Stepford Wives (2004)

3/5 stars

I’m not burdoned with having seen the original, so I had no expectations in mind. This remake took a more humorous path than the original (or so I’ve heard), and I thought it was fun. Great cinema? No. Fun? Yes.

Nicole Kidman did a credible job, but I kept thinking that Meg Ryan might have been better (that, and Kidman kept reminding me of Ryan). Bette Midler was fun as a angst-filled author, mother and wife. Matthew Broderick’s performance came and went — he’s good at the goofy, nerdy-type, but, as Andrew pointed out, at the climax, his delivery was somewhat wooden.

There were more holes in the plot than we could count, but it was still an enjoyable diversion for an evening.

Identity

1.5/5 stars

Already this one is fading from my mind. Ten strangers come together and are stranded at a motel one stormy night. And there’s a murderer among them. Less than halfway through the movie, I blurted out who the murderer was, and was correct. The twist was not terribly surprising, and the ending was expected.

Control Room

I had first heard of Control Room through the Beyond the Multiplex series on Salon. I was surprised when Andrew metioned that a local theater was showing it, and he’d like to go.

Control Room is a documentary on the Arab TV channel, Al-Jazeera. It begins in March 2003, just before the US “military operations” in Iraq. We follow things at the control room in Qatar but also at the American “CentCom” (Central communications) where the American military attempts to control the media output of the war. We also see the Al-Jazeera reporter in Baghdad, which has not been adequately explained (a bit of a coincidence that an Al-Jazeera reporter and two other reporters were killed during the same campaign).

Is Al-Jazeera slanted? Duh. But no more so than, say, FOX or CNN are slanted in favor of the US. Equally interesting to the difference in reporting styles of the Arab and US is the stories of the employees at Al-Jazeera. For example, the senior producer confessed that he would take a job at FOX News in a second if they offered and he would “trade the Arab nightmare for the American dream.” He plans on sending his children to university in the US and have them stay.

Thought-provoking film. Of course, though, the right people won’t see it.

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle

2.5/5 stars

Not bad, not great. If possible, this one was cheesier than the first (not that cheesy is bad, but this one went just a bit too far). I preferred Bill Murray as Bosley…Bernie Mac just wasn’t Bosley. (I realize that Murray was off filming Lost in Translation, and since that was an Oscar-winning film, it was certainly the right choice. However, based on my opinion of Translation, it would have preferred if he had done Full Throttle.)

Biking to the movies

We biked up to Reston Town Center today to see the latest Harry Potter movie. It was only 4 miles from where the W&OD trail crosses Hunter Mill (where we parked and unloaded the bikes), so it wasn’t as much of a workout as our past two bike trips. Next time, I think we’ll start from downtown Vienna, which will add a couple miles to each leg of the trip.

Total miles: 8.0

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

4/5 stars

This is perhaps the best of the Harry Potter films yet. As Andrew pointed out, there is a lack of the look-at-how-magical-Hogwarts-is scenes, and just a good solid story. I haven’t read the book, yet, so I’m not sure how closely the film followed it. However, there were a few things that felt like they needed more explaination, and so I suspect they ended up on the cutting room floor.

Troy

4/5 stars

I know. I know. Brad Pitt in a summer blockbuster just can’t be good. Now, I’m not a huge Brad Pitt fan (I think partly because I started hearing the no-showering rumors were true), but he was not nearly as annoying as I was expecting. I dare say he wasn’t bad in fact. The performances in Troy were overall quite good — in particular, I liked Eric Bana as Hector and Orlando Bloom as Paris — though there were a few clinckers. I wasn’t impressed with Agamemnon (Brian Cox).

Fortunately, I’ve never read the Iliad, so I wasn’t burdoned with knowing the inaccuracies in the movie. I quite liked the story, though some of the battle scenes could have been shortened. It was interesting that the director/writer/whoever chose to write the influence of the gods out. There is no golden apple. Achilles’ mom is not a sea nymph. Achiles dies from several arrows to his chest (though he pulls those out, leaving one in his heel).

Good, fun, summer movie.

Riding in Cars With Boys

3.5/5 stars

If you watched the trailers for this movie, you might think that it’s a comedy. It’s not. Fortunately, a couple friends had already warned me, so I was prepared for a drama. I rather enjoyed it — it’s a different sort of role for Drew Barrymore, at least from her recent spate of romantic comedy roles like Never Been Kissed and 50 First Dates. This is a story about dealing with what life gives you, even when it’s not what you had planned for your life. Happy ending? Not exactly. Didn’t need one. Life rarely does.

The Vagina Monologues

4.5/5 stars

I wanted to go to this when it came through town, but just didn’t feel like I could go alone (nor did I want to drag Andrew along). If/when it comes through again, I’ll definately get tickets.

This reminded me a bit of a one-woman show I saw several years ago called Whistling Girls and Crowing Hens. In both, I laughed, I cried, I laughed til I cried. Whistling Girls was a collection of stories about women in general — from one monologue on wanting the Dream Date game, complete with zits for not doing a dare, to a monologue about a woman being raped to a monologue about the old Girl Scout manual (teaching girls how to keep up a home).

Vagina Monologues had the same range of subjects, but all relating somehow to a woman’s vagina — from reclaiming the word ‘cunt’ to a gang rape survivor describing her vagina before as a village and after as a village plundered, destroyed. At times moving, at times funny, always captivating. Strongly recommended.

Red Planet

2/5 stars

I was ready to put all the bad science behind me and just enjoy a good sf movie, but there were so many other holes in the plot that I just couldn’t do it. For example, at one point, the surface navigation robot, AMEE, gets switched into “military mode” from “navigation mode,” and overhears the team members saying that they need to “kill” her to get the power they need for something (I already forget). Instead of killing them outright, she just maims one and runs off. Gallagher, Val Kilmer’s character, explains that she’s playing war games, and will come back and kill them one by one. Huh? She was clearly having no trouble with the three of them, so there would be no reason not to just kill them then and there. Come on.

So, since it was so bad in other respects, let’s chronicle the bad science that I can remember:

• Enough green algae on Mars will produce oxygen. Bloody unlikely — the green algae would die first.
• Where there is oxygen and water, life will follow. Well, maybe, but it’s highly unlikely that the life will go from green algae to insane omnivorous bugs. Way more likely to be some variation on the green algae, and a long, painful path from plant-life to animal-life.
• Mars will produce a breathable atmosphere in just a few decades (or less). Even with enough green algae alive and some kind of super bug, there ain’t going to be enough oxygen to have a viable atmosphere on Mars anytime soon.
• Astronauts could survive on the surface of Mars for a day without protective gear. Even if I could believe that Mars could have a breathable atmosphere, there is virtually no protection on Mars from the harmful radiation of the Sun. On Earth, we have the upper atmosphere to protect us from the harmful radiation of the Sun (gamma-rays, X-rays, UV) On Mars, there would not yet be a complex-enough atmosphere for such protection. Even if the astronauts did survive a day without their helmets, they would have severe radiation poisoning.

That’s all I can remember for now. I’m not going to re-watch it just to find bad science.

Perhaps I could have enjoyed this movie if there had only been plot holes and no bad science or no plot holes with bad science, but I just couldn’t look beyond both.