3:10 to Yuma
A small-time rancher agrees to hold a captured outlaw who’s awaiting a train to go to court in Yuma. A battle of wills ensues as the outlaw tries to psych out the rancher.
Read moreMovies
Cinema is another part of culture, and I classify posts related to movies I’ve seen or am interested in discussing in this category.
Kids
Disturbing, dark, low-budget independent film about teen-agers growing up in poverty in New York City. The story focuses on Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a teen who has a goal to de-flower as many virgins as he can. Kids follows a group of young, unsupervised, not mature, but all-too-grown-up kids in New York. One girl has just been diagnosed with HIV and is trying to notify the boy who gave it to her. The film follows these characters and their friends through the day, hanging out, playing, carousing, and going to parties. Each scene is intriguing and disturbing — conveying an urban reality that includes drugs, sex, guns, and disease; and yet never letting you forget these are kids.
Read moreKickin It Old Skool
A young breakdancer hits his head during a talent show and slips into a coma for twenty years. Waking up in 2006, he looks to revive his and his team’s career with the help of his girlfriend and his parents.
Read moreFracture
Wealthy, brilliant, and meticulous Ted Crawford, a structural engineer in Los Angeles, shoots his wife and entraps her lover. He signs a confession; at the arraignment, he asserts his rights to represent himself and asks the court to move immediately to trial. The prosecutor is Willy Beachum, a hotshot who’s soon to join a fancy civil-law firm, told by everyone it’s an open and shut case. Crawford sees Beachum’s weakness, the hairline fracture of his character: Willy’s a winner. The engineer sets in motion a clockwork crime with all the objects moving in ways he predicts.
Read moreRush Hour 3
Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker return as Inspectors Lee and Carter. This time the Chinese ambassador has been shot by the worst criminal organization in the world, the Triad, during a council. When the ambassador’s daughter gets kidnapped, the story leads the cops to Paris, where they work to destroy the Triads for good.
Read moreThe Bourne Ultimatum
Rogue agent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is being hunted by the people in the CIA who trained him to be an assassin. Still suffering from amnesia and determined to finally learn of his true identity, he is lured out of hiding to contact a journalist named Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), who has been following his story. Throughout his research, Ross has gathered valuable information about Bourne and Treadstone, which trained him. This is rather inconvenient for U.S. government official Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), who is hoping to start a new organization under the codename Blackbriar (which is briefly mentioned at the end of the first film) which would follow in Treadstone’s footsteps.
Read moreFreedom Writers
A young teacher (Swank) inspires her class of at-risk students to learn tolerance, apply themselves, and pursue education beyond high school.
Read moreZodiac
A serial killer in the San Francisco Bay Area taunts police with his letters and cryptic messages. We follow the investigators and reporters in this lightly fictionalized account of the true 1970’s case as they search for the murderer, becoming obsessed with the case. Based on Robert Graysmith’s book, the movie’s focus is the lives and careers of the detectives and newspaper people.
Read moreBlack Snake Moan
A God-fearing bluesman (Jackson) takes to a wild young woman (Ricci) who, as a victim of childhood sexual abuse, looks everywhere for love, never quite finding it.
Read moreShooter
Bob Lee Swagger, one of the world’s great marksmen and the son of a Congressional Medal of Honoree, is a loner living in the Rockies. He’s left the military, having been hung out to dry in a secret Ethiopian mission a few years before, when he’s recruited by a lisping colonel to help find a way that the President of the US might be assassinated in one of three cities in the next two weeks. He does his work, but the shot is fired notwithstanding and Bob Lee is quickly the fall guy: wounded and hunted by thousands, he goes to ground and, aided by two unlikely allies, searches for the truth and for those who double-crossed him. All roads lead back to Ethiopia.
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