The Invention of Lying takes place in a world not unlike our own. Except for one huge difference: People cannot lie. They are blunt and truthful all the time, which is not fun at all.
Then one person discovers that he can tell lies. He, of course, proceeds to take advantage of this ability which no one suspects.
The movie was funny. However, the main romantic plot was a bit underwhelming. The most fun was observing what little differences the writers have put in the movie’s world where no one can tell lies as compared to real life.
I would rate the movie 8/10.
We watched District 9 in the theater which was a good idea.
For some reason, people either hate this science fiction movie of aliens ghettoized in South Africa or they love it. I liked it. The movie did use a sledgehammer to hammer home its message at times, but it seemed in the spirit of the movie.
I rate it 8/10.
The Elephant Man is a movie about Joseph Merrick, a 19th century Englishman with a congenital defect.
As I understand, the movie has lots of historical inaccuracies. But that is par for the course.
It was an interesting movie, though the DVD print wasn’t good.
I rate The Elephant Man 7/10.
I love most Tarantino movies, so of course we had to see Inglourious Basterds.
The movie is about a Jewish special forces unit that’s sent to Europe to disrupt and kill Nazis (and scalp them). However, the Nazi intelligence officer who’s on the trail of that unit gets a lot more screen time. Also, there’s a major subplot about Nazi cinema.
Of course, this is a Tarantino movie so there are clever references to all sorts of movie history.
I loved it and rate it 10/10.
Since we have watched all the Harry Potter movies, we saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in the theater.
This movie is better than the last installment. I rate it 7/10.
Recently, I have been reading about and listening to lectures on the US Civil War. So I decided to watch the Ken Burns documentary about the Civil War. I have watched it off and on and in bits and pieces on TV before, but this time I was serious and borrowed the 5-DVD set from the library.
It’s a total of 11 hours. So it took me almost two weeks to watch it but it was worth it. The documentary makes the events of the Civil War alive in a way only a visual medium can.
I rate it 10/10 and recommend it to everyone interested in the United States or history.
Amadeus is a movie about the rivalry between two composers, Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It is a delightful movie with the period setting and costumes looking good. It also has an interesting satirical feel to it.
I liked it and rate it 7/10.
If you are wondering where I have been in the last three weeks, I have been busy. I had to transfer all the non-bloggy content of my website to WordPress.
Since I do book and movie reviews, I started using the Now Reading Reloaded plugin for book reviews and links to Amazon. However, I couldn’t find any similar plugin for movie reviews.
After getting permission from the developer, I forked Now Reading Reloaded 5.1.1.0 to make it work with movies and DVDs.
This plugin which I am calling Now Watching is now available on the WordPress plugin repository.
If you find any bugs or issues or have feature requests, please let me know.
Having watched all the previous Terminator movies, of course, we had to go watch Terminator: Salvation.
I have to say I was disappointed. It is nothing like the previous movies. Of course, there have been lots of contradictions in the series, but even accounting for that, this is not as much fun with some good action. On the other hand, Amber, who doesn’t remember any of the previous movies of the series and probably hasn’t seen the first two, did like it.
I rate Terminator: Salvation 5/10.
We watched new Star Trek movie recently.
I have to admit that while I am a fan of Star Trek, growing up I remember the Next Generation more clearly than I do the original series.
While time travel is a staple of Star trek, it lets them get away with some really bad plot points and this movie is no exception to that. Then there’s also the way they changed Spock and some of the other things from the original Star Trek canon.
Considering some of the weaknesses, the movie was fun. I would rate it 6/10.
