THE WIRE: SEASON 4 - This season of THE WIRE was very different from prior seasons...yet just as good. Instead of focusing solely on the gang-bangers versus the cops, in season 4 you also get the story perspective of the youth that's often caught in the crossfire. Here you get to know 4 Baltimore teens who are caught up in crime and crime around them, yet they also struggle to find opportunities in a neighborhood that offers very little. Once again the stories and drama here are first rate. Once again...a great season in a great series.
THE INFORMANT - Matt Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, an employee of Archer Daniels Midland in Illinois. He turns informant and begins working with the FBI as a whistle blower in a price-fixing scheme. But before you perceive Whitacre as someone with honorable intentions, you soon realize that the whistle blower has some skeletons in the closet of his own. This is a classic example of a "dramedy." It's got plenty of drama, but yet never becomes pretentious and maintains a sense of humor throughout. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, THE INFORMANT is definitely worth checking out. Great film.
KNOWING - Nicholas Cage stars as John Koestler, an astrophysicist at MIT. His son's elementary school digs up a "time capsule" that was planted there by students in 1959. One of the objects in the capsule is a piece of paper filled with numbers. John soon discovers the paper is actually a list of dates...dates that predict catastrophic events over a 40 year time span. John races against time to try to stop, or warn against the last three remaining events that still yet to happen. Critics blasted this movie pretty hard when it came out but I actually enjoyed it. The third act gets pretty far-fetched, but the ride up to that point is pretty fun and somewhat interesting. For a rental I'd say this is a pretty good movie. Much better than I expected.
THE JACKET - It's 1991 and Adrien Brody plays a Gulf War Vet who returns home from duty in the first Gulf War....only to find he suffers from amnesia and mental instability...(or does he?) He is institutionalized and sent to a mental facility, despite his belief that he's not crazy. Once he arrives he is routinely juiced up with special drugs, harnessed in a straight jacket, and stuffed in a box for periods of time. Now stay with me here...I'm still explaining this thing. So once he gets packed away somehow the drugs enable him to travel ahead in the future to 2008. Then...after he travels back and forth in time he discovers the truth about what got him institutionalized and crazy antics ensue. Whew! This film felt to me like it was trying to be a clone of the movie JACOB'S LADDER (1990), and JACOB'S LADDER was much better than this. Though I admire the effort here for trying to think "out-of-the-box," (no pun intended) overall I didn't care for this one. I don't mind "weird" in a movie, but there has to be a point to it. There were times here that it moved way beyond "weird" and just became "ridiculous."
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