievable. So the aliens come down and take the world by surprise and attack, through such hysteria as we've seen with September 11th, I can't imagine that everyone would put two and two together make a sound determination that the aliens planted pods here millions of years ago, and then they came down in the lightening storm. Everyone repeated this story word for word. Unbelievable. Finally, the characters were all flat and I felt little empathy with any of them. I didn't like Cruise, I wasn't sure how to feel about his rebellious yet let's do good and fight the aliens teenage son, and I certainly was annoyed by Dakota who played his screaming 10 year old girl who knew too much for her age. This is a definite rental!