The Departed.

Martin Scorsese is back with his first fiction movie since The Aviator. The Departed is a Hollywoodized version of the 2004 Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs.

Two men from opposite sides of the law are undercover within the Massachusetts State Police and the Irish mafia, but violence and bloodshed boil when discoveries are made, and the moles are dispatched to find out their enemy’s identities.

This is actually a great movie. It is based on an excellent movie, the cast is impressive - Jack Nicholson gets two thumbs up, I’m not actually sure if he is really acting or just being himself - and Martin Scorsese certainly knows how to grab your attention immediately. The Departed is true to the original in many ways, and where it goes astray it does so in a way that doesn’t mess up everything.

Except for one thing. The ending is changed radically, and that’s what I mean with a “Hollywoodized” version. For a while I thought they would keep the original ending, but no. At least it explained why Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg’s character was in the movie.

The Departed is certainly worth a look and so is the original, Infernal Affairs. If you have to chose from one of them, don’t. See them both.

My Date With Drew.

All right, so two reviews in one day is probably overkill, but I just felt I had to write this in case you were about to go out and rent this movie or maybe even buy it. The world needs to be warned. During this review I also take the liberty to spoil actually seeing the movie for you by telling you how it all ends. This is to save you the trouble of seeing it.

My Date With Drew is about Brian Herzlinger and his efforts to meet Drew Barrymore. Brian has just won $1100 dollars on a game show where the final answer that earned him the money was, you guessed it, “Drew Barrymore”. He’s got a life-long crush on Drew and sees all this as a sign that he should try to get a date with her. He is somewhat realistic about it, though, and realizes that it’s not very likely that he will ever end up in a serious relationship with Drew anyway. Brian gives himself 30 days to get a Date With Drew and with a little help from his friends, he sets out on his quest.

The movie fails to surprise anyone. It never really grabs your attention, and when you finally think it’s over - when the 30 days have gone by - you realize you have to sit through another 57 days before it’s all over.

Kudus to Brian for his efforts, he really tries hard to make an entertaining movie. It’s just too bad he fails miserably.

My Date With Drew is a waste of time. Also, it could be that it’s a waste of Brian’s time, too, as Gine, who has a better gaydar than me, suggested that certain aspects of the movie pointed towards the possibility that Brian might be playing for the other team. This is also something Drew points out during the date; “Look at us, we’re like women sitting here”…

As with most critics, the phrase “if you think the movie is so bad, let’s see you make a better one yourself” has not effect on me. I’m not supposed to know how to actually make a good movie, I’m just telling you what I think of movies that someone worked their ass off to create.

Miami Vice.

Miami Vice, like Superman Returns, is another movie title that brings back memories. Very loosely based on the 80s TV series, the it’s about two cops with the Miami PD and their lifes and work with big guns, fast cars, faster boats and hot babes - except for one of the main characters, for some reason.

Miami Vice takes you straight into the action, no ten minute sequence with a long list of names you really couldn’t care less about reading anyway. It’s not until the end credits you’re actually made aware of the fact that you’ve been watching Miami Vice for the last two hours and fifteen minutes. While we’re talking about time; Michael Mann could probably have cut the movie down by at least thirty minutes without loosing much of the story. This actually seems to be the main issue with movies these days, there are simply too long.

I like Michael Mann’s camera work during action sequences. Hand held cameras gives you a better feel of the (maybe-not-too-realistic) action sequences and makes it seem less like a movie and more like the real thing. What I also like is the sound track. Mann is obviously a Audioslave fan and the tracks used for the movie mostly blend nicely in with what’s going on on the silver screen. During the action sequences, Mann also removes all the background music, as opposed to other directors, who tend to cram in as much music as possible. This works very well because it creates an extra element of tension.

The movie has what I would call a semi-open ending and it wouldn’t surprise me if we can go see Miami Vice 2 in two or so years.

Even though Miami Vice won’t be receive the Movie of the Year Award for 2006, it’s still worth the money. I recommend going to the movies to see it, if it’s too late for that, make sure to catch it on DVD and to turn up the volume during the action sequences.

Views on the Miami Vice goes from bad to worse amongst the internet’s movie besserwissers (a group that includes myself from now, I guess). You find a lot of them over at IMDB. The post “WORST MOVIE EVER!!!!” (registration required, I’m afraid) says it all. It’s also a good peek into the internet movie know-it-all community.

Everyone’s a critique, you know.

Movie.

This week has been another one of those weeks that I’ve spent most of my time at work. It’s certainly not something I’d like to recommend, but you already knew that.

So how, you might wonder, was I able to post new entries almost every evening for the whole week, except for yesterday? That’s because I’m extremely effective. I actually wrote the entries posted on Monday and Wednesday last Sunday and I’ve even got a spare entry laying around for another busy day.

You gotta love me for my effort.

Tonight I’m seeing Miami Vice. We’ll be twelve people going to the movies, and I’m organizing the whole shebang.

You gotta love me for my effort.

I’m looking forward to the movie. One of the reasons is that it’s Miami Vice. The name brings back memories of the hours I spent in front of the idiot box all those years ago, watching Don Johnson and Phillip Thomas in the original TV series. I have to admit I don’t remember much of it, but it must have had some kind of effect on me since the main reason why the movie caught my attention was the title.

Trivia: Did you know that Philip Thomas is doing the voice work for the character Lance Vance in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? Neither did I until I read it at IMDB. What a great source of absolutely useless information.

Two other reasons why I’m looking forward to Miami Vice are Jamie Foxx - if I’m not mistaken a comedian turned successful actor and producer - and Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral, The Insider).

Trivia: Did you know that Michael Mann was also involved in the original Miami Vice TV series as a writer and a producer. It’s just incredible what you can learn with a few random clicks on the internet.

Being With Others.

The nerd in me has taken on another nerdish challenge: To get Ubuntu to work on my old Dell laptop.

Getting it up and running was surprisingly easy, download the Live CD, which also worked as an install CD, check it out for a bit and then install. Everything went OK until I was to connect to my wireless network, which uses WPA encryption. And I’m just not able to get WPA to work with my D-Link DWL-G650+ wireless card. WEP is OK, but in the words of one of my favourite cartoon characters: Idowanna!

Since I face enough challenges at work, I really don’t feel like sitting in front of a computer strugling with something like this. Right now I’m connecting through a Windows box using a twisted TP cable and that works well – but it’s not very wireless. I have now taken what can only be descibed as the easy exit; asking the people over at the Ubuntu Forums for suggestions on PCMCIA cards that work out of the box. Hopefully they’ll come up with a cheap alternative.

The German movie Stalingrad is on the idiot box in the background. It looks like a movie I should probably see properly one day, but not right after dinner. Violent, violent stuff. “War”, I think they call it.

And while we’re on the subject of war. On my way back home from work today, I biked passed a pro-Israeli demonstration. A lot of people, and a lot of cops. Perhaps a perfect opportunity to photograph riot police beating the living shit out of activists. So I got home, grabbed my camera and walked back. But when I got there, they had left.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know where they had gone, which is too bad, because after a while the pro-Israeli crowd had stumbled upon a not-so-pro-Israeli crowd and they’d startet hiting eachother, burning flags and all kinds of really mature stuff. Kodak moment upon Kodak moment, and I wasn’t there!