Review

Jumper: David Rice (Hayden Christensen, sulky as ever) is your garden variety weedy highschooler when he suddenly discoveres he can “jump” - teleport to a place he’s seen before. Based on a novel, it’s a fast paced sci-fi thriller that won’t win any award for plot (case in point: David’s never encountered another jumper before, but soon after, refers to the “jump scar” - how? wha? when?). The action is unrelenting, the movie never really taking a breath to let us absorb and believe the characters, but for all that, it’s not half bad, and saved by Griffin (Jamie Bell, formerly Billy Elliot), ironically enough a character introduced for the film. ★★☆ ...

The Forbidden Kingdom: So get this. You’ve got a kid from Boston magically transported to middle-ages alt-China. Kung fu and the whole deal. You’ve got Jackie Chan and Jet Li on board (for the first time in a Hollywood film), and you make this movie? Good lord, someone make sure this scriptwriter isn’t let near a movie studio again (though IMDB suggests he’s about to murder a classic). Stunning visuals and good fight coreography entirely let down by a plot that takes itself much, much too seriously and doesn’t bother to explain its oddities (like 14th Century Chinese emperors speaking English) along the way. ★★★ ...

For me, it started with a glaring continuity error. Let’s back up for a minute here. The most important thing a movie needs to do is keep your disbelief suspended. It’s what lets you watch James Bond movies and think of a car with missles under the engine as integral to the plot (Die Another Day is another matter). Three hours of The Lord of the rings would scarcely work if you couldn’t for that time believe the story. So it’s an inauspicious start when there’s a simple and glaring continuity error. Not very long into the film, we see Kevin Spacey’s too-clever-by-half MIT lecturer deal out the first round of a Blackjack game. Cards are dealt face up to the the four players, and that’s part of the key to 21’s premise, that you can beat the system by counting which cards have been dealt and so concluding which cards are left. The camera then switches to a shot of our nominal protagonist, Ben (Jim Sturgess). He’s making excuses for not joining the team. You know it’s a weak excuse because the premise of the movie, what you’ve seen in the trailer, is that he’s going to go to Vegas-Baby-Vegas. The shot switches back to Spacey, and bam - continuity. There are now 6 cards on the table, face down. If you’re not looking for it, you might not see it (though after reading this, you certainly will be). I wanted to see the cards out of curiosity at the hands dealt, expecting the first lesson in card counting to come then. But the sudden jolt of continuity threw me back into the fact that I’m in a theatre, and the elementary rules you expect to be followed have just been thrown out. It’s the same as why programmers can’t stand to watch movies about “hackers” - knowing what you know, the pretensions to reality are implausible. And here, it’s something as simple as cards being upside down. It throws you off the dialogue, and makes you walk back through the plot you’ve seen already, thinking about whether you’ve missed any other goofs. The second most important thing for a movie is to not be entirely predictable, and on that count, 21 fails utterly, and miserably. ...

The Kite Runner: poignant tale of two Afghani kids, one Pashtun, one Hazara. Growing up in Afghanistan before the Russians invade, and then torn apart by the invasion. Based off the book of the same name by Khaled Hosseini, though I’ve yet to read it. Reasonably hard hitting story that manages to have a few light-hearted moments in it, with some excellent acting. ★★★★

The Wii? Totally, totally worth it. I will say this straight up: if it’s top-of-the-line graphics and abilities you want, the Wii doesn’t cut the mustard. Its sole non-game feature that makes pretentions at being something more than a simple console is the internet access, and even that’s flaky and needlessly slow - for one, where did Nintendo manage to find a 802.11b only chip in 2008? Everything else is focused on the game, and in some ways, that’s what you want from a console, despite everything the Playstations and Xboxen are being sold for. ...