21

21, for those of you who haven't seen any commercials yet, is the story of a team of MIT Students who spend their weekends flying to Vegas to count cards at Blackjack with the help of their professor. The movie is loosely based on a real-world team that actually pulled this off back in the 70s, but to keep things modern and interesting they put it in the context of modern-day.

The Story follow Ben Campbell (Jim Sturges), an MIT senior and boy-genius who gets accepted into Harvard medical only to find out he can't afford the $300,000 tab. After being turned down for a full-ride scholarship because his story didn't "jump off the page", he is approached by Professor Rosa (Kevin Spacey) with a proposition to join the underground team of card-counting college kids.

Immediately his life is turned around as he spends his time in high-roller suites in expensive suits, attracting the attention of a struggling Vegas security firm. They monitor the team's movements and start to pick up their strategies, leading to an eventual confrontation that throws the whole operation into Jeopardy. While the movie may not me true to the book, it's an original idea and the acting pretty decent. The story is believable overall well-directed. You really get a feel for Ben Campbell, you relate to his situation and he seems and acts human enough to make the story work. I ended up enjoying the movie, and would definitely recommend it for blackjack fans and newbies alike.

Shutter

Let me start by saying that before I bash this movie, I'm not biased, I actually enjoy these kind of cheesy Japanese ghost flicks (The Ring, The Grudge, ect). While they all follow the same formula and are usually over-the-top and predictable, I have an un-explained fetish for these B-Movie horrors. That being said, I have lost almost all faith in the genre thanks to Shutter.

Not only is shutter predictable and over-the-top, but it's a complete ripoff of the ring, almost scene to scene. In fact, I bet you could play the ring side-by-side with Shutter and watch the same events unfold, just substitute a camera in the place of a videotape. The acting is abysmal and to call the special effects disappointing is an understatement.

The story is about a young couple who moves to Japan (sound familiar yet?) only to realize they are being haunted by the ghost of the guy's ex-girlfriend. He's a photographer, so the ghost messes with his life and starts screwing around with all the pictures he takes. You follow the two as they see more and more signs of the ghostly girlfriend until finally they go to her old house and find her corpse, but of course that wasn't enough to keep her away. I won't spoil the ending, but I will recommend you wait until it's on DVD you absolutely insist on watching it.

Horton Hears a Who

While I may not seem like the typical Dr. Suess fan, I've been stuck in Surfside Beach all week and I was up for just about anything to ease the boredom. While I was extremely disappointed with the previous attempts, I think they finally got one right. For those of you who missed the colossal advertising campaign, they picked up some pretty big names for this latest installment, ranging from Jim Carry to Steve Carell. As a diehard fan of 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad, it was pretty great to hear Rogen and Hill voice-acting for a children's animated movie too.

The movie actually stayed pretty true to the book, as far as I can remember. Everyone knows the premise- an elephant finds a colony of Who people living on a flower he found, and can hear them speaking to him because of his gigantic ears. When he tells others about the Who world, they think he's crazy, and so begins the hectic battle between Kangaroo (voiced by a surprisingly menacing Carol Burnett) and Horton regarding the Who's existence. Vlad Vladikoff, the overly soviet vulture nemesis, is hired to ensure the flower is destroyed. Many people believe the original book actually delivered a pro-life, anti-abortion moral ("A person's a person no matter how small"), but the movie itself downplays that element.

The animation is fluid, detailed, and impressive. At one point they stray into traditional animation when Horton bursts intro a psuedo-Dragonball anime cut scene in which he battles hordes of killer monkeys, bringing a little variety to a somewhat-overused medium. While the movie obviously caters to a younger audience, it seems like it defies the trend in that most any age group can be entertained by the brand of humor it adopts.

No Country for Old Men

Looking back at another one of the year's new classics, I'll be reviewing No Country for Old Men. If you've been living under a rock and haven't seen it yet, this is one of the better films of 2007, based on the best-selling Cormac McCarthy novel. The story follows a drug-bust gone bad, a lone manic assassin, a desperate man's attempts to escape, and an elder small-town sheriff caught in the middle of it all.

The movie itself follows the classic McCarthy style- slow but suspenseful, leading up to an eventual coup de gras that interlocks the entire cast together. Havier Bardem gives an oscar-worthy performance as the giant, hulking, crazy assassin-gone-bad who pursues the stolen drug money at any cost. No Country for Old Men has an incredible cast and was filmed in various location all across Texas, making for an anything-but-predictable story of betrayal, insanity, and murder into a cinematic piece we won't soon forget.

Do yourself a favor and see this movie. With the exception of There Will Be Blood, this is probably my favorite movie from the 2007, and was recently awarded several Academy Awards. The legendary Cohen brothers have out-done themselves again, and this one you won't want to miss.

Semi-Pro

Today I got a chance to see Semi-Pro, the new Scott Armstrong (Road Trip, Old School) comedy starring Will Ferrel. For those of you haven't seen the ads, it's about 70's one-hit wonder Jackie Moon (owner, coach, and player for the Flint Tropics) as he fights to have his ABA team merged into the NBA. The movie has the usual Armstrong crew, relying on the usual slapstick and shenanigans seen in Talladega Nights and Anchorman.

When the ABA announces it's merger into the NBS in the late 70's, only four teams are allowed to move onward while the rest are disbanded. In a desperate attempt to both learn basketball and round up 2000 fans, Jackie and the Tropics go into a frenzy of ridiculous gimmicks from wrestling bears to leaping over cheerleaders.

As a die hard fan of Ferrel's work on Saturday Night Live in the 90s, I'm pretty much biased when it comes to anything and everything he shoots, with the exception of the cinematic catastrophe known as bewitched. I can't say this was bad, but after his last few successes it's probably fair to call it disappointing. For a slow, boring weekend it might be worth seeing, but you might want to just catch it on DVD.

There Will Be Blood

While I'm a little late on this one (since I saw it a month ago in theaters) I just thought I would go through with a review anyways in honor of "Oscar Season". There Will Be Blood is loosely based on "Oil!", the Upton Sinclair novel. The film is extremely dark and dismal, looking into the cut-throat (literally) dealings of the oil trade in the early 1900s.

Daniel Day Lewis leads the film with an incredible performance as Daniel Plainfield, the twisted, troubled, ruthless businessman as he ascends from a struggling prospector to an affluent tycoon. On a side note for those of you who missed it, he was nominated for and won Best Actor this year. Getting back to the film, Plainfield discovers vast fields of oil buried underneath the property of some simple, country farmers and looks to buy the land at "Quail-Hunting" prices in order to exploit it for profit, but the Eli Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), a young preacher, is wise to Plainfield's plans and forces him to support his church.

The film centers about Plainfield, the unusual story of his "son", and his conflicts with the land and the people of his new vast "ocean of oil". The film follows him through his development and exploitation, while dealing with his competitors and Eli all the while. As the movie goes on we learn more about his troubled past as he struggles with insanity.

Lewis and Dano really make this one of the best films of 2007. The acting is incredible, and the story is a deep look into the scarcely-seen vicious nature of oilmen during America's early years. This is a must-see, Daniel Day Lewis seems to limit himself to a movie every 5 years, and as usual it's worth the wait every time.



Here's an infamous scene from the film where Eli comes to Plainfield for money at the end of the film, if you haven't seen it this might be a spoiler.

Vantage Point

This week I finally caught a movie I was looking forward to, Vantage Point. For those of you who haven't heard, it's an action flick about a terrorist attack in Spain (fiction). The cast was pretty impressive, with Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, and Matthew Fox all on board. The basic storyline is that the President of the United States is attending an event to speak out against international terrorism, when he is shot on stage and the city erupts into chaos.

The movie is surprisingly similar to the concept of Crash or Pulp Fiction, with eight different unrelated characters being followed into an eventual inter-twined clash. What's different about Vantage Point is that you actually watch the same segments of the movie over and over, from different perspectives, with each segment revealing more details and secrets about the characters. While the concept got a little old about halfway through the film, it was something different.

The action was impressive and for this genre of movie it was pretty well made. I won't go into any details about the story like I sometimes do, because it's something you'll want to see for yourself and I'd hate to spoil it. While this may not make it's way to the academy awards, it's a damn good "lazy weekend" action movie, and you get your money's worth.

Jumper

Today I'll be writing about the colossal cinematic failure that is Jumper. While I would usually have enough good judgment to avoid these kinds of movies, I'm a die hard Samuel L. Jackson fan and there wasn't much out this week.

Jumper focuses on an imaginary, uber-breed of children born with the ability to teleport themselves huge distances by running through portals. These kids are called "jumpers", and there are no details on why they have this ability, where they came from, or even what they have in common. All is not well in the world of Jumpers, though, because everyone knows that no great power goes unchallenged.

When David Rice (Haden Christiansen), an American jumper, starts to bring attention to himself, the evil organization known only as the Paladins begin to pursue him. While we really don't know much about the Paladins, we do hear that they were tied back to the crusades and witchcraft trials, and they have Roland (Samuel L. Jackson) on their side, so you should know better than to screw with them. Somehow, the Paladins have connections with governments from different countries as well as access to technology that can prevent jumpers from... well, jumping.

What follows is a predictable, high-budget series of chase scenes and violence. Things turn ugly when David's elementary school sweetheart Millie (Rachel Bilson) is kidnapped by the Paladins to draw him into the eventual showdown.

Jumper is predictable, full of plot holes, and to say the acting is disappointing is generous. While the concept works on paper, they failed to explain the Jumpers or Paladins beyond initial introduction, and spend most of their time switching back and forth between fight scenes and sex scenes. Samuel L. Jackson may have been able to save Snakes on a Plane, but he was no match for Jumper.