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Creativity and Recreation

Review: Knocked Up (2/5)

“Knocked Up” (IMDB, Amazon) is about Ben (Seth Rogen) and Alison (Katherine Heigl) who gets drunk, has unprotected sex, gets pregnant and decides to keep it (or at least she does…)

This is a sweet movie and all. Some quite good characters, but the main problem here is, I don’t buy it. People just aren’t this cute and cuddly. Sure, she might have jumped into bed with him… if he’d given her roofies… and sure, she might have wanted to keep the child… if she felt jumping off a bridge was the only alternative, but the guy she’s doing all this with…

Don’t get me wrong here. Ben is a pretty cool guy…. in fact I bet most men think he’s really cool… he does his own thing, and … well goof off completely. Checking the IMDB page for this movie I’m not surprised to learn the director is a man (Judd Apatow) he’s also the writer, and four out of five producers are men (unless Clayton Townsend isn’t a male name, but I think it is…)

So, male fantasy coming up: Photo model beautiful woman will want to have your child even if you don’t have a job, smoke pot and are piss poor. Don’t tell me he got his act together in the end…. she didn’t know he was having a work, and apartment etc when she took him back.

Anyway, this story doesn’t have to be logical anyway since it’s just a big poster child for making people have kids (or at least not abort them) so much so they had to put in (definitely SGI’ed) shots of the baby “breaking out” just to scrape some of the sugar coating off.

This movie, ladies and gentlemen is nothing but the product of a frantic society (and I bet the rest of the western world are just as frantic as they are “over there”). The authorities want us to make lots of consumers and tax payers, but we’re not really doing so good in that department, so when they go old nobody will be able to pay for the care of them, at the rate of growth most western countries have today we’d have to import daily buss loads of immigrants or there will be no consumers or tax payers in the end… and that’s why this movie screams… get knocked up, do it regardless of the cost “Just do it already” and it doesn’t matter if the guy is a complete looser or if you brought condoms, just as long as you don’t use em… Wonder if the Catholic church is a sponsor?

This movie gets a 2/5 score for being a good laugh, but it could have gotten more, if it hadn’t been for the propaganda.

Creativity and Recreation

Review: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1/5)

“Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” (IMDB, Amazon) is about three strippers Varla (Tura Satana), Rosie (Haji) and Billie (Lori Williams) out in the desert looking for thrills. They come across Linda (Sue Bernard) and her boyfriend Tommy (Ray Barlow). After killing Tommy, they take Linda hostage. At a nearby petrol station they are tipped off about an old, crippled man (Stuart Lancaster) living in the desert with a fortune. They decide to liberate him of his money. All they need to do is get past his two sons (Dennis Busch and Paul Trinka). However, it turns out the old man has an agenda of his own and most of the cast end up knife stabbed or hit by cars before we reach the end of the movie…

I have to admit, this movie is from 1965, and apparently, the way they acted in the 60ies are just not in my taste.

This film has huge problems with the script. Let us start with the name. When someone calls something “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” at least I get an image of some kind of incitement/hunt/stress scene. My imagination was that the three “evil” strippers would incite the poor innocent girl to kill some other poor innocent victim. As it turns out, the script contains very little incitement, actually very little action at all.

The lack of action is, obviously, the main problem of this script. The characters (part from Paul Trinka’s Kirk) are all trying to ”be” instead of ”doing”. The three girls go around and snarl and talk “tough” but sadly enough the script fails them; there are virtually no cruelty or toughness for them to act on, leaving the poor actors to try and ”be” as good as they can, which of course just looks silly. This failure also rubs off on the victim of the story, Linda, making her fear and anxiety seem plastic and phony as well.

The script had me cringing more than once from the outright ridiculous plot turns. Especially the scene at the gas station where the station attendant tip the girls off about the old man, had me thinking of those good old days when I participated in high-school plays.

The script doesn’t give much credit to the human psyche either, and it utilizes the “linear cause-effect” type of psychology. For instance, the old man lost his ability to walk when he saved a girl from being hit by a train, so obviously, now he hates trains and girls…

If you want to see how to write a script that will kill all the characters mercilessly, then watch this flick (and by “kill” I don’t mean “blood-bath”-kill, unfortunately, even splatter would have made this less painful… most of the characters die, that’s true but they’re dead long before that happens). Or if you just feel that the good old classics has to be good, old and classic, then watch it and suit yourself! ;o)

I give “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” 1 point of 5. (I’m not gonna f-up my own system by starting to deal out zeroes and minuses but I am pretty tempted…)

Creativity and Recreation

Review: Paycheck – Let the future be untold (4/5)

Paycheck (IMDB, Amazon) is a story about Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) who is an engineer, or to be more precise a reverse engineer. Michael is paid to take competitor’s work and reverse engineer it into something his employees can make into a products of their own.

Since it would be very bad if information about whose technology was reverse engineered into what, Michael’s assistant Shorty (Paul Giamatti) helps removing all of Michael’s memories of the project once work is finished.

A once in a lifetime opportunity comes along as Michael’s old friend Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart) offers him work that will give him stocks in Rethrick’s promised-to-become-great company. Michael takes on the three year project, even if he risks losing his memory for the whole period, and that of a probably blooming romance with one of Rethrick’s employees, doctor in biochemistry, Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman).

Three years passes, Michael finds himself back where he once begun, in Rethrick’s office, his memory wiped and all that stands between him and his millions, a trip to the bank.

That is however, when problem starts, because Michael finds not only has he switched the personal effects he once had to leave before entering Rethrick’s employee, he has also forfeited a 100 million dollars worth of stocks in Rethrick’s company.

Why did Michael say no to the money and, of significantly less importance, what became of his personal effects? Michael soon realizes his former employees and the FBI are out to get him, and his bag of assorted effects seems to be the only thing that keeps him ahead of the game. A game, that if lost, could cost him his life…

You can read the whole review by clicking the below link, but there may be spoilers in that text…

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Creativity and Recreation

Review: Ultraviolet – Xenophobia (3/5)

Ultraviolet (IMDB, Amazon) is a story about Violet, an ordinary woman whose life changed when she was infected by a virus that turned her into a feared and hated hemophage.

Once contracting hemophagia, Violet was incarcerated and experimented on, and perhaps these experiments cost her the child she was bearing when infected, perhaps the infection itself did, regardless, Violet escaped and now she is out to steal the government’s latest and most deadly weapon in the fight against hemophages.

The hemophages have superhuman strength and speed, but at a cost; few live longer than a decade. Since the virus that causes hemophagism infect on blood contact, the number of hemophages should have grown had it not been for the government’s prosecution.

Like vampires the hemophages have pointy eyeteeth, but unlike the vampires they do not require sucking blood and taking lives to survive. They are far from demons, and rather unfortunates infected by a deadly and infectious disease, and the only demon thing about them is the demonizing of them done by the government.

You can read the whole review by clicking the below link, but there may be spoilers in that text…

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