“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” — Roy Scheider, Jaws (1975)
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Quantum of Solace (2008) I think Daniel Craig is a great Bond, potentially better even than Sean Connery, but as other reviewers have complained, this movie is too similar to the Bourne trilogy (Bourne Identity/Bourne Supremacy/Bourne Ultimatum) to really have the feel of a Bond movie. The constant physical violence also reminds me of the Jason Stratham Transporter flicks, and I’ve about had enough of it. The old Bond movies, as silly as they were, had narrative structure and occasional moments of class. Can we get back to that, peeps? |
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The Reader (2008) When I was a military brat in Kaiserslautern during the middle 1950s, German adults were the elephant in the room. Germans never talked about what they did during the war, unless it was to claim they’d fought on the Eastern front, far from home. No one knew anything about the Jews. It’s hard for me to watch Holocaust movies without thinking black scornful thoughts about all the pure decent innocent Germans who didn’t know nuthin’, but I must say Kate Winslett was excellent, as were David Kross and Ralph Fiennes, and that the period detail was superb. I will note in passing that there is a surprising amount of T&A in this movie. |
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Religulous (2008) Bill Maher doing Michael Moore. The movie’s genuinely funny . . . so long as you’re in the choir Maher’s preaching to. I wish he’d given some thought to the Eastern religions, about which I know nothing, but then I suppose the movie would have been four or five hours long, and even though I’m totally with Bill Maher on religion, more than one-and-a-half hours of his brand of smugness would have driven me to prayer. |
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The Wrestler (2008) This is a brute of a movie — a simple story with stock characters (has-been athlete, hateful daughter, stripper with a heart of gold) that knocks you over with the strength of its telling. Mickey Rourke’s Ram Robinson is the man they invented the word “dogged” for, and I will never see a staple gun again without shuddering. |
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Passengers (2008) Not what I hoped it would be; everything I feared it might be: another mystic crystal revelation hippie-dippy saccharine oh-look-we’re-dead-and-it’s-not-so-bad flick. The dog was a nice touch, though. |
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Defiance (2008) The actual story of the Bielski brothers’ defiance is at once incredible and inspirational; this movie is neither. I thought I was watching one of those “scripted reality” TV shows, full of stock characters and pat mini-dramas meant to confirm conventional prejudices. A disappointment all around. |