Micro Movie Magic

If you’ve been reading my blog lately, you know I’ve spent a lot of time in the air this year. Since I always ride in coach and there’s no room for my 6’3” body to work with a laptop, I end up reading or watching movies whenever I’m not sleeping. In terms of films, both South African Airways and Delta Air Lines have pretty good in-flight entertainment systems with individual on-demand video systems.  As a result, I count 26 movies watched in the air this year. I thought I’d devote a post to movie reviews. However, since they have little tiny screens on airplanes, these are just little tiny reviews. Enjoy.

1. Juno: A quirky perspective on teen pregnancy.
2. Beowulf: All CGI. Angelina Jolie’s digital instance is pretty awesome.
3. Atonement: A little depressing. My one chick flick for the year.
4. We Own the Night: Not buying Marky Mark and Joaquin Phoenix as brothers, but there’s a really unsual car chase in a rain storm. I love car chases!
5. Knocked Up: Incredibly funny. Seth Rogan is great and Katherine Heigl is very sweet.
6. Dan in Real Life: Oops. Another chick flick. With Steve Carrell and Dana Cook, I expected it to be really funny, but this is a serious movie. Still pretty good.
7. Cloverfield: Not sure I’d see it again since the outcome is spoiled now, but everyone should see it once. Good, clean monster movie fun.
8. I Am Legend: A better kind of zombie movie. Check it out.
9. Jumper: Just okay. Don’t expect Anakin to wield any light sabres in this one.
10. Into the Wild: I gave up. Sean Penn goes overboard with the artistic stuff. I did like Vince Vaughn as the leader of a gypsy harvest combine crew.
11. Charlie Wilson’s War: Surprisingly good. I don’t agree politically with the real Charlie Wilson, but the movie was a lot of fun.
12. Elizabeth – The Golden Age: I fell asleep.
13. National Treasure – Book of Secrets: How can Nicolas Cage play this kid-friendly, quasi action hero role, then go off to another movie where he’s a complete psycho? Whatever. A good addition to the Nat T franchise.  And it has a car chase!
14. Gone Baby Gone: I usually hate this kind of “kid in peril” movie. But it had a lot of twists and turns and I enjoy Ed Harris (who was also in NT: BoS).
15. Semi Pro: Goofy. Silly. Prototypical Will Ferrell.
16. Be Kind Rewind: This is an odd little film. It was shot to look like a home movie which is funny given the plotline. The movie is a little Weird Science and a lot something else.
17. The Bank Job: Jason Statham is cool. Typecast, but cool. I can imagine him playing David Beckham in a soccer biopic.
18. Drillbit Taylor: Owen Wilson is slipping a bit. Just okay.
19. I, Robot: An oldie, but goodie, as they say. High quality sci-fi is a weakness of mine. This is almost as good as Minority Report.  And it has trucks-full-of-robots-chasing-a-car chase!
20. An Inconvenient Truth: Way better than I expected. The scariest part of this film is that it was made by a politician with clarity and who seemed to make sense. The situation must be much worse than it appears for that to have happened.  But no car chases.
21. Leatherheads: George Clooney and Renée Zellweger try a wee bit too hard to have chemistry, but it’s not every day someone makes a football movie from this era. Good for a view.
22. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Another favorite classic. I need to go to Wudan school.
23. 21: The book was better.
24. Master & Commander – The Far Side of the World: The next best thing to a car chase is a 19th century round-the-world tall ship chase.
25. 10,000 BC: I didn’t realize that in ancient Egypt there were massive mountain ranges full of mastodons, vast jungles with super sized flightless vultures AND the giant deserts you normally associate with the region (plus you could pretty easily walk across all this terrain in a few days), but it’s right here on film.
26. Vantage Point: This movie is good up until about the 4th run through of the assassination sequence from a different point-of-view, then it started to get a bit repetitive (literally).  Still it’s not bad.  And there’s a great car chase through the streets of Mexico City (the movie was “set” in Salamanca but not “shot” there).

Howzit? Howzit!

Back in Jo’burg. Again. Land of opportunity. Land of malls. It’s like southern California the way everyday commerce revolves around the malls in this city. Sandton City, Rosebank, Cresta, Clearwater and other malls seem to dominate social activities.  Most of the restaurants are in the malls.  Many of the grocery stores are in the malls.  There are flea markets in the malls.  Even liquor stores are in the malls.  Go to the mall or go home.

Anyway, I am lacking in recent posts, but I simply haven’t had time to write nor much of interest to write about.  I’m hopeful this will be the last trip for a long while as I am tired of airplanes.  With travel for work and vacation, the end of next week will mark a six week stretch during which I will have slept four nights in airplane seats against only five in my bed at home and flown 42,212 miles (across United, Delta and Southwest… bummer).  Strange way to live.

On the upside, spring is arriving in SA.  Today it’s a sunny, clear, crisp Saturday.  There are some noisy Hadada Ibis in the garden.  Dawn breaks at about 6:15am and I’ve been able to get back to running in the morning, which is good for my health and sanity.  I ran 4mi this morning, then walked another 3mi hitting a couple shopping centers to complete some errands.  There’s Beijing 2008 Olympics coverage on the TV and the South Africa v Argentina rugby match will be on shortly, so I’m getting a much needed sports fix.

Hopefully, I will be posting more regularly going foward.  Thanks for the patience, iyakubonana (Xhosa) and totsiens (Afrikaans).