Film Review: Armored (2009)
Armored starts off as a somewhat promising deviation from the standard heist movie and then quickly degenerates into formulaic action fare. The plot revolves around a team of armored truck guards led by Matt Dillion. They decide that, on a day when they're transporting an unusually large amount of money, they're going to stage a hijacking and take the money for themselves. Things don't go according to plan, because if they did, it would make for a really boring movie. Unfortunately, it's still a predictable, boring movie.
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Film Review: Planet 51 (2009)
Some of the promotional material would have you believe that Planet 51 is about a human astronaut that lands on an alien world and is hunted out of fear and ignorance. In reality, Planet 51 is about Lem, a teenage alien (we're never given a name for the species) whose life gets turned upside down when a visitor from another planet lands in his backyard.
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Film Review: Pirate Radio (2009)
Pirate Radio is about several things, but swashbuckling is unfortunately not one of them. It's about Radio Rock, a rock n' roll radio station illegally broadcasting to the United Kingdom out of the North Sea in the 1960s. It's about the men (and woman, but a lesbian, so it's ok) running the ship and the rebellious, unorthodox lives that they lead. It's about young Carl (Tom Sturridge), who's sent to live on the ship with his godfather Quentin (Bill Nighy), the ship's Captain, to get his life on the right track. Oops. Finally, it's about select members of the British government who have made it their mission in life to destroy pirate radio. They don't want to simply fine or punish, they want to wipe it from the face of the Earth.
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Film Review: Gamer (2009)
Gamer takes place "some years" from now according to the opening caption, which seems lazy, although given the subject matter, I'm sure it's meant to be ambiguous and alarming. A man named Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) has invented a self-replicating nanite which colonize in your brain and give someone else control of you, i.e. mind control. The first implementation of this technology was used in Society, a fakecommunity where players could control real people and live out interactions, much like the PC sim Second Life. The technology was then used to create Slayers, which the plot of the movie revolves around. Meanwhile, an anti-nanite movement called Humanz is trying to bring Castle's empire down.
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Film Review: Shutter Island (2010)
As the film opens, U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are on a ferry headed to Shutter Island to invesitage the disappearance of a patient from the AshcliffeHospital for the Criminally Insane. A storm is on the way and the sky is grey and overcast. Teddy Daniels is seasick and vomiting. And soon, Shutter Island is looming in the distance.
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