Mission Impossible: II Good action. Lots of action. Did I mention that there is action? Why don't we point out that there is action here. Yes, lots of action in true John Woo style. Now don't get me wrong, he has a lot of good stuff. Sadly he doesn't seem to understand when enough is enough. Does every reload of a gun have to include a slow-mo dropping of the clip, overdone sound for when it leaves the gun and hits the floor, absolute silence in between, and close up on the bottom of it hitting the floor? Does every kick have to be wilder and cooler than the last one? Do we have to have a slow-mo scene every 5 minutes?

That's my bitch about the "style" of the movie. The actual plot of MI:II was pretty standard. Lots of action, sidekicks that don't really contribute to the mission, lots of things blowing up, a hero that feels the need to do things the hard way, and a pretty lame relationship that someone thought would be a good idea.

But a good action flick.

My pride, my absolute pride of this movie was calling a stunt double. That's right, the first scenes with Tom Cruise rock climbing I said "man that looks like Ron Kauk" and lo and behold under "stunt doubles" in the credits, on the far right column (look for it!) is the name Ron Kauk.

Guess that whole climbing thing paid off huh?

The quick and dirty conclusion... if you love John Woo go see it, you'll love it. If you hate John Woo go see it anyway, it's a decent (albeit cardboard and predictable) action flick.

Frequency This movie caught me totally off guard, in a good way, and therefor gets high marks (yes, 4/5 is a high mark). This movie was not what I expected. It wasn't a cool ass si-fi techie extravaganza, but instead it had a bit of everything. There was emotional stuff, techie stuff, action stuff and philisophical stuff. Basic premise is a guy manages to contact the past through a time of freak solar flares via an old ham radio.

This presents a great many interesting situations, and some big questions. Should you if you could? What are the consequences? What do you do if you don't think about the aformentioned questions before just going ahead and doing it?

It is sort of like a big star trek episode (as Mr. Cranky says), but on the other hand, it's done in a "real" setting. What would you do if you could talk to yourself 10 years ago? And how would affect things now? Of course, this question has been the topic of many, many movies already, but this is a new way of doing it.

The end also came to me as a bit of a surprise. All through the movie I had an idea of what was going on, and what was going to happen next. Heck, I even had a couple of ending senarios all set up in my head, but it was a bit of a shocker. Now that I think of it (2 hours later), it's a bit surreal. When you see this (I do recommend it) think about how the ending happend, and what events occured... maybe your brain will start doing cartwheels figuring out the time paradoxes (or maybe I just don't remember exactly what happened and am blowing smoke).

U-571 This is for the movie U-571. This movie is pretty much what you'd expect, a fun action movie that takes place under water. Most would scream "Das Boot rip off!", and well, you're pretty much correct. This movie is about a young crew of US submariners who end up on the run from the enemy, in (gasp) enemy waters. The story does have an interesting historical twist though. The premise is that they are on a mission to capture an "enigma" decoding device from the Germans. Obtaining one of these would turn the tide of war, give them access to encoded German transmissions, etc etc. To do this they impersonate a U-boat to meet up with another, take control of the vessle (by killing everyone on it), get the enigma device and scuttle the ship. Sadly, as things go in movies like this their own ship is blown out of the water and the crew, sans captain, is stuck in a German U-Boat in enemy water.

You can see how this is a problem.

The story is pretty predictable, with a few twists toward the end. The focus charcterwise (IMHO) was at the star of the show, Matthew McConaughey, who not only has the most wacky spelling of a last name, but also is the 1st officer (the XO) of the US sub. With the captain dead he must take control and become a captain to his men.

Part of the story is how he goes from being unable to have control of a boat (at the beginning of the story it is explained how he didn't pass the captain's test and get his own command) to having to, and via trial by fire, transforms from a weenie into a "true captain".

This borrows heavily as I said, from Das Boot, and is pretty predictable, including it's overly American skew (could you make the "US" insignia on the wing of the Catalina at the end any more obvious????), but a fun ride.