Eagle Eye (2008)

This review contains mild spoilers but honestly if you couldn't figure them out on your own you're empty inside and should probably just lock yourself in your room and cry tears of sorrow into your pillows over your worthless existence while Linkin Park's "Crawling" soothes you to sleep.


Directed By: D.J. Caruso

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Julianne Moore (uncredited)

Other Actors of Note: Rosario Dawson, Billy Boy Thornton, Michael Chiklis, Ethan Embry, William Sadler

Plot: Jerry Shaw (LaBeouf) and Rachel Holloman (Monaghan) are two strangers thrown together by a mysterious phone call from a woman they have never met. Threatening their lives and family, she pushes Jerry and Rachel into a series of increasingly dangerous situation, using the technology of everyday life to track and control their every move. As the situation escalates, these two ordinary people become the country's most wanted fugitives, who must work together to discover what is really happening -– and more importantly, why.


You know those movies that are good but so incredibly unrealistic that even flipping your brain to "Die Hard" mode doesn't quite fix the fact that there isn't a thing that's the least bit plausible about the entire fucking thing?

You may have experienced this feeling whilst watching films like "Sunshine", "The Core", or anything that features Stephen Seagal in a prominent role. And whilst the movie is mind numbingly insulting to any semblence of intelligence you might hold you find a supreme enjoyment in coming up with snarky comments to say about it on the imaginary movie blog in your head.

Fortunately this movie blog is neither imaginary nor in my head. And my time has come...

"Eagle Eye" is a political thriller in much the same way that "No Country For Old Men" is a feel good comedy. Don't get me wrong it tries really hard to be intelligent but half the time I was just expecting Shia LaBeouf to drive a police car into a helicopter. (For reference, Billy Bob Thornton does actually crash a Reaper spy plane with a half-ton pick-up truck.

Shia LaBeouf plays Jerry Shaw, a no-name slacker with no path and life and a fear of shaving. He is suddenly called by his mother after three years away from home to be told that his twin brother Ethan (Shia LaBeouf) has just died.

Across town Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) sends her son off to a band performance in Washington D.C. with the help of her deadbeat ex-husband. Both Jerry and Rachel get calls telling them that they have been "activated" accompanied by orders (Jerry gets framed for terrorism and Rachel gets her son's life threatened.)

Well it eventually turns out that the evil voice on the phone (Julianne Moore) is some self-aware super-computer along the lines of Skynet, Shodan, GLaDOS, HAL 9000, AUTO, and Oprah. Complete with giant white orb on stock with glowing red eye. Unfortunately after making their super computer to "gather intelligence" they mistakenly install a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista: Vengeful Cunt Edition into her software and she decides to make the executive branch assplode.


Let me put a little disclaimer for some of you. I know a lot of you think Shia LaBeouf is overused and untalented, but since you're all entitled to my opinion and that I would rather hammer roofing nails into my dick then listen to any of you fuckers bitch and moan about it one more time I'm going to kindly ask you to either A) shut up or B) Put a cat in a pillowcase, shake it up, and then put it over your head.

Shia LaBeouf gives probably one of the finer performances of his career. Jerry is a believable character and there wasn't one bit of his performance that I found to be hard to take. (Which is good because most of the rest of the movie was.) And for those who claim that LaBeouf can only play more or less one role, he does a fine job in a role that is nothing like his parts in "Transformers", "Disturbia", or "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" other than that he plays a relatively normal guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Michelle Monaghan who I am glad to see in an A list movie that isn't "The Heartbreak Kid" does a wonderful job in the role of Rachel. Her performance as a troubled single mother with no regard for anything other than the safety of her own child is wonderfully done.

Billy Bob Thornton plays an FBI agent who's a bit too action movie-y for the film's own good. He uses a pick-up truck to blow up a Reaper spy plane. Though he does have some rather humorous lines, particularly "You'd better be looking at me because I'm a suspect because if you don't figure this out I'm going to make sure you're all demoted to a job that requires you to touch shit with your hands."

Rosario Dawson plays some sort of Airforce special agent or something. What I found particularly odd is that she starts out the movie with a pale complexion (I didn't think it could possibly be Rosario Dawson due to the fact that she was too white) but grows darker as the film progresses. She plays her role a bit too seriously and by the time she's stabbing ARI's giant HAL eye with a metal pole after crawling out of an inexplicable pool of water. (Because jamming a piece of metal in something electircal whilst soaking wet is always a good idea.) She is ultimately an unneccesary part of the movie and her performance is rather inconsequential.

Julianne Moore (Which Rosario Dawson has confirmed is the voice of ARI) is fittingly creepy as the malevolent super computer. Not as creepy as Shodan but at least creepier than GLADoS, though there were points when I expected her to goad America to its doom with empty promises of freedom and cake.

And this brings us to Defense Secretery Vic Mackey. I have no idea why anybody thought it was good to put Michael Chiklis in a role where he doesn't bust someone's face in. This is not to say I think Michael Chiklis is a bad actor, but come on that's like Secretery of State Gilbert Gottfried! Some actors fill niches and Michael Chiklis' nich'e involves acting intense and breaking things.


The story of "Eagle Eye" is so incredibly implausible that I don't even know where to start. ARI for some reason can pretty much control anything on "the grid" to the point of being able to read ripples on a glass of water to detirmine what's being spoken and making power lines spontaneously bust and fall on Iranian-Americans that are apparently have skin made of magnesium.

This is the kind of movie that just encourages the lunatics living in wooded cabins with a barn full of bullets and a gigantic stash of hoarded beans to believe all the paranoid delusions they've always had. As if "Shooter" didn't already give them an exscuse to live in the woods and talk on CB radios because the United States government built a hybrid between HAL 9000 and Cerebro in the basement of the pentagon.

Speaking of Ari, I have no idea who came up with this plot device but it was a bigger show stopper than the loom in "Wanted." About a million and one evil super computer jokes popped into my head about how Ari was going to send Governor Schwarzenneger back to the past to kill Rosario Dawson's mother, or how I expected Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" to play over the end credits. (It totally should have.)

My favorite part is when Shia LeBeouf takes three bullets to the torso (hitting his heart, lung, and spine respectively) and is shown later in a scene maybe two lakes later looking no worse for wear in a fucking ARM SLING! Couldn't they have at least done the prerequisite wheelchair and chest wound withbandages with suit jacket wrapped around his shoulders and a bandage serving as a crude headband for no particular reason?

And Shia wins out in the end and becomes a national hero and gets to bang Michelle Monaghan which is worth it because she is incredibly hot.



...even if she did sleep with Chook Chutney.


"Eagle Eye" (aka "Live Free or Die Hard 2: Live Free or Die Harderer" or "2008: A Spaced Oddity") is a pretty mindless movie that'll be something nice to watch on a saturday afternoon on HBO.

I give "Eagle Eye" a 3 out of 5. It's entertaining but utterly forgettable, rent it sometime.

Lakeview Terrace (2008)

Directed by: Neil LaBute

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, and Kerry Washington

Other Actors of Note: Ron Glass and Jay Hernandez

Plot: Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) is a LAPD officer and strict single father of a 15 year old daughter and 10 year old son. He is also the self appointed neighborhood watch patrol in Lakeview Terrace. A young interracial couple, Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa Mattson (Kerry Washington), move into their first home next door to Abel. Abel is raising his children by very strict standards, and he disapproves of any bad behavior in the neighborhood. Abel believes that Chris and Lisa are bad influences on his children, and he decides to harass them until they move. Taken from www.imdb.com.


The fact that Samuel L. Jackson stars primarily in cinematic abortions and spends far too much time discussing his hatred of avian reptiles always tends to make me forget that he really is one of the finest actors ever.

True he's had more bad movies but how can anyone forget "Pulp Fiction's" Jules Winnfield, or "Jackie Brown's" Ordell Robie, "Grand Theft Auto San Andreas'" Frank Tenpenny, or "Coach Carter." Besides, he's the hardest working man in Hollywood. Do you think it's easy never turning down a script?

"Lakeview Terrace" is just another thriller/drama in the pantheon of ambiguously tonal movies such as "Paparazzi", "Changing Lanes", and "Hard Candy." Fortunatley it's more the latter two than the former.

It's the story of Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington) Mattson, a newly married interracial couple moving into their first home on Lakeview Terrace (Hey, that's the name of this movie!)

But their neighbor Abel Turner (Samuel L. Muthafuckin' Jackson) quickly tries to put them out of their home with several tactics to make them want to leave. Soon the situation escalates and shit be freaky.


There are only 3 performances in this film that are actually important enough to note. Let's start with the most inconsequential.

Kerry Washington, of "The Last King of Scotland" and "Fantastic Four", gives a decent albeit reined in performance as Lisa Mattson. She desperately wants to be a mother and it's implied that she stops taking her birth control pills without telling her husband so as to get pregnant. However, all of this kind of becomes a moot point and Lisa ends up being more of a background character than a proper lead.

Patrick Wilson, most notable for his performance in 2005's "Hard Candy", has gone from being beat up by a 13-year-old girl to pistol whipping Sam Jackson. Wilson showed a lot of good acting potential in "Hard Candy" but he really comes into his own here. He reminds me of a young Michael Keaton both in looks and actions and really serves as a solid adversary for Samuel L. Jackson and holds his own on the acting field as well. Chris is clearly bothered by how people treat him, being a white man married to a black woman, and is especially annoyed by Abel's behaviour. I hope to see more of Patrick Wilson in the future.

Then of course, there's Samuel L. Jackson. Abel Turner is a cross between the psychotic father Doyle Gibson that Jackson played in "Changing Lanes" and Denzel Washington's crooked cop Alonzo from "Training Day." Meaning that aside from being a racist nutjob, Abel is also a crooked asshole policeman. The look of outrage on his face when Abel sees that Kerry Washington is married to Patrick Wilson as opposed to Ron Glass, who actually turns out to be her father says everything. While it gets a bit tiresome, it's nice to see a movie that's not afraid to show that people of other races can be racist too.


I'm told that this film was penned by a playwright, and if this is true it really shows in this movie. The same sort of focus on the main characters, simplistic sets, and no nonsense storline that is usually seen in plays is shown here. There are no establishing shots and it's hard to get a good mental picture of what any area actually looks like.

What hurts the story the most, however, is the plot lines it shows only to leave untied. Abel's got more problems than just being a racist prick. He's an abusive man with questionable practices as a law officer and a father. The conflict between Abel and his children is left unresolved (though I guess you could say the ending sort of resolves it.) Also the problems between Chris and his father-in-law as well as Chris and Lisa over their unborn child never seem to resolve fully.

The story reeks of drama but gets so caught up in being a thriller that it never quite reaches its dramatic potential. This makes the tone of the film confusing and hard to get behind as even the film-makers seem to be unsure of what sort of movie they're making.

One of the finer notes of the film and my personal favorite was the backdrop of the California wildfire during the entire movie. The wildfire serves as a wonderful mcguffin, always looming over every scene as some sort of unseen menace and even in the final scenes of the movie it is downplayed as being the lesser of two evils in comparrison to Abel's horrible actions.


It's a movie with a lot of unrealized potential that could have been much better than it was. You won't find "Lakeview Terrace" to be unsatisfying but you'll walk away feeling like there was something missing.

I give "Lakeview Terrace" a 3 out of 5. It's worth seeing but you're not missing anything if you don't.

Death Race (2008)


Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson

Starring: Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Tyrese Gibson

Other Actors of Note: Ian McShane, David Carradine

Plot: Ex-con Jensen Ames is forced by the warden of a notorious prison to compete in our post-industrial world's most popular sport: a car race in which inmates must brutalize and kill one another on the road to victory. Taken from www.imdb.com


Back in 1975 when the year 2000 seemed like a long time away and Roger Corman created "Death Race 2000" a wonky, bloody, and delightfully ridiculous sci-fi film featuring then no-name actors David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone and was based on the short story "The Racer" by Ib Melchior.

Now one would look at a movie directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (the man responsible for the "Resident Evil" movies and "Alien vs. Predator"), produced by Roger Corman (the man responsible for some of the worst films ever made), and Jason Statham (The man responsible for at least 2 of the most retarded action movies on the planet: "Transporter 2" and "Crank") would be the cinematic equivalent to having your testicles put in a vice and slowly smashed until they resemble pork tenderloins.

However, I am happy to report that your would be wrong. If "Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki" was "Cool Hand Luke" for retarded 12-year-olds, "Death Race" is "The Shawshank Redemption" for retarded 12-year-olds.

The movie is about Jensen Ames (Jason Statham with a name only slightly less stupid than Chev Chelios) a former NASCAR driver who's pretty much on a slow road to prison anyway. When his wife is killed and he gets framed for her murder he just happens to get sent to the prison where Death Race takes place.

We all know the spiel now, having heard it in "Battle Royale", and "Riki-Oh", and "The Running Man" and God knows how many other things. The economy collapses, prisons are run by private corporations, and futuristic bloodsports are put on for the entertainment of the public.

So it turns out Jensen was brought in to replace crowd favorite Frankenstein (David Carradine, half-assed reprising his role from the original film), a driver so disfigured by the many car wrecks he's had that he wears a mask. He is promised that if he can win one race he will be set free, but unfortunately Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson) is looking to kill Jensen just as he killed Frankenstein in the headache inducing opening sequence.


Let me just say that I use the term "acting" with a grain of salt here. This movie isn't about acting, it's about making things explode.

Jason Statham plays the type of character that Jason Statham would play. He kicks ass and chews bubblegum but he is out of bubblegum. Naturally he's 100% in control the entire film and never experiences a moment where he's not kicking ass or getting revenge for getting his ass kicked.

Tyrese Gibson plays a very angry man who wants to win so he can be released. Which kind of seems pointless as the man is clearly a lunatic and would probably end up right back in for killing somebody. There's an interesting exchange of dialog early in the movie:

"Machine Gun Joe has a male navigator, because he's gay"

"Actually it's because he goes through navigators so fast, the violence towards women upsets the audience."

It was like Paul W.S. Anderson was anticipating imdb forum topics before the movie was even made.

Then of course there's Ian McShane as the coach and main guy in the pit crew for Jensen. The first time I saw him I went "Wow, Al Pacino has really let himself go." No less McShane, probably does the closest thing to actual acting of anyone in this film.

Then finally we have Joan Allen as the bitchy ice queen warden Hennessy. Who most likely has teeth in her vagina and a very large stick up her ass. She does pretty much what she does in the trailer.


The effects are pretty good here. The movie, while naturally toned far down from it's 1975 counterpart, is still shockingly violent. We see people being shot and splattered and shot and shot and... uh... shot. Machine Gun Joe probably has the highest body count just on navigators alone.

Then of course there's the cars. The cars look fucking awesome, every single one of them. They're all built to look fast yet strong. Then of course partway through the film we're introduced to The Dreadnaught (dramatic overlude) a giant tanker semi with anti-aircraft guns, spiked tires, flamethrowers, and a tank turret on the back.

This movie is so blissfully violent and full of explosions, blood, and carnage that it brings out the kid in all of us. It's pure mindless violence in its most distilled form.


Story-wise "Death Race" borrows a lot from "The Longest Yard", "Shawshank Redemption", "The Running Man", and "Twisted Metal."

It's interesting to see how this series has come full circle from "Death Race 2000" to the video game "Twisted Metal" which was arguably the closest thing to "Death Race" video game (moreso even than "Carmageddon 3: The Death Race 2000") and now "Death Race" seems like a movie version of "Twisted Metal."

So blatant is the video game allegory that the track even has power-ups. There are circles on the ground. Running over a sword turns on the machine guns, running over a shield turns on the smoke, oil, and napalm. Running over a skull brings up a spike barrier that will kill you.

Paul W.S. Anderson being no stranger to video game adaptations no-doubt did this intentionally. Wanting the movie to feel like a big video game. In fact if Anderson wanted to just go ahead and make a "Twisted Metal" movie, he has my blessing.

Many people have said that this movie is sacrilige to the original 1975 film. And while it is decidedly lacking in running over old ladies for points and Sylvester Stallone in a pimp suit it's about as close to the original as a mainstream movie is going to get these days.


It's fun, it's mindlessly violent, and blissfully retarded but it's probably the most fun you're going to have watching a movie for a while so stop paying attention and just wach things 'assplode.

I give "Death Race" a 4 out of 5.

Burn After Reading (2008)


Directed by: Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring: Francis McDormand, George Clooney, Brad Pitt,

Other Actors of Note: John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, and J.K. Simmons

Plot: A disk containing the memoirs of a CIA agent ends up in the hands of two unscrupulous gym employees who attempt to sell it. Taken from www.imdb.com.

The Coen Brothers are some of the finest writer/directors to ever grace the field of cinema. They're also some of the most underrated. Oh sure people love the shit out of "Blood Simple", "O Brother Where Art Thou", and "The Big Lebowski" but movies like "The Hudsucker Proxy", "Barton Fink", and "Raising Arizona" (Quite possibly the greatest movie in known existence) go largely ignored.

The Coen Brothers don't make bad movies, they make movies you don't understand. This doesn't mean you're dense or stupid, it just means you don't understand it. There is not one Coen Brothers movie that I have been displeased with that I didn't learn to enjoy on repeat viewings, this is including "Intolerable Cruelty" and "The Ladykillers" (I am one of maybe 3 people on earth that think that movie's hilarious.)

"Burn After Reading" is banking mostly off the success of last year's "No Country For Old Men" and I think that will hurt it more than anything. "Burn After Reading" is like a combination of "The Ladykillers" and "The Big Lebowski."

It's the story of a CIA agent Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) who gets demoted due to his drinking problem an quits his job. He is immediatly mocked for his choice by his ice-queen wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) who is having an affair with federal marshal Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney.)

Katie soon comes to the conclusion that it's time to leave Osbourne and takes his financial information off of his personal computer, accidently taking the memoirs of his time in the CIA he was in the process of writing.

The personal assistant of Katie's lawyer has the disk that Katie has burnt the information onto and accidently leaves it at the Hardbodies Gym where it is found by Chad (Brad Pitt) who jumps on the oppurtunity to play spy and try and blackmail Osbourne for the purpose of paying for coworker Lynda Litzke. (Frances McDormand)

Of course in typical Coen fashion, everything goes to shit and a bunch of people end up dying.

This is an all-star cast that certainly proves its clout. George Clooney plays the same type of smooth-talking paranoid delusional man he played in "Intolerable Cruelty" and "O Brother Where Art Thou" but there's also a touch of his character from "Syriana" but skewed and over-exaggerated to the point of parody. Harry is a womanizer and a paranoid coward, but he's also the only character in the entier film who seems to have even the slightest hope of being a good person.

On the other side of the coin. Frances McDormand seems like the least likely person to improve herself. From the beginning, Linda is vain (she probably thinks this song is about her) and seems to care about only her looks. She even seems absolutely oblivious to the horrifically obvious come-ons of her boss Ted (Richard Jenkins.) On top of this, Linda is incredibly shallow and greedy, using Chad to try and blackmail money and when failing that going to the Russian Embassy to trade in the CIA secrets she thinks are on the disk. Frances McDormand plays the role beautifully as the anti-thesis to her character Marge Gunderson from the other Coen directed film "Fargo" where Marge was intelligent and full of depth, Linda is ignorant and about as deep as a pothole.

From the previews we are led to believe that Brad Pitt is the lead of this film. This is wrong. Brad Pitt has very little screen time in this movie and the character of Chad doesn't have very much to do with the story. This is a shame as this movie beautifully showcases Brad Pitt's acting talent. I sometimes forget that Brad Pitt is a brilliant actor when he's not busy making shit movies like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and bouncing back and forth between two actresses I could give a fuck about. Chad is a genuine idiot, a new-age health nut who rides a bike everywhere he goes and whose entire wardrobe consists of shorts and form fitting t-shirts. Every scene with Chad is like watching a thought creep slowly across his mind and even then being barely comprehended. This movie could have been 2 hours of Brad Pitt chomping gum and dancing to his iPod and I still would have loved it.

The two weak performances here are Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich. They just come across as two very angry two dimensional characters. John Malkovich drinks and says fuck a lot and Tilda Swinton dissapprovingly criticizes everything she looks at. Neither one wowed me, though it did impress me that Tilda Swinton played a charcter more bitchy than the evil witch she played in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe."


Every Coen movie has its own personal "gimmick" that really needs to be seen before one can truly understand where the movie is coming from. "Burn After Reading's" gimmick is that it's a spoof of political thrillers like "Syriana", "The Sum of All Fears", "The Bourne Identity", "Shooter", etc.

The big joke is that this is a political thriller where nothing really happens. While steeped in government secrets and espionage it's nothing more than the tale of a bunch of really dumb people fucking up each other's lives and has no effect on national security at all as shown in two scenes involving J.K Simmons as a CIA director who doesn't really care about any of this.

The beauty is that the music and cinematography doesn't seem to be in on the joke. The music is composed of low register bangs and overludes and the camera zooms in and out at extreme angles dramatically.

The ensemble cast plays off of one-another perfectly and it's interesting to see how the actions of each character affect the others. The movie takes several black comedic turns and each one is absolutely hilarious, most of them playing off the espionage angle.

The Coens are always able to inject humor into everything they do. Even Cormac McCArthy's downer "No Country For Old Men" had plenty of comedic lines (line that I might ad were not funny in the book.) The same is done here with camera work, musical cues, and especially subtle gestures and body language, particularly on the part of Brad Pitt.

It's the kind of subtle genius that I don't think most audiences will appreciate. Though the humor is a little easier to spot than it was in the vastly underrated black comedy "The Ladykillers" I think its still a bit too funny for the "No Country For Old Men" audience and a bit too subtle for the "Big Lebowski" crowd.

I reccomend several repeat viewings of this film upon its release even if you did kind of like it. Once you truly see where the movie is coming from it's brilliant, witty, and hilarious. Otherwise you'll probably just be scratching your head and wondering why anybody likes it.

"Burn After Reading" is a fine addition to the Coen Brothers library of modern movie masterpieces. You may not appreciate it at first but don't give up on it, keep watching it and it will grow on you.

I give "Burn After Reading" a 5 out of 5. Go see it.