Shaolin (Foreign Chinese Action 2011)

This movie was OK. A little melodramatic at times but overall it was good. The story was about a warlord in China, after the 1911 Revolution, who underwent a change of heart after his daughter got killed because of his greed and ambition. As the title states, he becomes a Shaolin monk and with their help fights off another warlord and pretty much saves the day while becoming a martyr.

That's the whole story in a nutshell but just picture it taking close to 3 hours to tell. Everything was good...no real big mistakes anywhere and overall good acting from a solid list of good Chinese actors.

Rating - B

Hereafter (Drama 2010)

This movie was OK but it's quite forgettable as well. Matt Damon plays this dude who can talk to dead peeps and convey messages while his brother is some loser trying to pawn him off at every turn. There are 2 other parallel stories going on in the plot but you really don't care about either of 'em.

The main thing killing this film is the inconsistent nature of the 2 other stories. Because they were either boring or annoying, I couldn't find time to care about their plights. So with all the scene jumping that was going on, I was only interested in 1/3 of the film.
Rating - C

Sacrifice (Foreign Chinese Drama 2010)

Gosh, talk about a slow movie. Yeah this one almost put me to sleep. There was so much damn talking and of course when there are no subtitles and my very limited Chinese is making my brain work in overdrive, it does not bode too well in the long run.

The film was about a small time doctor who saves the last child of a very large and powerful family. He raises the kid as his own and inserts him into the presence of the now-King who was responsibile for the genocide of the kid's family.

So much talking...I can't even think about any other part of this film because that's all I could picture. For an Asian flick, it was OK but just boring. The fight scene at the end wasn't even all that either. Unless you are into old Chinese stories made into movies, it isn't worth watching.
Rating - C

TRON: Legacy (Sci-Fi Action 2010)

So yeah...Tron. It's funny actually. The name of the film is Tron but the character of Tron was barely in it...that and he didn't even say much.

The movie was a flop. It was exciting in the beginning but then towards the latter 90% of the film it was slow-moving and didn't do enough to build up a story. I swear I could storyboard the whole movie in 10 index cards because nothing really happened. The visuals were OK and all but they were only covering up for a lacking plot.

I really didn't like the face of the main character, played by some unknown by the name of Garrett Hedlund. I mean his face really really annoyed the fuck out of me. For a guy he wasn't even good looking so I kept thinking to myself, who was responsible for the awful casting?

Anyway, the movie wasn't boring as I kept watching to see when it would pick up or when the story would get better, but it never did. It wasn't until the end when I discovered that the movie was over that nothing would help it attain any reasonable standing.
Rating - D

Restrepo (War Documentary 2010)

This movie was OK. It followed around a bunch of soldiers tasked with manning an outpost in the Korengal Valley within Afghanistan. The whole film jumped between video footage and personal interviews. Although this style is not inherently wrong, I believe documentaries turn out better if they are guided through with a narrator.

To put it all out there, I've seen much better documentaries. I mean you got to give these soldiers a bunch of kudos for being camped out in the middle of nowhere for so long, fighting for your lives everyday; so like most, we feel for them and don't want to bag on the movie. But it really could've been better had the film been organized and directed in a different manner.

One depressing aspect to the movie was that I remember watching the news and seeing a report on how the US was pulling out of the valley after using a ton of resources, man-hours, ordinance, and lives to secure the location in the first place. It's hard not to view this as anything but ill-planning and a total waste.
Rating - C

Sanctum (Adventure 2011)

Oh God this movie was so fucking bad. From the first few sentences that came out of the characters' mouths, it totally seemed like a very B-movie that never made it to DVD. Yeah the acting was that bad and the lines were even worse. The story had so many eccentric characters and overacting that it seemed like everyone was in some HS drama class trying to kiss ass. On top of this, the main characters were Australian so if you add that into an underwater environment, what you get is muffled speech that was very hard to understand.

So let me ruin some of this for you. From the trailer you probably know that these peeps go diving into some underwater cave system and then get trapped when the cave floods and some large rock blocks the entrance. The only way to escape is to follow the cave out to the sea. Many peeps die along the way. So the whole "thriller" aspect to the plot was all about these guys running out of air and their light going out. They didn't seem to have a problem with hydration or food which was very peculiar. Anyway...since all I wanted was for all of the characters to die, I didn't get any suspenseful feel from any of this at all.

Quite honestly the only thing I really wanted to happen was for all of the dead people to come back as zombies...now that would've been one hell of a ride. Picture all of the dumbfuck characters in a cave, using a re-breathers and scuba diving, and being all up in a panic because their undead friends were chasing after him...yeah that would've been a much better plot than the trash I was fed. I can't say it enough...highly unrecommended!
Rating - F

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Fantasy Adventure 2010)

This movie wasn't horrid but it wasn't very good either. There was not as much action as there were in the first 2 movies and it had a lot of talking without enough explanation. Other than that it was a regular Narnia movie. The main characters' cousin was super annoying. He had a weird thing going on with his nose that made you want to just punch it.

Anyway the movie is worth a watch just so that you can finish off the series but other than that, don't be expecting much.
Rating - C

The Fighter (Drama 2010)

Well this movie was good, but I don't think it was as good as everyone made it out to be. The story and all was interesting and it flowed well, but that was about it. It wasn't solid like Inception or something.

Probably the thing that post peeps would attest to would be the acting skills of Christian Bale. Insane I tell ya. It's hard to envision him as Bruce Wayne in Dark Knight vs. the crack-addict that he was in this film. At the end of the movie you get to see a snippet of the real character of Dicky Eklund and yeah...Bale was almost identical in terms of talking style and movements.

All of the other characters did good jobs but nothing more than what one would already expect from Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams. It woulda sucked being in the main character's family. So many trashy sisters and a ghetto mom...fun.
Rating -B

Season of the Witch (Fantasy Action 2011)

Seeing Nicolas Cage do a medieval fantasy film is just weird. It doesn't suit him one bit. Yeah as expected this movie sucked. The beginning of the film was straight out of Soldier with Kurt Russell and the rest of it reminded me of a movie called Black Death which I reviewed a few months back.

So yeah there was nothing redeeming about this one. Acting was labored, action was blah, special effects were about a C, and yeah then the movie ended and nobody cared about the result.

Rating - D