Movie roundup

I haven't been very good about posting blog entries about movies for quite a while now. In this post, I'll briefly discuss some of the movies I've seen recently. A few of these deserve their own entries, and you'll notice that I'm including movies that I saw more than 2 months ago that I simply didn't get around to discussing. I'll list them in the order I saw them:

Paprika (6/9/07): Lemming felt that the movie was awesome. Zifnab felt that the movie was good. Certainly, I agree that the movie was trippy, but I found it to be merely decent. I was disappointed because the trailer made me think that I would like it a lot more than I actually did. (Though unlike one of our party, I remained awake during the entire flick.)

Knocked Up (6/16/07): This movie was great! I really enjoyed it! Now I need to go see The 40-year old virgin, which comes from the same group.

You Kill Me (6/23/07): This artsy dark comedy was nice and enjoyable, but it was good rather than great. I also appreciate the fact that the lead actor Ben Kingsley, who played an assassin in this film, has also played Ghandi.

Ocean's Thirteen (6/27/07): Mindless fun. (By the way, I was literally the only person watching this showing of the film.)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (7/11/07): I really liked this movie as well, though of course it was more of the same. The character Luna was awesome and the Raistlinesque view into the character of Snape was much appreciated. My plans concerning this series are to finish watching all the movies, let a little more time pass, and then start the story over with the first book. (I haven't read any of the books yet.)

Rush Hour 3 (8/10/07): This was the movie the gang saw last night. I really liked it, so I'll classify it as at least very good and possibly great. I enjoyed this iteration more than its two prequels, though it's possible my not having seen the first two films in the series for quite a while is influencing this perspective. (It actually has the highest IMDB rating of the three films, though there does seem to be some inflation in IMDB ratings for recent films. I know I've heard Lemming briefly mention this before, but I wonder if this perception corresponds to a statistically significant result?) The cab driver was fantastic, the female assassin was also really awesome, and I always enjoy the outtakes in Jackie Chan's films. Also, Chris Tucker was far less annoying in this film than he sometimes can be (which also has a lot to do with why I liked this film better than the first two). This film also can also be described as "mindless fun" and it's a particular good example of that type of film.

There are a number of upcoming films I really want to see. Among the ones (of those not already ot in theatres) at the top of my list are Balls of Fury, which is supposed to be released on August 29th of this year. In fact, I've been waiting for this film for quite a while --- ever since my ping pong coach Wei Wang discussed her role as the film's technical advisor (she also appears briefly in the film as the nun, who appears in some of the trailers). Yesterday's film included an expanded trailer for this film, which pretty much typifies the phrase "mindless fun". (It's definitely not going to be winning any major awards that are considered to be "good" ones.) Moreover, it centers around ping pong, which makes me want to see it even more than I otherwise would. Coming out in 2008 is the film version of Get Smart, which was a fantastic TV show from the mind of Mel Brooks that appeared way back in the day. (I had a chance to see some reruns while growing up --- and again briefly a few years ago --- and comedy has held up extremely well over time.) I was really excited about this film as soon as I heard about it a couple of years ago, and I became even more excited about it with the superb casting of Steve Carell as Agent Maxwell Smart. (Incidentally, Lemming told me today that the trailer is really good. I haven't watched it yet, but I will during one of the commercial breaks for the Dodger game.)


Non sequitar: One other thing I wanted to mention about the trek to see Rush Hour 3 last night is that while we were eating dinner at Carl's Jr., I heard an elevator music version of the song "Falling Down" by Tears for Fears.