Saturday, April 2, 2011

Movie Review - Insidious



The hairs on my arms stood up for the ending of this horrific tale of possession from the creative teams behind the Saw franchise and the Paranormal Activity (soon to be) trilogy. James Wan directed and Oren Peli is sited as producer on Insidious which is a story of a young boy who strangely falls into a coma and his family struggle to find out the cause of this bizarre occurrence. I enjoyed this movie understanding who was making it and who they were making it for.

It follows a similar story to the Paranormal movies but in a more narrative structure, adding in a much more elaborate set of possessor beings. The family is struggling to keep from tearing apart as the mother starts to see things that the husband/father seems to know nothing about. There's much more to that then the father, wonderfully played by Patrick Wilson, is leading on. He's a very strong character in this, although has much less to do with discovering the incidents. Rose Byrne, who plays the resilient mother, takes all things in stride to a point before calling in professional help. The secondary characters were believable too! I think the cast was well rounded for the movie.

The soundtrack was amazing too! It really kept me on the edge of my seat. It was a more traditional horror film with a very suspenseful strings section and often used spaces of no sound quite well.

Don't leave before the credits are over and you'll get a small tidbit. It's not much, but it's enough to re-raise the arm hairs a bit. Overall, I give this movie a three and a half arm hairs up out of five. For more, check out Imdb or ImdbPro.com

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Movie Review - Battle:LA


In my first viewing of Battle:LA I was expecting a great Science Fiction movie filled with amazing special FX. I wanted to see a lot of the alien technology. What I came out with wasn't that. That's not to say that you shouldn't go see it, in fact this is far from that. I say you go watch this more than once like I did. Yes the special FX were amazing. I even read an article on the models for the creatures in Make-Up Artist Magazine : Fractured Fantasy and Angry Aliens.

*Slight spoiler Alert*

What I did go see (more than once) is an amazingly crafted war movie that is politically correct in that our adversaries were not another human race of people. We were fighting against a race of aliens that landed just outside the coasts of several major cities. The alien's source of power was our ocean water. I have taken that as an analogy for our struggle with oil and the fight we continue to have to this day.

The movie starts of with us learning about all the main characters and what status in the military they have. We also find out who knows who. This sets up conflict amongst the unit later on. Finally, when the soldiers are put on the front line, each has to band together to fight off the common enemy for survival.

I think this was cast very well, the story was believable, and the resolution works and doesn't leave too many open ends for a sequel. Aaron Eckhart seems to be getting the "John Wayne" characters and pulling them off quite well. I was surprised to see Rapper-turned actor Ne-Yo in a toned down role much to go against stereotypes of Rapper/Actors like Eminem, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, and many others who use their movie roles to splay their music all over the soundtrack. He was very smart to keep the two separate.