Vintage

So I finally got a chance to experience Inglourious Basterds.  I am a "Basterd" for not having giving Basterds director Quentin Tarantino his due diligence on this Website long since the Nazis lost World War II and a million times again in war films done to death.  How could anyone inject fresh life into this stale occupied genre?  

Tarantino is not just anyone.  Tarantino is the most unique and creative director alive today so far as I know from the foxhole of my Western ethnocentric view.  His take on World War II is nothing short of a cinematic pulp blitzkrieg.     

Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 war film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino and starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent. It tells the story of two plots to assassinate Nazi Germany's political leadership, one planned by a young French Jewish cinema proprietor (Laurent) and the other by a team of Jewish Allied soldiers led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt).  The central villain in the film is SS colonel Hans Landa (Waltz).  A significant supporting role is the German film actress and double agent, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Krüger).

Doubt was a very good movie but I have my doubts.  There is no doubting the power of the acting in the movie.  It features world class talents such as the always engaging Philip Seymour Hoffman and the legendary Meryl Streep.  These two are great to watch squaring off against one another.  Call it dueling actors.  Problem is that I found that—this acting match up—the most interesting thing about the movie.  This story could not carry lesser names and get away with it. 

Doubt is a 2008 film adaptation of a John Patrick Shanley stage play Doubt: A Parable. Written and directed by Shanley and produced by Scott Rudin, the film centers around a priest, Father Flynn (Hoffman).  Flynn has a "very close" relationship with a black boy in an all-white Catholic school. This raises the suspicions of a domineering principal, Sister Aloysius (Streep), and the more innocent Sister James (Amy Adams).

The Boiler Room is a story about one man and his search for morality in a den of financial thieves.  The film puts a green accountant’s lamp over the world of "Boiler Room" brokerage firms. The film centers on college dropout Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi), a budding underground casino owner from Queens, New York, who gets a job at J.T. Marlin, a less-than-reputable brokerage firm.  At the time, Seth is totally unaware of the firm's criminal reputation. He is just happy to have a job. Aren't we all?

At times compelling, Boiler Room is not a great film by any means.  To me it was filmed by a fan of the movies Wall Street (1987) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).  Both of those films are heavily quoted in Boiler Room.  Both are are on a higher pedestal then this "need for greed" flick.  

If you didn’t get enough of Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) in Crank then Crank: High Voltage is for you.  This movie picks up right where the first left off – literally.  The film’s opening scene shows Chev falling from a helicopter, which was the final scene of the original film.
 
In this installment it is a race against time for Chev to find his heart.  You see, a group of Chinese mobsters pick Chev up after he crashes from that fall.  While in their custody they cut Chev open and steal his heart and replace it with a motorized one that isn’t designed to last.

Before the doctors can remove anymore of Chev’s organs he gets out of the makeshift hospital (after kicking some ass) and starts his search for his heart.  He enlists the help of his friend, Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam), who explains to Chev that he has been fitted with an artificial heart. Once the external battery pack runs out, the internal battery will kick in and he will have one hour before it stops working.  

Now it is a mad race against time to find the heart.  One disastrous thing happens after the other.  The battery pack gets smashed up, the car Chev is driving gets wreaked, he gets into a few fights.  In the midst of all of this he has to keep electrocuting himself to stay alive.