Another Bad-Ass Guy Ritchie Flick!

Country: UK
Director: Guy Ritchie
Starring: Mark Strong, Gerard Butler, Thandie Newton, Tom Wilkinson
Release Date: October 31, 2008
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures

Guy Ritchie established his own genre of cockney gangster films with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. He followed up with the hilarious heist movie Snatch and the surprisingly deep Revolver. Rumor has it RocknRolla is more than another stylish addition, Guy Ritchie says it’s the beginning of its own f***ing trilogy!

Heavy on the Zack and Miri, light on the Porno.
 
Country: USA
Director: Kevin Smith
Starring: Elizabeth Banks, Seth Rogen, Jason Mewes
Release Date: October 31, 2008
Distributor: The Weinstein Company

With early news regarding the fight to keep an R rating for the film, I definitely expected something a little different than the typical Kevin Smith flick. You’d think I’d learn my lesson by now.

Eastwood and Straczynski... of course it's amazing!

Country: USA
Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Jeffrey Donovan, John Malkovich
Release Date: October 31, 2008
Distributor: Universal Pictures

I caught the trailer a while back. The story looked interesting and I’m somewhat of a fanboy for Angelina Jolie. Once I found out that Eastwood was the director and it was a true story, however, I rushed to the theater.

I expect you to die... 

If there were any fears that the success of "Casino Royale", the highly-acclaimed reboot of Ian Fleming's "007" series, was a fluke, you may now take those worries and drown them under three measures of gin, one measure of vodka and a half-measure of Kina Lillet.

Shaken, of course.  Much like Daniel Craig's interpretation of Fleming's timeless hero, James Bond.

"Quantum of Solace" reunites us with an internally scarred Bond mere minutes after his "meeting" with Mr. White at the end of "Casino Royale", and opens with a car chase through the mountains of Italy.  While falling a little short of being the greatest filmed chase scene ever (I personally give that honor to "Ronin"), it still touched that side of me that always longed to see a classic action scene that was more than just a mish-mash of CGI and big, pretty booms.  This one was vintage Bond, and each action scene that followed never disappointed.

Some books are better left unwritten. 

M. John Harrison's "Light" nearly hit that category, if it wasn't for an epiphany I had.

The book offers the reader three different characters.  Michael Kearney, a physicist and serial killer in present-day Earth, struggles against a force that follows him at every turn.  Meanwhile, in a future hundreds of years beyond ours, two other characters seek an escape of their own.  Seria Mau Genlicher has given up her body--and, subsequently, her humanity--to pilot a highly advanced starship while running from her alien "employer".  And Ed Chianese is a man who's seen it all, but has become disillusioned with the universe, choosing to hide from those he's indebted to through virtual reality tanks.  Between them all is a mysterious being known as the "Shrander" and a spatial anomaly known at the Kefahuchi Tract, which bathes the future galaxy in a perpetual ocean of light.

Great prequel movie to a great survival horror game!

Country: USA
Director: Chuck Patton
Starring: Bruce Boxleitner, Kelly Hu, Keith Szarabajka, Jim Cummings, Kevin Michael Richardson
Release Date: October 28, 2008
Distributor: Anchor Bay Entertainment
Formats Available: DVD, Blu-ray

I noticed the release of Dead Space: Downfall and figured it would be worth checking it out. In case you don’t know, and if you’re geeky enough for this site you should know, Downfall is the animated feature prequel to sci-fi survival horror game Dead Space. A lot of major releases, be they movies or video games, have been cranking these little animated tie-in DVDs to stir up the hype for the main product. You may recall a few of the notables like The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury or Van Helsing: The London Assignment. I know why they do it and I think it’s perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, these movies don’t typically add anything of value to the franchise and almost never fair well on their own. This is not the case with Downfall.

 Over-the-Top Ninja Action... That Works!!

Native Title: Shinobi
Country: Japan
Director: Ten Shimoyama
Starring: Yukie Nakama, Jô Odagiri, Tomoka Kurotani, Erika Sawajiri, Kippei Shiina
Year: 2005
Distributor: FUNimation Productions
Formats Available: DVD, Blu-ray

Shinobi had a decent User Rating on Netflix so I decided to check it out. Who doesn't appreciate a good ninja flick, right? What I got was a little more than I expected... Most reviews and synopses will hype it up as “equal parts Romeo and Juliet and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” or “X-Men meets Romeo and Juliet.” Was the romance there? Yeah. He’s from this ninja clan and she’s from that one, the two clans are at war and it’s never going to work out, etc., etc.  The romance was definitely there, but I personally felt that the movie spent much more time on the action than developing the romance plotline. I consider Crouching Tiger a lot more of a ‘chick flick’ than Shinobi.