Reviews

With its story and its screenplay written by none-other-than James Cameron, Strange Days is director Kathryn Bigelow (K19: The Widowmaker) vision of a beautiful dystopian Los Angeles on the precipice of the turn of the millennium where violence is everywhere, the police are out in force like something in Bosnia or Northern Ireland with full-on riot gear and automatic weapons.

Martin Scorsese‘s fantastic follow-up to 1990′s Goodfellas, again teaming up with Nicholas Pileggi, who is also again both the author of the book and the writer of the screenplay.  Many of the faces of Goodfellas return here to Casino to tell the true story of how the mafia took Las Vegas from a small-scale military stop-over and turned it into the money-making machine that it is today–and how they screwed it all up on the way.

Chaos is such a waste of cast, script, film, and money.  The writer and director Tony Giglio has little previous directorial experience and his IMDb resume provides associations with mostly B-movies in general for his career.

In this horrible movie we are presented with a bank robbery in Seattle led by Lorenz (Wesley Snipes) and a crew of loyal men organized as smartly as an accountant’s records, who hold the contents and people of a bank hostage and demand to negotiate only with recently-suspended Det. Quentin Conners (Jason Statham).  Conners has been suspended and his partner fired for their involvement in a bad shooting in another hostage situation in the recent past, referred to as the Pearl Street shooting.

HBO and writer/director Scott Z. Burns bring us this sensational, utterly believable and simultaneously terrifying story of a man named Timofey Berezin (Paddy Considine) working in one of the Soviet Union’s many secretive nuclear plants who is exposed to a fatal amount of radiation and must find a way to get enough money for his wife Marina (Radha Mitchell) and his son to continue to live pleasantly after his inevitable death in what is appropriately titled Pu-239 or The Half Life of Timofey Berezin. The officials at the plant lie about his exposure and try to get him to sign a statement to the effect that it was an error in his judgment to enter a chamber and try to repair some damage. When he refuses, they suspend him indefinitely without pay, pending a hearing. Worried about his family’s future life when he finds out about his true level of radiation exposure, he decides to steal a sizable quantity of plutonium (Pu-239), which is the nuclear material from which nuclear weapons are made, and then try to sell it for the $30,000 he estimates his family will need.

Director Jonas Åkerlund‘s 2002 Spun has the pace and editing style of the drug which is the central theme of the movie: methamphetamine.   For example, while most movies have something like 600 cuts in them, Spun contains a record of more than 5,000 cuts.  It stars Jason Schwartzman as Ross, a naive meth addict with a car; Mickey Rourke as The Cook, who manufactures the meth in very dangerous and hazardous circumstances, including motel rooms and rents weird porn while wearing his cowboy hat and visibly shoulder-holstered gun; Brittany Murphy as Nikki, a stripper who is The Cook’s girlfriend; John Leguizamo as Spider Mike, the dealer who buys what The Cook makes and then sells it from his disgusting house; Patrick Fugit as Frisbee, a spacey meth user who buys from Spider Mike and is often found lurking around his house; Mena Suvari as Cookie, Spider Mike’s live-in girlfriend and meth addict; Peter Stormare as The Mullet Cop, one of the two undercover police officers who use meth and make drug busts; and Alexis Arquette as the Mustache Cop, The Mullet Cop’s partner.