HIT MOVIEZ

HERE IS THE SUMMARY FOR THE MOVIE TWILIGHT FROM IMDB

Bella Swan has always been a little bit different. Never one to run with the crowd, Bella never cared about fitting in with the trendy, plastic girls at her Phoenix, Arizona high school. When her mother remarried and Bella chooses to live with her father in the rainy little town of Forks, Washington, she didn't expect much of anything to change. But things do change when she meets the mysterious and dazzlingly beautiful Edward Cullen. For Edward is nothing like any boy she's ever met. He's nothing like anyone she's ever met, period. He's intelligent and witty, and he seems to see straight into her soul. In no time at all, they are swept up in a passionate and decidedly unorthodox romance - unorthodox because Edward really isn't like the other boys. He can run faster than a mountain lion. He can stop a moving car with his bare hands. Oh, and he hasn't aged since 1918. Like all vampires, he's immortal. That's right - vampire. But he doesn't have fangs - that's just in the movies. And he doesn't drink human blood, though Edward and his family are unique among vampires in that lifestyle choice. To Edward, Bella is that thing he has waited 90 years for - a soul mate. But the closer they get, the more Edward must struggle to resist the primal pull of her scent, which could send him into an uncontrollable frenzy. Somehow or other, they will have to manage their unmanageable love. But when unexpected visitors come to town and realize that there is a human among them Edward must fight to save Bella? A modern, visual, and visceral Romeo and Juliet story of the ultimate forbidden love affair - between vampire and mortal. Written by Summit entertainment

Isabella Swan moves to gloomy Forks to live with her father. As she starts her junior year in high school she becomes fascinated by Edward Cullen who holds a dark secret which is only known by his family. Edward falls in love with Bella as well but knows the further they progress in their relationship the more he is putting Bella and those close to her at risk. Edward warns Bella that she should leave him but she refuses to listen and to understand why he is saying this. Bella learns his secret. He is a vampire, however she is not afraid of his blood-thirsty needs and the fact he could kill her at any moment. Bella is afraid of losing him, the love of her life. The thrill begins when a new vampire finds it a challenge to hunt Bella down for her irresistible blood. The game is on and James will not stop until she is killed. Written by courtney

Bella Swan is a clumsy, kind hearted teenager with a knack for getting into trouble. Edward Cullen is an intelligent, good looking vampire who is trying to hide his secret. Against all odds, the two fall in love but will a pack of blood thirsty trackers and the disapproval of their family and friends separate them? Written by LadyN1

Bella Swan was not expecting anything out of the ordinary to happen when she moved to live with her Dad in Forks, Washington. But this where her life truly begins. There she meets Edward Cullen, a mysterious and captivating student at her new high school. Bella soon discovers that Edward is hiding a secret, after he impossibly saves her life from a van with his super-human strength and speed. She is determined to unravel his secret, but the truth is more terrifying than she realized. Edward is a vampire. Any normal person would just keep away from him, but Edward and Bella have fallen passionately and unconditionally in love with each other. And so begins their forbidden relationship between a human and a vampire. But the young lovers soon discover that their troubles are only just about to begin. Written by Mel from the Untied Kingdom.

Perhaps the least likely event movie in the history of cinema, "Twilight," after a full year of fire-stoking from fangirls of all ages and lung capacity, finally hits screens to greet its adoring followers, leaving the uninitiated on the outside looking in. However, that's a great place to be when it comes to this impossibly sloppy, incoherent motion picture; the outside leaves plenty of leg room to run screaming from Catherine Hardwicke and her absolute inability to direct a stirring motion picture.

Moving from Phoenix to remote Forks, Washington, Bella (Kristen Stewart, "The Messengers") has quickly found a focal point for her high school awkwardness: Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"). A pasty loner with severe social issues, Edward is a mystery to the swooning Bella, leaving the teen girl hopelessly in love with an enigma. When bodies start to pile up in surround counties and Edward saves Bella from certain death, it comes time for the strange boy to reveal the truth: he's a vampire and Bella is his true love. As the duo work around their extraordinary relationship issues, trouble arrives in the form of a rival vampire clan, cursed with James (the woefully insipid Cam Gigandet, "Never Back Down"), a tracker who will not stop until Bella is dead.

I know I'm skating on thin ice to bring any note of condemnation to a franchise that has built a mighty tower of adoration from readers across the globe; author Stephenie Meyer's world of vampires, unrequited sexual thirst, and self-conscious teen emoting has resulted in semi-Potteresque hysteria, extending to the release of this first feature film. However deafening the hype, I found "Twilight" to be a rotten movie, yet the blame for the failure of this tween sleeping pill doesn't completely point toward Meyer's imagination, but Hardwicke's thundering screen cluelessness instead.

After a misfire ("The Nativity Story") and two outright creative fiascos ("Lords of Dogtown" and "Thirteen"), what brought the producers to Hardwicke's doorstep to direct "Twilight" is a mystery for the ages. I'm sure her time spent with young actors was a major consideration, but a film of this scope and sensual edge needed someone capable of communicating thick torrents of bodice-ripper romance and dark, violent tones, blended together to create a magical arena for the characters to work out their Northwestern angst. In place of challenging gloom, Hardwicke gives the material an inflated ABC Family Original treatment, draining the life out of "Twilight" through her sheer inexperience with fantasy and horror. Would you give an all-powerful fantasy franchise capable to producing hundreds of millions of box office dollars to a woman who once bungled the softball story of the Virgin Mary?

Shabbily edited and suffering from Hardwicke's compositional ineptitude, "Twilight" is reduced to a poorly contained unintentional joke. With shirtless vampires running around at Superman speed, Edward rocking goofy Johnny Suede hair, and the picture offering perhaps the worst display of parental indifference I've ever seen, "Twilight" is riddled with secretive passages meant only for lovers of the source material. To the outsider, the whole experience alternates between embarrassing overindulgence and outright boredom, watching a promising concept for teen "Romeo and Juliet" style escapism turn into big screen triviality, with a horde of dreadful actors (Stewart is celebrating her eighth straight year of playing the exact same stuttery, awkward character) and Hardwicke trying to pull together everlasting love with extremely limited artistic means.

"Twilight" doesn't play by standard vampire rules, so ingrained bloodsucker cinema logic is thrown out the window when processing Meyers's pensive creation, as are most concepts of spatial relationships, motivations, and romantic chemistry (sorry folks, but I've seen siblings with more sexual heat than Bella and Edward). "Twilight" just dances where it wants to, assuming most of the audience is filling in the blanks on their own. It makes for an exhaustively moronic final act, where the entire cast suddenly pinballs around the country with minimal explanation, just to arrive at a mirror-filled final vampire showdown location straight out of the directing 101 handbook. Surely the vampires are a more complex bunch than what Hardwicke presents here...at least I hope so. I've never read the "Twilight" books, and if this film is any indication of their treehouse substance and foul whimsy, I have no interest in starting now.

Even with something as labyrinthine as the "Harry Potter" series, there's an effort from the producers, however effective or ineffective, to include everyone in on the adventure. I never felt the same invitation with "Twilight," watching Hardwicke stumble hopelessly around the material, making sure the basics, no matter how clumsy they fit into the overall visual scheme of the movie, are accounted for. Encountering vampires with diamond skin in the daylight, impromptu thunderstorm baseball games, and creepy undead boyfriends who show little regard for matters of nighttime privacy, it's clear "Twilight" is an invitation-only experience, and should elicit the appropriate squeals from the core demographic.

Outside of the indoctrinated, it's a toss-up how this movie will play with the masses, but I have to assume a full two hour blast of traditional Hardwicke blunders and head-slapping "romantic" lines such as "You are exactly my brand of heroin" (huh?) will snap even the most devoted of multiplex wills.

11/16/2009 02:44:00 AM
Categories: Movies Starting with T. Author: kevin

HERE IS THE SUMMARY FOR THE MOVIE SURROGATES FROM IMDB.

People are living their lives remotely from the safety of their own homes via robotic surrogates -- sexy, physically perfect mechanical representations of themselves. It's an ideal world where crime, pain, fear and consequences don't exist. When the first murder in years jolts this utopia, FBI agent Greer discovers a vast conspiracy behind the surrogate phenomenon and must abandon his own surrogate, risking his life to unravel the mystery. Written by Touchstone Pictures

HERE IS A REVIEW FOR THE MOVIE SURROGATES FROM DVDTALK

Every couple films, I've noticed something really odd about Touchstone Pictures. I'm not attacking the studio; they've made plenty of good movies and will undoubtedly make more, yet sometimes I feel like they have a computer hidden away on their lot with a fill-in-the-blank interface for "blockbuster" movies. Just type in a mildly clever idea, add some actors (at least one megastar), press "Start" and out pops a pre-packaged motion picture, sealed neatly in clear cellophane, ready to be delivered to audiences with a minimum amount of effort. Surrogates is one of those movies. The idea of a future where people experience life through mind-controlled androids is just good enough to trick innocent filmgoers into thinking it's enough to float a movie, and Bruce Willis has exactly the right kind of broad appeal to draw in any stragglers who aren't quite convinced, but there's no movie here -- just a shell, motivated by the bottom line.

One of the most disheartening things about the film is how disinterested Bruce Willis seems by the endeavor. Playing Greer, the same Tired Movie Policeman from thousands of his other movies, the actor sleepwalks through Surrogates, hitting each emotional note with the lowest amount of required energy possible. I've seen plenty of lame-duck films where Willis' sense of humor and line delivery were enough to elevate the project entire grades at a time, but even at a measly 88 minutes, Surrogates proves too large a bland mass for the actor to overcome. Even Bruce's few moments of clarity are a letdown; they're so infrequent, brief and unrelated, they feel less like a reprieve and more like the film dangling a pipe dream in front of the audience. Curiously, almost all of these moments occur while we're seeing Greer as his CGI-enhanced surrogate rather than the man himself. It's ironic that a movie arguing for real, human emotions over ones experienced via electronic proxy is almost completely ruined by the opposite problem.

Aside from Willis, most of the other actors here are shoved to the side by the film's brief running time. Willis is briefly reunited with his Pulp Fiction co-star Ving Rhames, but Rhames has a thankless role that never develops. Radha Mitchell's character Peters seems less predestined towards two-dimensionality, but there's no room amongst the film's tired murder plot for any backstory on her character's real-life persona. Worst of all, disappointingly, is veteran character actor James Cromwell, barely inhabiting a hackneyed role with even the slightest bit of life. During Cantor's first major scene in the film, he meets with Greer and Peters through a special surrogate, and I'd much rather have watched that actor (who I can't concretely pick out on IMDb) give 110% than see Cromwell giving 0%. The only notable thing about Cromwell's entire participation is how much he resembles James Cameron. Only Rosamund Pike gets enough screen time to create anything for the audience to latch onto, but two of her moments are marred by the movie's goofy science fiction (scoring inappropriate laughter from the audience).

Some elements of the idea are great. Dr. Canter invented the concept of surrogacy with medical intentions, to allow the disabled or injured to experience day-to-day life again, yet the public seems to have adapted it to its current purpose. The film also touches on alternate, feeling-free models of surrogates, how a surrogate can allow people to live a double life (it's the anonymous internet chatroom of the future!), and the tumultuous co-existence of the machines and people who find living through a machine to be an abomination. Screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris have other things in mind, however, and the film focuses on twists and turns that might be more tired and worn-out than Bruce. If there are any grizzled, slightly old-fashioned cops out there without tragic pasts, please report to Hollywood immediately.

For the longest time, I've been defending director Jonathan Mostow's Terminator 3, which I'd thought had plenty of good action, a fun story and a knockout ending (the film certainly sits in the shadow of its predecessor, and it's probably unnecessary, but it's far more entertaining than it gets credit for). Aside from Mostow, Brancato and Ferris also wrote T3, and the fumbles of Surrogates feel like an attempt to recreate the formula. The film's one beam of light is that the action sequences are pretty good, but there are only two of them, and the rest of the direction ranges from mediocre to embarrassing (watching a rack-focus on Greer staring at a symbolic baseball glove actually made me want to groan out loud). As far as a "knockout ending" goes, the film's trailer gives too much away, although the information has been cleverly re-arranged; even the knowledge that the ad features some spoiler-riffic shots won't mean anything until they actually limp on-screen.

Surrogates is a movie that was made from the outside in. At all times it looks like it cost millions of dollars, and never once does that flashy gloss add up to anything creative or interesting. It's a bad sign when the most interesting thing about your movie is that it features actor Devin Ratray, the once and always Buzz McCallister from the Home Alone movies in a cameo as a computer guy. Ratray actually seems enthused to be in the movie, investing a little energy into his two-scene role. I guess he didn't get the memo: this one's just for show.

11/16/2009 02:29:00 AM
Categories: Movies Starting with S. Author: kevin

Here is the summary for the movie H2 (Halloween 2) from imdb

Michael Myers is still at large and no less dangerous than ever. After a failed reunion to reach his baby sister at their old home, Laurie Strode is immediately taken to a hospital to be treated by the wounds that had been afflicted by her brother a few hours ago. However, Michael isn't too far off and will continue his murdering 'Halloween' rampage until he gets his sister all to himself. Written by Anonymous

Here is a review for the movie H2 (Halloween 2) from dvdtalk

First things first: I thought writer/director Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of Halloween was an interesting, brutal alternate-reality version of the Michael Myers story. Many of the complaints I've heard about it are about the changes Zombie made from John Carpenter's 1978 original, which makes no sense at all to me. If you're going to remake a movie, it has to fall somewhere between the two extremes: not-at-all different (The Omen 2006) and so different as to be almost unrecognizable (Dawn of the Dead 2004). The whole point of remaking a movie instead of creating an original work, in my opinion, is to explore an angle that the original movie contained but left untouched. People can claim up and down that the psychology of Michael Myers doesn't need to be explored because it takes away the mystery that, for some, made him terrifying to begin with, but that's a complaint that should be directed at the final product, not Zombie's vision.

That brings us to Halloween II. Let me state in no uncertain terms that unless you understand two facts completely and without reservation, you will probably not enjoy this movie. One: this is a film made by someone with a singular vision. There are no cracks in it into which viewers can slip their own interpretations; this is a movie that really takes an idea and runs with it. Again, whether or not anyone likes it is really a criticism that should be directed at the final product, but either way, the viewer has to be willing to accept what Zombie wants to do or they'll just become increasingly frustrated (something I see has already happened). The second fact should be obvious, but I guess I feel it needs to be stated anyway: this is an extrapolation of everything Zombie did in Halloween 2007. If you didn't like any of that, why would you expect to like any of this? These aren't John Carpenter's versions of Laurie and Loomis, these are a continuation of Zombie's version of them, and he's only taking them farther in new directions.

The first of Zombie's core ideas with the sequel may be the hardest to grasp. Given its psychological nature and the general unwillingness of audiences (including myself) to accept armchair analysis of movie characters, this may be a dealbreaker right off the bat, but it runs through the entire movie. (Spoilers ahead. I'll try to keep them to a minimum, but it's hard to review this movie without them.) Michael (Tyler Mane) have visions of his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) and a white horse, which Zombie explains using an opening title card as iconography in Michael's waking dream state. Personally, I didn't feel it was that problematic. Not only is this a re-interpretation of the characters to begin with, I've never really thought of Michael as having that distinct a personality. I'm sure the die-hard Halloween fans will get up in arms and email me the numerous details that separate Michael from his illegitimate offspring like Jason Voorhees, but at least one of the elements people are defending seems to be that Michael is a mystery, a blank slate onto which any terrors can be imagined. I suppose those people would be just as quick to argue that sequels, both to the Carpenter original and Zombie's remake, are unnecessary, but the undefined nature of slasher icons like Michael is almost certainly what caused us to get to the twelfth Friday the 13th film. Zombie wants to tell a story, not create an empty, masked killing machine. I hate to keep reiterating this, but whether or not it works is a separate argument; all I'm saying is that Zombie's basic logic seems sound to me.

The second level to this is that Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) has her own psychological issues stemming from the events of the earlier Zombie film. In fact, the film even goes so far as to suggest that there's a bit of a mental bond between Michael and Laurie. I'd say it isn't particularly pronounced other than a scene where Laurie becomes sick while Michael is eating, but I'm sure people will make a huge deal out of it. Some of this portion is overdirected, filled with abusive quick-cutting and shots of Laurie screaming, but it leads into Zombie's other idea, which is easier to grasp. Rob has stated in interviews that the heart of the story stems from what it'd be like to learn that you were the sister of Charles Manson, and Halloween II does a good job of presenting this idea to the audience. Sure, the movie doesn't delve particularly deeply into the subject, but even Carpenter's original isn't a deep film, just a creepy one.

Apparently people don't think Zombie's version of Myers is creepy, but I disagree. At the very least, I'd hope even the most fervent 2007 hater would agree that the film had strong visuals, and the sequel is no different. Zombie and cinematographer Brandon Trost have created a number of stunning images, and many of them are equally chilling, especially a nearly silent shot of Michael's silhouette passing by an upstairs window. I also thought that Mane's version of Myers was frightening in his brutality, which has not lessened. Early commenters have already complained about the grunting, but I thought the sight of Myers viciously stabbing someone in a hospital was plenty scary. There's even a moment when Michael is pulling a woman from the cab of a truck that I felt was a bit of a visual homage to the way Michael terrorizes a nurse in the original.

Aside from Zombie's vision, it's nice to see Brad Dourif in a meaty role as Sherriff Brackett, and while there's still a brief, annoying scene at some sort of goth bookstore/coffee bar, both Taylor-Compton and Harris turn in better, more likable performances. I also really enjoyed the Loomis plotline that turns him into a bit of a leech-like, exploitative sell-out, something Malcolm McDowell digs into with relish. But Zombie's vision is all that drives this project, and even though the world seems clearly ready to hate it, I thought it was great. It's a strange, demented vision of Haddonfield that's unlike any of the other Halloween films. To many, this will be a bad thing, and it may even top Resurrection as the most hated entry in the franchise. At least we've traded Busta Rhymes for Weird Al. That's something, right?

9/01/2009 12:43:00 PM
Categories: Movies Starting with H. Author: kevin