Mini Movie Reviews Before the New Year

So, things have been a little crazy for the last little while.  They have involved moving, marking, three hamsters, a goat, classes finishing up, one-and-a-half pineapples, and bacon-wrapped filet mignon, in no particular order.

I do promise to do better in the new year.  However, some mini reviews of (now old) movies before then.

Quantum of Solace

This second outing of the rebooted James Bond franchise literally picks up where the last one left off — too the point where I didn’t really know what was going on, since it had been a couple of years since seeing the last one.  There wasn’t really too much plot to this one, however, so it didn’t matter so much.

Bond basically seems angry and just beats the crap out of lots of people in this movie.  Casino Royale had a good mix of undercover work and ass-kicking, but this one, I felt, favoured ass-kicking too much. (I know that is a shock coming from me.)  There was one clever bit that I quite enjoyed, in the opera house where Bond actually uses his brain and gets some useful intelligence — something I expect more of in a *spy* movie, really.

Still, Quantum of Solace was an enjoyable action flick.  The main thing that actively irritated me was the incredibly explosive hotel in the finale — that just seemed to be an example of poor engineering.  I hope that they bring Bond back closer to his secret agent/spy roots for the next movie.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

This is a solid — if slightly sentimental — Kevin Smith film, that unites some of his regular actors with Seth Rogen and his posse.  The movie contains some gratuitous nudity, gross-out humour, and a sweet love story.

The premise is that longtime friends and roommates Zack and Miri decide to make a porno after they can’t pay their rent or utilities, and a video of Miri in some unflattering underwear manages to garner hundreds of thousands of hits on Youtube.  This opens a doorway to their true feelings for each other as they go through the production process.

I suspect fans of Smith or Rogen will enjoy the movie — I’m not sure about anyone else.

And that’s all I have to say.