Mansquito: exactly what it sounds like

I rarely watch movies on tv, but sometimes that rare gem of a movie comes along that makes me give up two hours of a Saturday afternoon. Such is Mansquito, a Sci-Fi Channel original (red flag!) cautionary tale of experimenting with mutant mosquitos.

Sadly I missed the first part of the movie, but the gist of the movie is this: a man is bitten by a mutant mosquito in some sort of explosion, and thus mutates into a 7 foot mosquito. Or mansquito, if you will. He roams around the city sucking the blood out of anyone he comes across, including a group of homeless people and the entire SWAT team, while being chased around the city by cops who are trying to put an end to his reign of terror.

Did I mention that a sexy scientist (which is really more science fiction than a 7 foot mutant mosquito) who happens to be the girlfriend of one of the cops was also injured in the explosion and is slowly turning into a mosquito herself? Well, she is. And mansquito wants to mate with her! Hot. But before mansquito and womansquito (it just doesn't have the same ring to it) can get it on, boyfriend cop has to find a way to kill mansquito.

Highlights from the rest of the movie:

-We learn that mansquito is impervious to bullets. Just as all mosquitos are. Clearly the way to go was building a giant fly swatter, or luring him into a bug zapper.
-Mansquito is able to drink several times his own body weight in blood.
-Eventually mansquito tires of merely drinking blood, and resorts to ripping off limbs, crushing and/or slicing off heads, and throwing people out windows.

I won't give away the end of the movie, but let me just say that either I'm really smart, or sci-fi original movies are really dumb (and the odds are much better on the latter).

Monsoon Wedding...blame it on the rain

My other rental for the week (Blockbuster Rewards people, check it out) was Monsoon Wedding. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this movie. I was expecting it to be My Big Fat Punjabi Wedding with dancing, but it was really a very beautiful movie.

The movie follows a woman on the eve of her arranged marriage to a man who has been living in Texas. Their wedding is a traditional Punjabi wedding, which includes many ceremonies over four days. Wedding movies are often played for laughs, and rightly so, there's a wealth of material. Monsoon Wedding has some of that, but I was surprised that the movie dealt with a lot of deeper issues. The bride-to-be is struggling with feelings for her recent ex-boyfriend - a married television host - and trying to decide if marriage is what she really wants. There is another crisis of family that really surprised me (I won't spoil it here, though it's quite obvious once you start watching the movie) involving Ria (played by the gorgeous Shefali Shetty), an unmarried cousin of the bride.

The colors used in this film were amazing. Everything from the costumes to the wedding decorations (tons of marigolds, which apparently you can eat) was so bold and vibrant. One of the funniest moments of the movie for me, culturally speaking at least, was when the wedding planner starts decorating a tent in the "new fashion" of white, and the father of the bride comes out and yells at him "What do you think this is, a funeral? I want color!" The music was also pretty amazing, and even though there was a bit of dancing, this is definitely not a Bollywood movie.

Monsoon Wedding was just a very pleasant movie about the bonds of family, and a lucky first glimpse for me into Indian cinema.

I am thrusionist with the illusionist (lame title I know but I couldn't think of anything better.)

Yo! My name is Timmy and I am a new critic on this blog. I hate movies just as much as Erin does, so we thought it fitting to work on this thing together. Anyway here is my first review.
The Illusionist
Ok I think the only reason I saw this is because I really wanted to see the Prestige. I know that movie isn't even out yet, but I was so excited about it I saw this instead. It was horrible because I just thought about the other movie the whole time I watched this one. I felt like I was cheating on my girlfriend or something.
I guess what really drew me to the film was just the fact that I love the actors in it. Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti are two of my favorites. I would usually see anything Giamatti is in, with the exception of Big Mommas House, and I have been a big fan of Norton ever since my hardcore high school obsession with Fight Club. Here's the question I asked at the end: HOW DO YOU MAKE EVEN EDWARD NORTON LOOK BAD IN A MOVIE? Granted he wasn't awful, but he was no shining star either. But whatever here are my reasons why this movie was just bad.
The dialogue was horrendous. It was so much of "let me just tell you what I am feeling instead of being a smart director and showing you" There was absolutely no subtest in this film. Example at one point all these little peasant poor children run up to Nortons character. The director doesn't choose to show that they are poor, which could have been easily accomplished, he instead has them all proclaim as the run up to him "We are poor!" I laughed so hard. Some of the other lines are so melodramaticly cheesey that I don't understand how the actors could have said them without laughing.
The plot is anything special either. You feel like you are watching the last third of a movie. I really felt they made a really long film and just decided to show the last third of it. There was so much more interesting stuff they could have showed. How does he learn to be a magician? Where did he travel to to learn his craft? I am not saying get rid of the love story completely, but come there were a lot of things that could have made this a really interesting film. But hey maybe that wasn't the story that this filmmaker wanted to tell. Oh and speaking of story....
I am going to try and not spoil anything in case you do want to see this.



I can't promise anything






Ok don't read the paragraph after this line.



SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
Alright people love twist endings and I understand why the director executed this one in the way he did, however he could have done it in a better way. Twist endings are created for rewatch value. Yeah they are cool and sometimes very much a part of a story. But if you are going to have a twist at least but in the subtle clues of one. The audience should never realize that the twist is about to happen. They should be able to think back on the film and remember important elements that helped that twist work. There is a twist in the movie and only maybe one clue is shown before the end. All the other clues are shown to you in flashback mode, and it's stuff that was never shown to you in the first place, with the exception of one. If they were shown maybe I missed it. I don't know.
END SPOILER!



So that's my first review. My others shouldn't be so lengthy I just had a lot to say about this one.
Laters
TIMMY!

Tsotsi

I went to Blockbuster for the first time in ages. It was between Snakes on a Train (which is really more like Trains in a Snake), I Always Know What You Did Last Summer, and Tsotsi. I ended up going with the Oscar winner, though I might have been more entertained by one of the others.

I don't really know what to say about this movie. Or maybe I just don't have that much good to say about it. First off, I should just stop reading movie jackets. It bugs me when a movie is marketed as "a story of redemption." First off, it makes the movie sound cheery, and the subject matter is anything but. Secondly, it pretty much gives away the ending, although it's a bit unfair to say that in this case. Tsotsi was a story about the path to redemption, but it didn't have quite the fairy tale ending most redeption stories do.

The basic story of Tsotsi is this: Tsotsi (which means "thug") is a gang leader in a ghetto of Johannesburg, where he likes to steal and kill (even his own friends). One night Tsotsi ends up fleeing after a confrontation with one of his friends, who he ends up beating severely. He ends up in a rich neighborhood, where he ends up carjacking and shooting an unexpecting woman. He drives away, only to discover that there is a baby in the backseat of the car. He then faces the dilemma of how to take care of the baby. He resolves this dilemma by doing what any other parent would do - force a woman to nurse the baby at gunpoint. Obviously Tsotsi's interaction with the baby (and the woman who helps him with the baby) is what spurs him on to "redemption." The rest of the movie deals with how Tsotsi decides to deal with the baby and how he decides he's going to live his life.

I was mostly underwhelmed by Tsotsi. There just really wasn't anything about Tsotsi that made me care whether or not he turned his life around. The character I sympathized with most was the woman who helps Tsotsi with the baby. Tsotsi wasn't a bad movie by any stretch, I just couldn't get invested in it. I know this comparison has been made a lot, and that the two movies don't have anything in common other than they're about life in the ghetto (on two separate continents), but I would recommend skipping Tsotsi and just watching City of God. Some would argue that City of God is too flashy and relies on fancy camerawork as opposed to Tsotsi which just relies on the story, but City of God is still a far superior movie, in my opinion.

The dvd special features include a short film by the director called The Storekeeper that I did enjoy, more than Tsotsi itself. That was worth seeing, but Tsotsi....eh, I think I would have been okay had I never seen this movie.