The trailers I’ve seen for UNSTOPPABLE make the film feel like it’s almost a satire of clichéd movies about runaway trains.

This uncanny trailer spoof from Saturday’s SNL takes it one step further. It’s almost magical in its greatness.

The premise of HARRY BROWN, according to Netflix, is: “When a crew of drug-dealing gang members takes the life of his only friend, Leonard (David Bradley), retired Marine and widower Harry Brown (Michael Caine) decides to take the law into his own hands — but his old-school training might be overmatched.”

A pretty accurate description, that. Mine, though, would go: HARRY BROWN is a cross somewhere between DEATH WISH and GRAN TORINO, with a dose of TRAINSPOTTING injected into the arm.

I watched it the other night, and it was good, entertaining even. But, unfortunately, not nearly as good as any of those other films. Caine is brilliant, as is to be expected. The whole cast does a solid job, really. But the story, or perhaps the director’s unfurling of the story, is what drags the whole production down. The plot is all over the map, alternating from being too heavy-handed in the dramatic scenes, and too ridiculous in the action scenes — especially the whole third act, which is completely over-the-top and makes no sense at all.

My recommendation? Wait till it’s available on Netflix’s instant watch — which will probably happen within a couple of months — and go check out DEATH WISH instead. Watching Charlie Bronson dispense vigilante justice to criminals in scummy, 1970′s New York will be a far more entertaining use of your time.

Being a gentleman of leisure occasionally works to my advantage, such as yesterday, when I was able to take in two movies in one day. Not something I would ordinarily be able to do on a weekday.

MACHETE was the first order of business. Saw it with Brandon and Krystel in the afternoon. It was everything I could hope for in an intentionally Mexploitation film. Cast was great, especially Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez and Robert DeNiro. Lindsay Lohan . . . not so much. This, along with BLACK DYNAMITE, makes two throwback movies I’ve seen this year that were masterfully done. Hopefully next year’s HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN will be as good.

Later in the evening, I went with Adam and Jason to see THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, the second of three films adapted from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. It was very good. Perhaps not quite as good as the first film, but very enjoyable nonetheless. Lisbeth Salander really is one of the most interesting antiheroes I’ve seen on the screen in a while. Can’t wait for the third film. The Neon should hopefully get it sometime early next year.

Speaking of the Neon, they have a little café area and an outdoor patio that I’d somehow never paid attention to before yesterday. So before the movie, I was talking with my friend Diana, who’s a manager there, and she said it would be perfectly fine if I brought my laptop sometime and set up shop. Might have to take her up on that next week. Change of scenery would be cool.

Dear God.

Uwe Boll, possibly the world’s worst film director, and the asshole behind many an awful video game adaptation, such as POSTAL, BLOODRAYNE, and HOUSE OF THE DEAD . . . is making a movie about the Holocaust.

And it’s called AUSCHWITZ.

The teaser below is all sorts of unpleasant to watch, not least of which because Boll has also cast himself in the film.

He’s the concentration camp officer standing guard at the gas chamber.

Comic book writer Mark Millar reviews the new KARATE KID “reimagining,” and in doing so delivers one of the best lines I’ve ever read in a film review:

I spoil it for no one when I point out that Will Smith 2.0 wins out and I can’t believe how satisfying it was to watch the spawn of a rich, Hollywood golden couple kick a poor, Chinese peasant boy in the face in front of a crowd.

It seems part of Daft Punk’s score for the upcoming film TRON LEGACY was leaked a week or so ago.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Daft Punk, techno/house music not really being my thing, but the bits of score I’ve heard in the TRON LEGACY trailers sounds damned good, and this leaked music is pretty awesome. I might just have to pick up the soundtrack whenever it is (officially) released.

Daft Punk – Tron Soundtrack (Sampler) by Some Kind of Awesome

[Via Cinema Blend.]

Just came back from seeing the new Angelina Jolie spy flick, SALT. An enjoyable enough film, overall. The plot was absurd and about three different kinds of incoherent, but the action scenes were well-orchestrated and exciting to watch. Jolie kicks asses like no other movie star.

And, of course, she is still, as the kids are calling it these days, hawt. It’s been fourteen years, I think, since I first saw her in HACKERS, and still I am in love after all this time.

I look forward to the sequel, which is supposed to feature Brad Pitt as Johannes Pepper, an Austrian sleeper agent who goes up against Jolie’s character.

I believe they’re going to call it SALT VS. PEPPER.

Can’t sleep. Too much going on later today for me to sufficiently subdue my brain into unconsciousness.

So instead I will share with you a video titled, “Advice for Young Girls from The Little Mermaid.” It features a starved-looking Ariel providing spectacularly spot-on advice to young girls, such as:

Don’t ever talk to a man until he kisses you on the lips first. Then, as a woman, you’re allowed.

You know what? I’m gonna buck the trend and not spend several hundred words bashing the movie 2012 over the many splendid ways that it is an awful film. Not a peep on its hackneyed characters, overwrought melodrama, ridiculous premise — even by director Roland Emmerich’s standards — or eye-rolling “twist” ending.

Instead, I just want to point out that I find it incredibly funny that the special effects of INDEPENDENCE DAY, a film Emmerich made 14 years ago, look much, much more realistic than the special effects of 2012.

Why?

Because back in 1996, computer generated effects were just beginning to take off, so the filmmakers had to use the traditional method of miniatures and models to stage all of the scenes of the aliens nuking Earth (with a smattering of CGI for tweaks). This had a two-fold effect of forcing the effects teams to be much more creative in their depiction of the world-wide destruction, which they arguably pulled off quite well, and since they were using miniatures and models which actual exist in a physical state — and not just on a computer — they automatically look more “real.”

Whereas in 2012, in an era where CGI has become so common that it’s made many filmmakers lazy and uninspired in its usage, the effects are all-CGI-all-the-time, and, as a result, posses a soft, unreal, and plain fake feel about them, so all the scenes rendered of the Earth having its gigantic psychotic break and cutting itself end up lacking any emotion whatsoever. We are then sucked completely out of the movie, even if we don’t explicitly realize it.

I swear, the only two filmmakers in the last ten years who have been able to effectively use CGI on such a massive basis are Peter Jackson and James Cameron. I just wish the rest of Hollywood would wake the fuck up and take note.

I watched THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO last night, and I think I may have just seen the best film of the year. It was absolutely mesmerizing.

I’m not going to go into the plot of the film or anything (you can read about that on Wikipedia), but I will say that it is a superbly crafted thriller, and Lisbeth, the punk main character played by Noomi Rapace, is one of the more uniquely compelling anti-heroines I’ve seen in the movies in a long time.

A quick note: it is a movie made by some damn foreigners from Sweden, so you’ll either need to watch it with the subtitles, or, if you prefer to be a lame doorknob, with the English dubbing. Me, I can’t stand to watch anything dubbed, as nothing will pull me out of a movie faster than dialogue not matching a character’s mouth.

I’ve yet to read the book that the movie is based on — though I did order it last night — since most movies are generally inferior to the original source material, and I like to enjoy the movie based on its own merits first.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was so good, though, that now I’m curious to see how the book stacks up in comparison.