DVD review: Valhalla Rising

A group of Vikings en route to the holy land get lost in a spectacular way, carnage ensues.

Normally I eschew artsy movies because I don’t want to get myself into that sort of self pretentious affair with long stares, loong backgrounds shots, looong silences… you know them. Lately a bunch of good auteur, and a dearth of good stuff in the mainstream, drove me to reconsider my stance and try more indi stuff.

But then we saw this one which is exactly the incredibly boring stuff that I can’t bear. On paper it should have been good, it good Vikings, brutal fights, gorgeous Scottish vistas but the writer/director Nicholas Winding Refn manages to squander all of this.

Yes the fights are nicely choreographed and extremely bloody but they are of the “Blink and you’ll miss it” variety, added together they amount to no more than a couple of minutes for the whole film.

The vistas are also gorgeous but we practically never see them because for the majority of the movie everything is shrouded in a thick mist. Even I can appreciate the symbolism and visual appeal of it but after an hour we are really overtaxing our patience.

All this stuff would have been secondary if the story was up the par but this is actually the worst part. The main lead is a mute and the other Vikings instead of talking more to make up for his silence they actually sit there brooding most of the times. So the whole movie is about a bunch of people rarely talking and when they talk they do it in such a sloooow way. Probably it should give them more gravitas but it only makes the poor spectator sleepier.

Moreover when they do something, because eventually after a lot of brooding they slooowly do something, what they do is not very significative and doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are nicely flashes of the prophetic visions of “One eye”, the main lead, but it all just remains there, undeveloped.

I know that I should have been taken by the dream like atmosphere but this movie is the factual demonstration that the best atmosphere in the world is not enough. We need stuff to happen for a story to be enjoyable.

DVD review: Green Zone

The hunt for Saddam’s weapons of mass destructions!

The whole premise of this movie is kinda funny to me. Yes, spoiler ahead, there were no WMD in Iraq, it was just a lie that they come up with so that they could invade Iraq so a movie that goes into this, that actually culminates into this has some serious problems to overcome.

On the other side Wiki informs me that actually somebody managed to be offended by this so maybe somewhere in the American right they still thinks that the weapons are there, they were just very well hidden….

Anyway being a sane person I knew from the start where this exercise was going so the only thing to check is how Miller, played by Matt Damon, will get there and on this front I must admit that they crafted a decent thriller. The characters are clearly defined even if every one of them blatantly represent a category, there is the spy, the press, the evil politician, the good native etc., and the plot is east to follow. Sadly they stumble in another problem, bring this one a realistic affair not a lot happens in term of action and the big action scene consist mainly of our hero running around in Bagdad.

In the end this is the umpteenth failure to get an enthralling movie out of the war in Iraq. I think that the problem actually lies in the gulf war itself, that it’s simply a not very cinematic event. The background is a boring desert or a derelict city, the enemies goat herders and the whole situation just a big mess. Nothing that screams good cinema moment to me.

Book Review: Anansi Boys

Fat Charlie Nancy discovers he is the son of Anansi, the spider god.

It’s very difficult to review a book that is so good. The pacing, the characters, everything is practically perfect. This is must buy not only for fantasy fans but also for fan of good fiction in general.

The tale is set in the “Gaiman verse” and shares some of his characters with “American gods”, an earlier Gaiman novel. In the Gaiman universe all the old myths, with their gods and monsters, are in some way true. Moreover he manages to tie them marvelously with today’s life showing how those old stories are still shaping the world we live in.

“Anansi Boys” is excellent even compared to the rest of Gaiman canon. “American gods” is maybe too long in some parts and overall too serious while “Anansi boys” has been written as a comedy and so manages to deliver all the important content with a much lighter touch.

Again, go out and buy it.

DVD review: Armored

A group of security agents plan to rob the armored van that they are protecting.

The idea is undoubtedly original. An heist movie from the point of view of the guards, who are also doing the heist. Thinking about it you’ll notice what is missing, an adversary to thwart the robbers. Sadly the screenwriter answer to this is that the robbers are the clumsiest that I have ever seen and therefore the majority of the problems arise because their plan doesn’t make any sense.

Moreover for an action movie this one is curiously bereft of action. First we have to wait thirty minutes to see the actual start of the heist, then when it start the situation quickly evolves in an annoying siege with an armored van as the home fort.

The protagonist is bland and uninspiring while a bunch of really good actors, Fishburne, Dillon, Reno, get saddled with undeveloped roles.

This is certainly one to miss.

DVD review: The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Alice Creed is kidnapped.

This is a British independent movie with no big names, apart from Gemma Arterton, and actually a cast of three people in total, two kidnappers and 1 victim, shot most of the time in the same location.

The plot is brilliant, a perfectly oiled machine of betrayal and tension. There are many more plot twists that it should be possible with only three characters and such a simple premise.

On the other side this movie is oddly cerebral. Of course we can’t get behind the kidnappers but is also oddly difficult to get behind the victim after an incredibly questionable decision on her part. What remains is a plot as precise as the inner mechanism of a clock but oddly lifeless. It’s like watching the writer/director solving an enormous puzzle in front of us.

Of course a movie like this would die if the performances from the cast are not that good but luckily they are all terrific. I was honestly surprised by Gemma Arterton. I thought that she took this role as a calculated move to show that she can be a serious actor but she is actually very good. I hope that she brings this also to her mainstream roles where she been not really that interesting.

Cinema Review: Super8

In the eighties a group of teenagers are filming a movie, on a super8 camera, when something happens to their town.

The blurb of the story really doesn’t convey how good this movie is. It was intended as an homage to the “Spielbergverse” of the eighties, you know those movies where a bunch of kids in a little American town come upon something incredible like an alien looking for home or a map to a pirate’s treasure? Yes that kind of movie.

Now what is incredible is that what was obvious and repetitive in the eighties is incredibly original now because simply they are not making that kind of movie anymore!

Abrahams not only took the setting from Spielberg, who produced the movie, he took the good stuff also.

Those kids are real characters; we get to know them and to care for them before the obligatory final act full of stuff blowing up. Actually the best complain I’ve heard about the movie is that we care so much them that we don’t really care about the monster of the week.

Speaking about the monster Abrahams clearly remember the lesson that he imparted to the world with “Cloverfield”. All the monster related stuff is filmed from the point of view of us poor humans and so a relatively little train accident is much scarier and more adrenalinic than two hours of transformers three.

Must see cinema.

DVD review: Where the wild things are

A young boy enrages his mother and then goes to the island where the wild things are.

A lot of craftsmanship certainly went into making this movie. The screenplay is carefully balanced, the shots are interesting and original, the wild things are wonderful… but in the end what a boring movie!

See the problem is that this movie is adapted from a very famous illustrated children book, where the wilds things are, which is ten sentences long. Now with all the skills in the world is simply not possible to adapt ten sentences in a ninety minutes movie without leaving an after taste like a very watery soup.

Therefore all the carefully constructed scenes looks interesting the first time but when we see that young Max is a lonely boy, again, and again, and again, in get unnerving. We want the story to move on but there is not enough story so everything takes a bloody long time to get done.

This really ruins what could be an interesting movie. All the psychological flavor in the world is not enough when nothing interesting is happening.

On the plus side the director, Spike Jonze, had a very public fallout with the studio about how to realize the wild things and I heartily commend his decision to go the “person in a suit” route. They look incredibly more physical than the usual CGI stuff, which is wisely still used for facial animations, and give the story a mesmerizing fairy tale look which reminded me of “Labyrinth”.

If only they could have made it less than an hour long….

DVD review: Battle for terra

A planet of peaceful aliens is invaded by humankind.

This is a movie that shouldn’t be any good; it’s practically the rehearsal of Avatar’s story which, as we all know, is basically A “Dance with the wolves” remake, just set in deep space. But like “Battle beyond the stars”, the scifi remake of “the magnificent Seven” which is the western remake of “Samurai Seven”, is oddly enjoyable, albeit in a campy way, Battle for terra somehow transform is obviousness in a strength and having settled on a simple story they polished it till it starts to literally shine.

First the visual are, for what is practically an independent production with 30 time less than the big animated blockbusters, stunning. The aliens look like aliens for once! And the vistas of the planet and of the big human spaceship are breathtaking.

Secondly the story is actually much more mature than the trailers give credit for. Stuff happens, bad stuff, and it all makes sense in the movie, nothing is there just for shock value. The best bit is actually the very basic conflict. Even if the human general is clearly the bad guy he actually haves a point, there is a reason humans are there, and he is not bad for the sake of being bad. This made the movie actually gripping; we wanted to see how the story ended and how they resolved everything.

DVD review: Black death

A group of knight and a young priest search a village rumored to have been spared from the Black Death thanks to a direct intercession from the devil.

What at first glance looked like your standard medieval fare, look Sean Bean is hacking Black Death with a two handed sword, is actually much more interesting than that.

Is plain to see that the filmmakers where passionate about the period which they recreated with plenty of loving details.

The beginning, with the presentation of all the characters and the stating of the mission, is intriguing. Everybody receive some distinctive traits and a personality in brief concise scenes.

After that the movie bogs down in an overlong middle act where nothing much of importance happens while the director tries to build pathos.

The ending is surprising and original, even if also a little bit too melodramatic.

Essentially this one is a “men on a mission” movie, just set in the Middle Ages, which, halfway through, becomes an homage to the “Wicker man”. There are much worse influences out there, probably with a bigger budget this movie would have got much better legs but as it is a recommended vision for fans of swords and chain mails.

DVD review: Coco before Chanel

Coco Chanel life before becoming famous.

Normally we watch a biopic of a famous person to discover that she lead a very interesting life and went over a lot of adversities to become a celebrity. Not with Coco Chanel.

While the first part of the movie is mildly interesting with a lot of period details and various stuff happening, half an hour in the movie bogs down in a boring and annoying ménage a trois and nothing interesting really happens till the very end.

I’m not into fashion and I knew nothing about Coco Chanel before this movie but if she was anything like what we see on the big screen then she must have been a really terrible person. Audrey Tatou depicts an incredibly proud woman with no kindness in her, neither grace, only capable of complaining about the life that she choosed to live.

The other characters are all bidimensional cardboard figures with no personality neither motivations. For obscure reasons they all stubbornly threat Coco Chanel like the second coming of Marie Antoniette.

Videogame review: Batman: Arkham Asylum

The Joker managed to occupy Arkham Asylum, the super villains’ prison, and it’s up to batman to stop him and his cronies.

This was certainly a long time coming because, to my knowledge, this is the first good superhero based videogame. They actually managed to convey the essence of what Batman is.

Technically speaking this is a third person action adventure. The graphics are very good, they use the unreal engine. The quality is actually not that incredible but the artistic direction is spot on with very interesting visuals that resonates with the entire batman canon. The scarecrow induced hallucination sequences are little masterpieces of surrealism and dread.

The combat system look complicated but is actually really easy, no punching in midair, the game will point you in right direction. Aesthetically is inspired by the Krav Maga, Israeli home grown martial art, and really deliver. Batman is a vigilante so a very violent and physical fighting style is perfect for him.

The stealth, predator, sequences are also brilliant. They are basically long mini puzzles where we have to figure how to pick up all the armed thugs of the Joker one at a time.

There are a lot of puzzles, riddles and stuff to figure out. Some of those is quite difficult and in the end I had to use a walkthrough but considering that it’s all optional content we really can’t complain.

The main problem for me was the detective mode. Basically we could switch from a normal visually pleasing world to a stripped down to blue tones reality where everything that we could need to know is highlighted. Now for all practical reason the game is easier to play by never switching to reality again and it actually obliges you to get into detective mode very now and then to follow some forensic trail. This drove me mad playing it because I wanted to enjoy the visuals but most of the times I couldn’t because I was continually switching to detective mode.

I must also add that when we get to the ending the fights start getting repetitive and underwhelming but considering that this was a surprise hit without a lot of funding we can forgive the developers. We’ll see what they do with the obligatory sequel Arkham City, out later this year.

A must buy for all Batman fans.

Book Review: Shout at the devil

Two poachers intrude in German East Africa territory where they clash with the local commissioner.

Another old Wilbur Smith (1968) this one is a bit messy. I understand that one of the good points of Smith’s writing is that he change in tone and plotting during his novels making them really unpredictable but here I had the distinct impression that the fused together two completely different drafts.

The first is a fun romp, an adventurous and comic escapade with an unapologetic rogue, Flynn O’ Flynn, as the main character. The second part is a somber affaire, mainly centered on a “inspired by a real action” World War I episode.

The tone and everything doesn’t really mesh between the two parts. The second part was also much too gloomy for my taste, is nice to have fun every now and then and it’s a shame that Smith thought that he needed to be so gritty.

Cinema Review: Arrietty

Arrietty and her parents are probably the last “Borrowers”, tiny creatures who lives in the nooks and crannies of an old house “Borrowing” stuff from his human occupants.

This is the latest animated feature from studio Ghibli, the best animation studio in Japan and probably in the entire world. The director is first timer Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the protégé of the legendary Hayao Miyazaki who supervised the entire project. This is very good news, with Miyazaki and Takahata getting older and openly talking about retirement is very important to pass the torch to a new generation.

The movie is quintessential Ghibli, gorgeous and poetic. It doesn’t feel at all the work of a first timer.

The story is a typical “Little gnomes” tale, actually a big children book in the UK, but it develops so beautifully that even the more cynical soon get caught in Arrietty adventures.

There is a myriad of beautiful little touches in the Borrowers world; it’s easy to recognize everyday items converted to a different use by them (like a chess piece that becomes an imposing piece of furniture for the main hall). This is mainly a story of proportions, when Arrietty meets the human we see them from her point of view, lumbering and menacing giants. Even the water with her being so small assumes a different, corpuscular, quality.

The main human lead is a letdown, too apathetic to be really engaging.

There is a very serious ecological undertone to the whole movie, with the humans destroying the borrowers’ world because they see them as pet like creature and the real possibility that the borrowers are practically extinct, but everything is kept in check and the movie never becomes pedantic.

It’s a shame that so few cinemas showed it, I hope it has better luck as a DVD/Blue ray because this is really a masterpiece.

The big Fringe review 2011

So I was away and managed to do some Fringe stuff during the weekend.

First we went to see “Korean Drums”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMZSSp1Au0U

Actually a really interesting experience, I didn’t realize that they had so many drums in Korea. It was a little bit too long for a drum spectacle, there aren’t that many variations that you can do with a drum, but it was smartly organized. They had traditional dances, a comic interview and even, halfway through, a flute, I wanted my money back at that moment, I signed for Korean Drums, not Korean Drums and a single Korean flute.

I’m kidding.

Anyway they are the real deal, a bunch of very talented and incredibly trained Korean drummers.

Then we went to see “Pinocchio: a fantasy of pleasures”.

http://vimeo.com/25320052

First I must say that this is not a show for children, easily offended people or simply very prude this show is not for you, go somewhere else and have fun, the world is a big place…

Now that the slate is clear, what an incredible show! I’m not a dance expert so maybe what they’ve been doing is relatively easy but I honestly found everything astonishing. The dance routines were amazing; they looked incredibly complex but at the same time were mesmerizing to watch. The dancers were clearly professionals.

There was also a singer who amazed us with very complicated and unusual songs, in many different languages at the same time!

This is a very peculiar reinterpretation of Pinocchio, mainly centered on the first part of the original story. The relationship between Pinocchio and the fairy becomes a very erotic love story and the Pleasure Island becomes literally a brothel. In the end they actually illuminated the original story from a different angle therefore making the show interesting also from an intellectual point of view.

All the leads were incredibly prepared and talented, and also very, very, good looking I must add. A must see show.

After that we went to see “Silent”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqFd54R6dOQ&feature=related

This was kinda a shame because I suspect that I saw another very good show but alas the language was too Irish for my ears, i could follow but it was so hard that I couldn’t participate in the flow of emotions and in the end a spitting headache stopped me from understanding anything. What I can say is that it was surely a very interesting experiment and also a very touching, and extremely sad, story.

On the last day we saw “Free run”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-9mB8Rg6o8

What a delusion! They were certainly talented and trained but really, the show had a lot of terrible moments.

It was far too long, of course they couldn’t jump all the time so they put the longest breaks ever where some crappy techno music played and they moved very slooowly around. They also tried to put a risible story in the middle of the show with the evil force of government chasing around our heroes in a badly choreographed scene. Choreography was the big absentee here; we practically just had a bunch of spots badly connected.

They still didn’t have enough free run to fill the show so they called a Capoeira and a Karate expert to do a pretend fight in the middle of the stage. Nothing against Capoeira, I actually like it, but the poor chap did the same routine over and over again, how boring.

The ending was kinda nice with all the free runners coming back and doing their spots one at a time, this time we could finally appreciate them, but really as an hour show it was very bad.

Book Review: Eagle in the sky

Young and reckless David Morgan fall in love with Israeli Writer Debra Mordecai and a new purpose in life as a Jet fighter pilot in Israel air force but tragedy looms.

Wilbur Smith is a guilty pleasure of mine. So much of is writing is clearly derived from the pink covered romance books that a lot of people steer wide away from his stuff. This is really a shame. Now of course I don’t want to say that is heroes aren’t all impossibly masculine, their lives doomed etc. just that he is a really good writer that craft fairly unpredictable and very enjoyable stories.

Eagle in the Sky is an old one, 1974, from before he got caught up in the great family sagas. The hero is archetypical Smith material, incredibly beautiful, rich and talented. The author himself acknowledges it many times.

The plot is mainly a love story but meander between many different settings and events. There are a fair number of action scenes, long and very detailed hospital sequences and much more stuff. This is a story where things happen, a lot of things actually, even if the basic structure is a little bit simple I honestly didn’t see it coming and so I was surprised by the main plot twists.

The ending is strange and fells truncated. I think that the author had another idea in mind then, after seeing that it didn’t work, he spun a change of setting with a new agenda and a new enemy. This is actually nice because it added another layer of unpredictability to the novel.

A very good book, this is a page turner.

DVD review: Whiteout

A murder investigation set in the South Pole.

This pedestrian thriller starts with a very interesting and strong concept and while it’s true that such an unusual setting makes things more interesting in the end the filmmakers totally failed to capitalize on it. The South Pole is just, there, they could have easily moved to plot somewhere else.

The setting also look terribly fake to anybody who had seen the real thing, it’s been depicted in a lot of documentaries so I can’t be to only one.

I feel that somebody in the process actually loathed Antarctica because when instead of giving the main lead Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) a personality they gave her a boring guilt laced flashback where she confessed that she went there to punish herself because Hollywood logic says that anybody in his right mind would prefer to live in Miami. This is terrible.

The plot is a mildly interesting whodunit with even a couple of plot twists but is based too much on the stupid and incomprehensible decisions of the protagonist. Speaking about her while Kate Beckinsale, while not a terrible actress, here show the limits of her acting repertoire. I wonder if this is the reason they put so much makeup and hair spray on her but in the end this added another layer of unnecessary fakery to the movie, she is already an extremely beautiful girl and so she would have survived some hair out of place.

To get if you got nothing better to do.

DVD review: The girl who played with fire

Lisbeth Salander is back and this time she is going against sex traffic.

Originally the millennium trilogy of books was adapted as a six part miniseries for the Swedish TV; it was released as a three part movie only later due to his phenomenal success. Now I haven’t read the books, neither saw the original TV miniseries, but this movie is a mess that suffers greatly from the middle movie in a trilogy syndrome.

The focus is squarely on the titular girl, played with great determination by Noomi Rapace. While I admit she is an interesting and highly original character there is a tipping point where if you continue to pile angst and misfortune on somebody it start getting ludicrous.

The convoluted and overlong plot doesn’t help. Improbable stuff piles higher and higher to a final act that should be dramatic and instead is terribly camp.

I think that we all felt in love with the idea of a Swedish thriller franchise with different aesthetics and original action beats but this shouldn’t blind us to the glaring problems of this movie. The main lead, journalist Michael Blomkvist, is practically reduced to supporting cast and does nothing, literally nothing, the whole movie. Apart from the titular girl all the other characters have no personality, no arc, nothing. There is even a gratuitous lesbian sex scene just to spice things up while the use of mobile phones in Sweden is apparently a peculiar super power of journalist and hackers because nobody else got one.

I got here so I’ll certainly go for the last one but I certainly can’t advice anybody else to do the same.

DVD review: Bad Lieutenant

Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) is a bad cop who after doing for once a good deed is left with chronic back pain. Six months later he is completely out of control.

This is a great movie.

For many years I was afraid to delve into Werner Herzog works. His reputation as the quintessential mad director beloved by critics worldwide convinced me that he was one of those incredibly boring type who spent half an hour on panoramic shots a la Jim Jarmusch.

Instead he is quite the opposite of that. This movie literally never stops; it’s a relentless assault on our sense and convictions with a wonderful sense of pace and a willingness to do anything.

There is also a quite complicated and interesting plot that actually in the end is not really that important. As the self explanatory title points this is the story of the titular Bad Lieutenant meltdown, and what an amazing meltdown it is.

Herzog points in the making of that he tried to depict what a calls “The bliss of evil” and I think he succeeded wonderfully. When I thought that nothing more could happen with McDonagh he managed to surprise me, multiple times.

Of course nothing could have happened without a strong turn from the lead actor and Nicolas Cage really did deliver this time with an exceptional turn. He doesn’t play the lieutenant, he literally inhabits him. In the entire movie he moved like a person always high on some kind of drug or with pain in the back. I can’t talk about the former but regarding the latter, suffering from back pain myself, even if not that bad, I must say that I recognized myself in his oblique movements.

He is not only very good, he is also incredibly daring in his performance going all in with a series of despicable activities that would have scared away most other actors.

This is really a very funny but also very intelligent movie, a rare beast in today’s Hollywood.

Cinema Review: Captain America: the first avenger

Skynny Steve Rogers is transformed into the patriotic super hero Captain America and battles his evil nazi counterpart, the Red Skull, during the Second World War.

This is an hard film to watch, it’s so American! Nothing against it of course, every movie should be free to express itself but in these modern times we see patriotic super heroes in a very different light.

I actually think that they used the right amount of flag waving in this one. If they did it less it wouldn’t have been true, it wouldn’t have been Captain America, an hero famous because in the cover of his first comic he punched Hitler in the face.

If you can manage to accept him on his face value then Steve Rogers is a nice character, well written and fairly rounded, surrounded by a competent supporting cast. Dominic Cooper’s Howard Stark does a nice Tony Stark redux impression adding levity to the whole plot while the rest of the cast, even serious colonel Philips (an always great Tommy Lee Jones), shares nice zingers.

Hayley Atwell manages a solid turn as the token female / love interest, a thankless role that actually requires a lot of skill to pull it off. Having said that I have don’t like the love story, Maybe I’m really turning into an old grumpy person but I think this movie doesn’t spread a good message. You see when Steve Rogers is a skinny short person no girl wants even to talk to him but when he became a “super soldier” he suddenly has hordes of girls offering themselves to him while the leading lady can stop looking at his pecs. To me this look like a wonderful advert for steroid abuse. “No girl wants you? Grow your muscle with this magic stuff and you’ll get laid with no need to learn to talk”.

To prevent this they only had to show that the girl was interested in Steve before he became a Super Soldier but no, that’s too easy for Hollywood.

The main plot is also idiotic. The main villain (An underutilized Hugo Weaving) can produce incredibly advanced weapons but instead of using them to win the war he continues to produce more of them so that he can conquer the entire world in one attack. It’s like in Risk, the board game with the little tanks, with the player who refuses to attack at all because he never has enough armies.

The action is competent, not too bad but not that good either. The main weakness are again the Nazis, they look like cast off from one of the Castle Wolfenstein videogames, too clunky and overall stupid.

In the end if you can get over all the flag waving is a nice summer blockbuster.

Book Review: Odd Thomas

Odd Thomas can see the dead people, even if he can’t talk with them. One morning he sees a mysterious stranger who is about to commit something terrible.

Dean Koontz certainly always writes the same novel. This is not really as bad as it look at first glance if that novel is a good one but Koontz output has been so prolific that the quality is wildly fluctuating. This is really detrimental because we need a really good craftsmanship to revisit the same situations and the same characters again and again and again.

Odd Thomas is a good one. Koontz, probably tired of establishing the same stuff for the umpteenth time, greets us in media res. Odd Thomas got all the classic “I see the dead people” powers and also all the corresponding troubles, mainly he really needs to act about the stuff that he sees putting himself in continuous jeopardy. Instead of having to hide all this stuff he already told most of it to a bunch of very bizarre, but very interesting characters.

Actually the most interesting part is the Odd Thomas Hometown of Pico Mundo which Koontz describes with a lot of interesting and vivid details. He clearly loves all the small town dynamics and the strange tales about his inhabitants that seem to multiply when the town gets smaller.

The main plot is standard Koonts fare, honestly a little bit subpar because we are missing any characterization of the main villains which is normally one of Koontz stronger point.

Kudos to the ending is very strong and got me totally unprepared.

DVD review: Salt

CIA agent Evelyn Salt is accused of being a Soviet spy.

Hollywood is so male centered that to give Angelina Jolie her first action role in two years they had to rewrite a movie originally intended as a Tom Cruise vehicle. There is really a dearth of original ideas up there because with a male lead Salt is clearly a poor man version of Bourne while with a female lead at least it becomes a little bit more interesting.

The plot starts in an intriguing way with a lot of questions about the true allegiance of our main lead but it answer those questions too soon leaving us with the same old same old routine of “who need a sensible plan and an armed force when we have a superspy that can do everything by herself”. I must add that I really hope that the original Kurt Wimmer, known for Equilibrium and Ultraviolet both better than this, plot made any sense because the rewritten for Angelina one is totally insane. There are plot holes so big that entire nuclear missiles literally fly into them!

On the other hand the action beats are nice and imaginative. The car chase for once is original and fun to watch and, generally speaking, all the action scenes are clear and easy to follow which is very good and very rare nowadays.

Angelina Jolie as always excels in this kind of roles. There is something about her, an intensity, that goes so well with ass kicking. Liev Schreiber is surprisingly good in a very limited part.

In the end this is a good popcorn movie.