the other night i wasn't feeling all that hot, so i decided to skip the bi-weekly family dinner at the in-laws. with wife and child gone, and the house to myself, i decided to give a movie my undivided attention.
now either i didn't remember, or purged it from my brain entirely, but i seem to have had no clue that this movie was released in theaters, but i vaguely remember the television ads for it. so i decided "what the hay?" and thought it a great idea to take in a modern day disaster movie with an ensemble cast like the Poseidon Adventure or Towering Inferno... and it had Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard in it too!
NOT one of my greatest ideas, i must say. the tagline -
Nothing Spreads Like Fear isn't true at all - this movie on a shingle is just as
slathersome. a hack screenplay and too much bad science to suspend disbelief... all colored with made for TV / two-night Event cinematography, i was shocked that this wasn't on Lifetime. in fact, i've seen better films of this stripe ON Lifetime.
and Jude Law? ohmigod! and NOT even cute anymore to boot.
since there weren't any opening credits (which i initially thought i had missed because i was getting something to drink), i had to wait until the end to find out Steven Soderbergh directed this s***... then i hated it even more, and realized that outside of Sex, Lies and Videotape, and
maybe the Ocean's flicks (for that afternoon entertainment factor, perhaps), i don't like anything this jagoff does.
Outbreak had me more concerned.
a few days later, i caught this dystopian
masterpiece. more entertaining than Contagion, but equally as loathsome. Seyfried and Sexy Back Bonnie & Clyde their way thru a world mapped out a bit too much like Grand Theft Auto Vice City and rife with myriad ghosts of Science Fiction past in order to gain and take advantage of the world's ONLY form of money - time (on your life clock).
the real story (or movie) here, lies in the aftermath of bringing down the global economy - re-establishing civility and maintaining resources in world where a human life IS the currency, and the rub is that everyone has as much or nearly as much as one another... which is potentially thousands of years... and no one ages after the age of 25.
vampires without a food source... now THERE'S a movie!
the next night i'm flipping through the TV menu and i see this film about to start. i hit the info button and read: Norse warrior blah blah blah, joins a band of Crusaders on a journey to the Holy Land blah blah blah. i thought it was interesting, so i threw it on. the opening credits read that it was a Nicolas Winding Refn film, so i thought Bronson... Drive... cool! and i like that Mads dude as well.
hard to say whether or not i "liked" this film. it was slow, cerebral and pretty surreal at times, and smelled like a film school grad piece. but it was really enjoyable. Mads Mikkelsen is a mute one-eyed Norse warrior who has visions of the future named (interestingly enough) One Eye, who is a captive of what i presume was a rival tribe, and forced to engage in ruthless fight to the death combat with other prisoners. he eventually escapes, killing all but one of his captors and the boy who had been tending to him. he and the boy then come across a band of crusaders en-route to the promised land, and are convinced to join them.
along the way, they become (essentially) lost at sea for quite some time, and then reach land... but it ain't the Holy Land, it's somewhere in North America, and the group with the help of One Eye, and a gaggle of Native hands, slowly have a Southern Comfort type of experience
bizarre movie, and it definitely left a mark.
