Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Flight of the Phoenix

It’s been a long while since I wrote something about a movie. A long while back, I saw a movie called Flight of the Phoenix. The movie summary on IMDB is pretty straight forward:

Survivors of a plane crash in the Mongolian desert work together to build a new plane.

Anyway, the whole thing felt like an Armageddon rip-off. All in all, I don’t think Flight of the Phoenix is worth watching.

Leviathan

Recently, I decided to watch a movie of some sort. Well, I ended up seeing Leviathan from 1989. It’s truly a bad movie.

Spoiler follows!

Leviathan

So, it’s essentially just like the movie Alien from 1979, except it takes place on the bottom of the ocean. You get the same kind of "monster" creature that’s impossible to kill, and it wants to kill everyone.

It starts off when the deep-ocean mining company workers find a ship-wreck of a ship that’s hasn’t (officially) sunk. Since the ship was Russian, they discover some vodka in the captains safe. Some of the crew consumes it. Little did they know that the vodka contains some virus engineered by the Russian military! (Everyone know that the Russian military experimented on their own men, right?) Anyway, these charismatic non-Russians’ DNA is now being rewritten by this virus. They are turning into…something!

After some battling (I’m not quite sure why they had a flame thrower on their ocean-floor base) of this "creature," they realize that they are on their own. The corporate headquarters don’t want to scare investors away with this "virus that rewrites your DNA" news, so they essentially wanted to let them die on the ocean floor. Little did the corporate heads know that our heroes are not only in deep s*..err..water, but also very creative and so they find a way to destroy the mutant, and at the same time save their rears.

So out of the 5 or 6 characters that we start with, all but two die. Oh, actually, one of the characters dies because a shark gets him! Doesn’t that bite (hahaha)? You are trying to escape a weird mutant creature that is a mix of your former buddies, and a shark gets you in the last 2 minutes of the movie!

If you have seen Alien, you’ve seen Leviathan. It really is that simple.

Monty Python's Life of Brian

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Warning: The following text is not guaranteed to be spoiler free. Reader’s discretion advised.

Just like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python’s Life of Brian is truly amazing. The British/Python-ian humour is pleasantly refreshing after watching several American movies.

Basic idea of the movie is: Brian is born next door to Jesus, and is mistaken for the messiah several times, has a number of run ins with the Roman occupation forces. And this is how it all ends (Brian is not in the frame, but he’s there with them):

Always look on the light side of life

So, today I learned that I should watch more British TV/movies. :)

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Warning: The following text is not guaranteed to be spoiler free. Reader’s discretion advised.

Well, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is much like Quentin Tarantino’s other film Pulp Fiction, that is, the movie is told non-sequentially. It is not as interleaved as Pulp Fiction, where you have about 4 stories told at the same time. Basic story is, a wedding is interrupted by 5 assassins, they kill everyone, or so they think. Some time later, the former bride wakes up from a coma, gets very aggravated, and starts killing the assassins. By the movies end, she gets two. My guess is, she’ll get the rest in Volume 2.

The one thing that made me give this movie 3.5 stars is the silliness of the fight scenes. It made me look at the movie as a comedy, more than a YAAF™. Without this humorous view, interesting camera effects and non-sequentiality, this would be just a sub-par action flick.

She killed them all!

The Mummy Returns

Rating 3 stars (out of 5)

Warning: The following text is not guaranteed to be spoiler free. Reader’s discretion advised.

I just finished watching The Mummy Returns. It was overall a silly movie, which relied on the viewers seeing and remembering the previous movie — The Mummy. There were way too many “why does this seem familiar?” and “I said that x years ago” which were referring to someone else saying something the person commenting said in the first movie. Sure, the plot was a continuation of the first movie, however there was nothing new beyond the basic concept set by the first picture: resurrect up (accidentally) the bad guy, travel a lot, kill the bad guy, save the date, and those references to the first film are just (at least in my opinion) cheap shots to make the plot interesting.

One thing that really disappointed me, was the final battle, where Rick O’Connell battles the Scorpion King, who has a body of a scorpion — the king was rendered rather poorly, compared to say Imhotep, or any other CG characters. This and the rather cheap plot gets it 3 stars.

Good vs. Evil

Equilibrium

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Warning: The following text is not guaranteed to be spoiler free. Reader’s discretion advised.

Yesterday, I watched a movie called Equilibrium. The plot is obviously very Orwellian; but there is plethora of ideas taken from other books and movies, including “Fahrenheit 451”, “1984”, and even The Matrix. It could very easily be summarized as: in a society controlling every aspect of an individual’s life, one feeling (which is a crime) individual contacts the underground and manages disrupt the control for long enough to make the people feel again, hopefully starting a revolution.

The parallels with Orwell’s "1984" are overwhelming:

  • “Father” vs. “Big Brother”
  • “Sense-crime” vs. “Thought-crime”
  • etc..

The end of the movie is rather silly, a major Neo vs. Agent Smith-like fighting scene takes place which makes the whole movies seem a little lighter and not as dark. I’d say if you have the time, go watch it is a nice movie.

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