We watched Eagle Eye the other night. I was looking forward to it since it looked like a pretty good action flick and from an action point of view it certainly fit the bill. From a plausibility standpoint, however, it was just way the hell out there. I understand about suspension of disbelief and all that, but holy crap.

Without giving away too much, some of the things the lady on the phone is able to do are just way beyond belief. She can control every cell phone and security camera in the country, not to mention street lights, construction cranes, subways, and even the demo TVs at Circuit City. At one point Jerry (Shia) turned his phone off, and within seconds, the phone of the guy sitting next to him on the train started to ring. To make that work, she’d have to:

• have a high-quality camera in the train car
• use it to take a picture of the guy’s face
• use facial recognition software to figure out who the guy is, with an accuracy of one person out of 350 million
• find that person’s cell phone number

Or maybe she could analyze the GPS coordinates of every cell phone in that area and figure out which one was physically closest to Jerry’s. Which is off. On a moving train.

In another scene, she kills someone by somehow causing a power line to break. The broken wire falls and fries the guy. Even with complete control over the power grid, how could she cause a power line to break? And assuming she could do that, how could she do it in such a way that she knew that it would fall and hit the guy, who happened to be running at the time? Later she has Jerry and Rachel rob an armored car for a briefcase with a time-release lock that they risk their lives several times to try and protect. And when you think about where they are when it opens and what’s in it, you realize that there were a thousand simpler ways to do it, all of which are less likely to fail that the one she chose.

One of the reasons she needed Jerry in the first place (to impersonate his twin brother) is moot, since the FBI would have revoked all of his security codes once he died. This part did make me wonder, however, if the real-life military (or CIA or FBI or whatever) would give top secret clearance to someone who had an identical twin, just for this reason. Their fingerprints and retinal scans would differ, but their DNA would be identical. Don’t know about voice prints or even how accurate voice print identification is.

Anyway, LaBeouf was pretty good, though his character seemed unnecessarily abrasive at times. If someone put $750,000 in my bank account and filled my apartment with stolen military stuff and then I was arrested because of it, I might decide that being a dick to the FBI agent who’s interrogating me would be a bad idea.

Having said all that, I have to say I did enjoy it. There were lots of car chases and explosions and overall, it was fun, if silly.

On a side note, I cannot watch a Shia LaBeouf movie without thinking he looks like Wil Wheaton:

Shia LaBeouf	Wil Wheaton

On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, Gail and the boys and I had a Harry Potter marathon. We watched all five movies back to back, and Gail had fun making Harry Potter-themed snacks. We’re all big fans of the Harry Potter series, but as with Star Wars, when you see a movie enough times and get to know the characters well enough, you start to notice little things that don’t make sense. I have fun coming up with these things. These are not a knock on the movies — I know that they are fantasy and that they don’t need to be 100% realistic to be enjoyable, in fact, any fantasy movie that’s 100% realistic isn’t really fantasy, now is it?

Philosopher’s Stone

• Hagrid says about Gringotts “ain’t no place safer! Not one! ‘cept perhaps Hogwarts.” Rrrrright. Hogwarts is guarding possibly the most important and valuable object in the wizarding world, and three eleven-year-olds — including one who’s only known about the wizarding world for less than a year — are able to get by the traps. Not to mention the fact that when Harry finally does arrive at the end, Quirrell is already there, which means that he got by all the traps too — and Harry had help, while Quirrel did it by himself. Hey, bang-up job on those traps, Hogwarts professors.
• Nicolas Flamel has had the stone, presumably in Gringotts, for well over 600 years. Why did they decide to move it to Hogwarts? Ron makes a good point about keeping a creature like Fluffy in a school. Surely they suspected that Voldemort might try to steal the Stone, so why bring it to Hogwarts and put the students in danger?
• To get into the room where Fluffy is guarding the trap door, Hermione performs a simple “alohomora” spell. Shouldn’t the teachers have magically locked that door so that simple spells wouldn’t open it?
• Similarly, if the restricted section of the library is truly restricted, surely the gate should be magically locked.
• When Voldemort tells Quirrell to kill Harry, why does he attempt to choke him? Why not just use avada kedavra? And why is he able to touch Harry’s throat, but turns to dust when Harry touches him? Quirrell says he tried to kill Harry a number of times previously as well — why use a complicated curse to make Harry’s broom fly all over the place and not just use the killing curse? He had plenty of opportunities…

Chamber of Secrets

• If Hagrid was at Hogwarts when the Chamber was opened fifty years ago, that would make him between sixty-one and sixty-seven years old at the time of this film. Does Hagrid look that old to you?
• On a similar note, Professor Dumbledore had a fairly long grey beard in the fifty-year-old flashbacks. My beard has a fair bit of grey in it, and if I hadn’t shaved in ten years, it could be that long, so it’s possible that Dumbledore is as young as forty in the flashback, but likely older. That makes him at least ninety now.
• Gilderoy Lockhart is a fraud, and yet he takes a number of opportunities to perform spells in front of people, with disastrous results. If I were pretending to be awesome when I really wasn’t, I’d try to avoid performing in front of people, lest my inadequacies be publicly displayed. Why would he choose to try to fix Harry’s broken arm? Why would he choose to start the dueling club when he knows he can’t fight? For that matter, why would he take this teaching job in the first place?
• Speaking of the dueling club, Snape says “perhaps it would be a good idea to teach them how to block unfriendly spells”, to which Lockhart answers “An excellent suggestion!” and then doesn’t do it. He picks two students and basically says “go!” without any advice on what to do.
• Why do some “expelliarmus” charms flick the victim’s wand away harmlessly (Lupin on Snape) while others (Snape on Lockhart, Harry on Snape) knock the victim twenty feet back?
• When trying to stop the flying car, Ron pulls out his wand and taps the steering wheel saying “Stop! Stop! Stop!”. He’s been around magic all his life — does he really think this will work? I know it’s a plot device to have him break his wand, but it could have been done better.
• Is “eat slugs!” really a spell, or did Ron just say that out loud and then do a non-vocal spell, something they don’t learn until sixth year?

Prisoner of Azkaban

• Fred and George said they took the Maurauder’s Map from Filch’s office during their first year, which means that they’ve had it since before Ron arrived at Hogwarts. During that time, if they had looked up the Gryffindor dormatories, they’d have seen the name “Peter Pettigrew” on the map because Scabbers lived there. Either they never looked up the Gryffindor dorms in that time (which seems unlikely), or they never thought it weird that the name of a person who they didn’t know kept showing up in the Gryffindor dorms.
• Sirius got past the dementors and into Hogwarts, presumably, because he was an animagus and turned into a dog. Are dementors really fooled by animagi? The Maurauder’s Map isn’t. Wouldn’t this mean that any animagus sent to Azkaban could simply transform and walk out?
• Hermione says something like “Bad things happen to wizards who mess with time”. If that’s the case, why would a professor give a time-turner to a thirteen year old witch just so that she could take extra classes? Doesn’t this seem dangerous?

Goblet of Fire

• Already done.

Order of the Phoenix

I’ve only seen this movie two or three times, so I don’t really have any comments about this one. One thing I do want to mention is that the character of Luna Lovegood was perfectly cast. She is exactly how I pictured her when reading the books, seemingly kind of ditzy, but sweet and strangely wise. She’s got the right dreamy sort of look and voice.

We saw the new Star Wars movie The Clone Wars last night. Before I write about this movie, let me say that I loved the original trilogy. I have watched the movies countless times and can quote whole passages from all three. When The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, Gail and I were there on opening day, even though Gail was six months pregnant at the time. I remember not liking the movie as much as I hoped I would (curse yousa, Jar Jar Binks), but almost feeling like I was betraying George Lucas and the original trilogy if I stated my displeasure. Others were not so concerned, and felt that Lucas betrayed them with the prequel trilogy. I think that’s a little strong, but either way, I liked the prequel trilogy less than the original one. The movies were good, but not up to the standard of the first three (though Revenge of the Sith was close).

Now, onto The Clone Wars. I knew that this was animated and that most of the voices were not done by the actors from the live action movies, so my expectations weren’t all that high. But I do not feel the slightest bit like I’m betraying anyone by saying that this movie sucked. The animation of the space scenes and robots was good, but the animation of people was really bad. The movement was really jerky, the lip syncing was terrible, and it looked like the animation hadn’t been finished yet — Obi-Wan’s beard consisted of a series of rectangles. Given the level of human animation in Beowulf, the animation in this movie should have been a lot better.

Now, in all fairness, there is a reason that the animation was so bad. This movie is essentially a pilot for a new cartoon series that will be appearing on TV next year. I guess they can’t spend zillions of dollars in animation for that, so they decided not to spend zillions on the pilot.

Anyway, back to the movie. The basic problem I had with it, aside from the animation, was that it was aimed at a younger crowd. Revenge of the Sith was violent, dark, and disturbing. It was so not aimed at kids that my kids have yet to see it, and I will not let them see it for a number of years. This one had lots of jokes, slapstick humour and even forgetful battle droids (though I never liked the battle droids in any of the prequel movies — either make them emotionless robots with no personality or don’t, they seem to be a bit of both). In this movie, one forgets a series of numbers told to him by another one. When I was six I would have complained about that — these are robots, they don’t forget stuff! There were too many attempts at humour, some funny, some not. I know that in a lot of action movies, people are making jokes while fighting for their lives, but it seemed like it was happening too often here.

As for the plot, weak. In The Phantom Menace, they mentioned that Tatooine is way out on the outer rim — so far away that Qui-Gon cannot use Republic credits as currency. Now, the Hutts control the critical shipping lanes around Tatooine, and getting them on the side of the Republic is crucial. Where do these critical shipping lanes go if the planet is on the outer rim? Anakin takes a padawan who calls him Master, but he complains in Revenge of the Sith because they won’t make him a master. And in Revenge of the Sith, he doesn’t have a padawan. Where did she go?

Also, if Anakin was on Tatooine, why didn’t he go and find his mother then, even for a visit? It would have been lovely — they could have barbecued up some womprat and had some blue milk. Ani, why don’t you call your mother more often?

Finally, Frank Oz didn’t voice Yoda. Nobody said “I have a bad feeling about this”. John Williams didn’t do the score. George Lucas didn’t even write it. Given all that, can it really be called a Star Wars movie?

Less than five minutes into the movie, Gail asked me “George Lucas sanctioned this?” and I have to assume he did. Maybe he didn’t actually watch it first. (Then again, this is the guy who created Jar Jar Binks.) My kids will love it, but we’ll wait until it’s out on video and then rent it for them. Neither of us can stand the thought of bringing them to the theatre to see it and having to sit through it again.

Just like last year, the boys spent last week at their grandparents houses (Nicky at Gail’s dad’s place and Ryan with my parents), and Gail and I had the week to ourselves. One of the things Gail and I miss most about life pre-kids is going out to movies — we do get babysitters now and again so we can go, but it’s a hassle and we just don’t do it very often, so on our kid-free weeks, we tend to go to a bunch of movies. I think we saw three in the week last year, plus went to the CNE and went to see We Will Rock You as well. This past week, I think I set a personal record for a single week — we saw four movies in five days (plus we rented The Da Vinci Code, the first Hellboy (to prepare ourselves for Hellboy II which we didn’t end up seeing anyway), and another movie called Untraceable, which was not bad. It had some techno-babble in it but it seemed like they actually talked to someone who knows technical stuff, since it at least approached making sense, unlike CSI: NY.

This year, we actually have two kid-free weeks, since the boys are doing the grandparents thing again the week after Fern, though they’re swapping grandparents. We decided to go to a bunch of movies during the first week, and if we get nothing done around the house, so be it. Then we’ll get more stuff done during the second week, though I’m sure a movie or two will still be involved. This past week, we’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Monday, The X Files: I Want To Believe on Tuesday, The Dark Knight on Wednesday, and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor on Friday (I had a baseball game on Thursday). We were going to see a double feature on Friday with The Mummy and Hellboy II, but many theatres stopped playing Hellboy II on Thursday and started playing The Mummy instead. At the one or two theatres still playing it, we couldn’t get the showtimes to match up.

Here are some mini-reviews:

Indiana Jones: Entertaining and fun. Harrison Ford is great, and I liked the fact that they made him older (meaning they didn’t try to ignore the fact that he’s not 45 anymore) and a little more vulnerable. The story wasn’t bad, but if you’re expecting another Raiders or Last Crusade, you might be disappointed. The swordfight between the Russian soldier from hell and the teenager was a little silly, made even sillier by the fact that he was standing on a Jeep driven by his mother. She sees her son in a fight to the death and does not stop the Jeep. Still better than the awful Temple of Doom, though.

X Files: I liked it, Gail not so much. It was basically a long episode (which the first X Files movie was not) with a bit of a love story in there too. Billy Connolly was very good, though it’s odd that a creepy pedophile turns out to be kind of a good guy. The climax of the film was a little weak, but overall it was pretty good. Gail was worried it would be too scary (a few X-Files episodes creeped her out a little much, and more than one did the same to me — more on this below), but it wasn’t that scary. The trailer for the upcoming Mirrors — now that was scary.

The Dark Knight: Wow. Just, wow. I read Roger Ebert’s review of this movie after I saw it, and I really shouldn’t do that before writing my own review, since I frequently agree with him and now I just want to quote what he said. The acting was outstanding — Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart (who I don’t usually like) and Michael Caine (I can’t get used to the Cockney accent, though I believe that’s his real accent) were all great, and Heath Ledger was amazing as the very creepy and psychotic Joker. I was wondering if Ledger could “out-Jack” Jack, but to his credit he didn’t even try; his Joker was a different kind of crazy than Jack’s. I’m surprised I haven’t heard any outrage from women’s groups over this one — there’s all of one significant female character in this whole movie. The only other women who speak are the corrupt cop and a couple of crying wives. Anyway, Ebert’s right — this and Batman Begins are a new kind of comic book movie, which is good because until they started over with Batman Begins, the Batman movies were getting steadily worse. Drawback: the Joker’s “one of you will die, but you choose which one” schemes reminded me of the movie “Saw”.

The Mummy: Another fun-but-silly one. I really liked the first one, though I don’t remember the second one much. I do remember that The Rock played the evil Scorpion King, who subsequently got his own movie and somehow became the good guy in that. Anyway, the third one wasn’t bad, it had some funny bits and lots of action. The one thing that annoyed me was that they kept saying that they had to prevent the Emperor from doing something as if failing to do that would mean instant doom for everyone. Then he did it anyway, and they decided that they now had to stop him from doing something else. “We have to stop the Emperor from getting the diamond! Oh, he got the diamond. OK, we have to stop the Emperor from putting it at the top of the magic tower! Oh, he did that too. OK, we have to stop the Emperor from getting to Shangri-La! Oh, he’s there now. OK…” I guess it’s important to set goals for yourself.

The X Files thing I mentioned before: after a particularly creepy X Files episode (no idea which one), Gail said that she couldn’t possibly go to bed right away, so we needed to stay up a little later and watch something else to take her mind off of it. I said sure, so we chose something to watch. Gail then said she wanted a Coke, but we didn’t have any upstairs, only in the cold room in the basement. Gail opened the door to the basement, looked down the dark staircase, and then turned to me and sweetly asked if I wouldn’t mind going to get her one. I didn’t quite puff out my chest and deepen my voice, but I gallantly told her that it would be no problem, and I really thought it wouldn’t be. I stepped through the open door and flicked on the light switch. As I did, the light bulb in the fixture at the bottom of the basement stairs blew out with a bang. I quickly turned off the light, closed the basement door, and said “Sorry, no Coke tonight”. Gail, who was standing next to me, agreed, and we went to get glasses of water.

For my birthday yesterday, Gail took me on a “date” to see The Dark Knight. I’ll post a review of the movie itself later (in a word: wow), but right now I want to review the experience. We went to the new Silver City Oakville, which has two “VIP auditoriums”. For an extra $5 on top of your regular ticket price, you get some perks:

• access to a licensed bar before your show
• a smaller “more intimate” theatre (though with the same size screen)
• digital picture and sound
• assigned seating
• leather seats that are very comfy
• wider armrests between seats (convenient because the guy sitting next to me must have been at least 350 lbs)
• in-seat service before the movie starts
• nobody under 19 allowed in (because it’s licensed), so you don’t get those noisy teenagers who won’t stay off my lawn

Gail was sure that she saw a description of this service somewhere and it said that there were no ads before the movie, but there were. I couldn’t find a description of the VIP thing anywhere on the cineplex.com website, which I thought was rather odd — you’d think they’d want to promote the hell out of this.

This is a brand new service, I think — the Oakville theatre only opened within the last few months, and there’s only one other theatre in Canada that does it (downtown Toronto), so they haven’t worked out all the kinks. The assigned seating thing was weird because you can’t choose your seats when you order the tickets, or even change them once they’ve been assigned. So if you want to sit in the middle but it assigns you seats 1 and 2, too bad. If you like to sit near the back and it assigns you row A, too bad. However, if it’s busy and you need several seats, it’s good to know beforehand that you have them all together. Another drawback is that you can’t bring alcoholic drinks into the theatre itself, you need to finish them in the bar area. However, they do have a non-alcoholic key lime smoothie thing that was mighty good.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the whole VIP treatment. For an extra $5 each, I wouldn’t do it for every movie (plus the theatre is further away from our house), but we do have VIP tickets for The Mummy on Friday.

Update (Aug 2): We saw the Mummy yesterday in the VIP theatre. This time, we didn’t have time for dinner beforehand, so we tried out the in-seat ordering thing. I had nachos and Gail had mozzarella sticks and popcorn. It wasn’t cheap (something like $27 for those things and a medium Coke), and then when using their fancy wireless technology to place the order, she marked down the wrong seat or wrong theatre or something. They took our order during the previews, and ten minutes into the movie Gail had to go out and ask where our food was. Because they couldn’t find us, they just left it sitting on the counter for at least 20 minutes, so my nachos were lukewarm and the melted cheese had re-hardened. Not very appealing. They did upsize our drink and offered to upsize our popcorn as well. I suppose it was one mistake that could happen anywhere, but it’ll probably be a while before we do that again.

Beowulf is thought to be the oldest story written in the English language. Given that, the fact that the latest movie version uses the latest in computer graphics technology is a little ironic. For the most part, the graphics are truly amazing; in a number of scenes, I had to work to convince myself that it actually was computer graphics and not a live action movie. Other scenes were not much better animation-wise than Shrek, but I guess that’s what happens on the bleeding edge of technology.

I read somewhere about some controversy regarding the rating of this movie. It was rated PG-13, and people thought it should have been higher because of Angelina Jolie’s character being essentially nude through all of her scenes. The weird thing is that the movie deserved a higher rating because of the violence and gore — it didn’t much matter about the nudity. Blood splattering everywhere, arms and heads being severed, people being impaled on spears and other objects, someone’s head being bitten off and chewed up, someone being ripped in half, monsters being stabbed in the eyeballs, someone ripping the heart out of a dragon with his bare hands… and people think kids shouldn’t watch this movie because of Angelina Jolie’s boobs?

I’ve never really been a big fan of Jolie — I haven’t seen all of her work, but she’s a decent actress, and is certainly attractive, but I’ve never found her to be as amazingly beautiful as others make her out to be. In this movie, however, well, all I can say is wow. The animators made her character look exactly like her (thanks to the skin-tight motion capture suit they had the actors wear), and in the world of sexy animated women, she makes Jessica Rabbit look like Ernest Borgnine.

Sorry. Back to the movie. Note: Some spoilers follow.

At the beginning, the Beowulf character is the ultimate hero — strong, fearless, and confident almost to the point of arrogance. The Grendel monster has the entire town in panic, and he dispatches the monster with relative ease. Quite honestly, I thought it was too easy. The whole thing about Beowulf being naked when he did this was a little silly though, as was the clever “camera” work to avoid showing his stuff on camera; that reminded me of Austin Powers and seemed out of place in a supposed action-adventure movie. Then he met Grendel’s mother (Jolie), who turned him from a hero into a fraud and a liar in no time flat. It seemed to me that the character we saw at the beginning who fought all of those huge monsters should have been strong enough to resist her temptation (though she would have been pretty damned tempting… Sorry.), but he seemed to cave pretty quickly. And what was in it for her? Was Beowulf a good enough roll in the hay that she agreed to leave the town alone for 20 years?

Anyway, aside from the gore, it was a pretty good film. Much better than another movie we saw recently, Michael Clayton, which was billed as “a different kind of thriller”. Sure, one that wasn’t in any way thrilling. There’s two hours of my life I’m not getting back.

Another Star Wars mystery I forgot to ask before:

According to Lando, Darth Vader and his peeps arrived before Han and Leia did. So when Han, Leia, and Chewie arrive on Bespin, Lando greets them enthusiastically, gives Han a hug, talks about his supply problems, hits on Leia a couple of times, gives them a room to hang out in, and then invites them for lunch. All the time, he is getting ready to hand them over to Vader, but he never hints that there’s anything going on, or even acts strangely. For someone with “no love for the Empire”, he certainly acts convincing when he’s about to turn his friend over to them.