Cloud Atlas

cloud-atlasAnother original, interesting, thoughtful movie. Sure, it had its slow moments, but all-in-all, it worked both as a concept and in the nuts-and-bolts of plot, acting, script, directing, etc. It did take a while for me to get into it, but after a couple rotations of the story, I couldn’t wait for the next cut.

Bulworth

I liked a lot about this movie… I just wish it knew when to quit – the rapping got totally excessive, and the Halle Berry romance thing was a bit much.  Some of the PC political message annoyed me too, but I liked the idea and I liked the ending.  Some scenes were really well done.

X-Men 2: X2

Wow, what a surprise… I wasn’t expecting much from this, but I think I liked it better than the first one. They didn’t have to spend so much time “explaining who the X-men are”, and could get to more plot & action. Plus, I liked the multi-dimentional characters and the way this movie plays on the fine line between good & evil. There were a couple little bothersome things – like why did the one girl have to kill herself? With all these superheroes, that’s the best plan they could come up with? And what happened to all those kids who escaped the “school”? It would’ve been neat if they had just one follow-up scene with them “doing something”. But all-in-all, I found it quite entertaining.

 

Monster’s Ball

A charming love story, where obstacles to romance get killed off one by one… which I thought was far “too easy”. It would have been a much more challenging movie if nobody had died & the romance still happened. I did like the way that the movie left a lot of the dialogue unspoken – you had to pay attention to the subtleties of the acting to understand what the characters were thinking. Worth a view…