It's been a while, but after a number of journals about Uni work, I think i'm ready to start dishing out movie reviews. In the past couple of weeks I've seen a total of 4 movies (man do they relieve stress). These are some smallish reviews for three of them. Stay Tuned for the super review of the fourth.

21

Based on a true story about a group of MIT students who, with the aid of their teacher, go to Vegas every weekend to 'count cards' at the Blackjack table (i.e, almost cheat, it's a wishy washy area, it's not technically illegal, but most if not all Vegas casinos these days will throw you out if you're caught counting cards, look it up to figure out the intricacies, it's not too difficult to do). It's a nice story and movie and fairly enjoyable, if only to see some decent turns from veterans Kevin Spacey and Lawrence Fishburn. The younger cast do well but haven't yet mastered the art of holding a movie, especially main focus Jim Sturgess. The movie also seems to slide in too much story for it's own good when it's bankable premise was a story about counting cards in Vegas and yet it still managed to shoehorn in a love plot and various side plots as well. Overall, a nice movie to watch and then forget and not entirely dissapointing. Not sure why there was narration though.

Forgetting Sarah Marshell

If you like the Judd Apatow movies like Superbad and Knocked Up, then you'll like this. A smattering of his usual cast (he only produced, this is actually directed by Nicholas Stoller and written by main man Jason Segal) and a smattering of well known TV personalities make the cast fun to watch. The story is basically easy to follow, really just giving a platform for a bunch of jokes that thankfully don't degenerrate into dick and fart jokes (despite the multiple apperences of Segal's penis). That said, you still care about the story and the charachters, which is something Apatow has been able to bring back to comedy cinema. A very sweet and funny movie great for easing away stressful afternoons, or just fun as a date movie.

Iron Man

Okay, first of all, the good. It's a good movie. Despite what you may hear and despite a few flaws, it is a good movie and in all fairness, everything that was expected from it. Downey Jr does an amazing job as a dick who turns into a hero while still keeping a little dick in there, it's the self sacraficing heroism that gets us liking him, but it's the balls out cockiness that brings it home. Paltrow's token female role works like most other token female roles in Superhero movies and while she plays it well, one can't help feeling they've seen it all before. The real treat comes from villian Jeff Bridges. usually known for his aimiable, sweet roles, his turn as a villian is truley a site to see (I probably should have warned about spoilers here, but if you've seen the trailers, this is no surprise).

The story is also good although in this day and age a tiny bit far fetched (Bridges builds his own suit for his diabolical plan of... well causing a bunch of destruction and death, the terrorists kidnap Stark and force him to build a missile and yet don't notice when he in fact builds his suit instead, Stark develops technology that could techincally power the world and solve the oil crisis/global warming/most other problems and yet he uses it simply for powering his suit), but if you leave your common sense at the door, it's entirely enjoyable.

Really, I say go and see it because we haven't had a decent super hero movie in a while and in the year of the super hero movie, this is a great kick start.