Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds takes place a long time ago...in nazi-occupied France. It is Tarantino's latest work and it is awesomeness in a movie. I wouldn't call myself a fan of Tarantino, in case you were wondering, for the simple reason that I have not really seen any of his movies (I know, I suck, I should fix it, whatever). I have seen Inglourious Basterds though (twice even) and me likey.

I don't really want to get into the plot too much because I don't want to ruin it and it might get complex and confusing. Basically there are two plots that eventually come together. In one, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads a group of Jewish-American soldiers who are in the nazi killing business. In the other, a Jewish survivor, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) plots some revenge.

All of the acting is excellent. Laurent does a great job at being sympathetic. Christoph Waltz, as Col. Hans Landa, is wonderfully evil and crazy. And Pitt makes an excellent crazy accent guy. His accent was so wonderful and it pretty much caught me off guard every time he spoke.

There were some typical Tarantino death scenes...or what I have been told are typical Taratino death scenes, but I didn't find it overly violent. I thought it had a great balance between sad, funny, and violence.

Inglourious Basterds gets three kernels - simply wonderful.

Julia & Julia

Julie & Julia is a really entertaining movie...or should I say movies? Amy Adams plays Julie Powell. A woman in a job that gets her down living in an apartment that gets her down. The only thing she finds enjoyable is cooking. Meryl Streep plays Julia Child. A woman who finds herself in France (b/c of her husband's job) with nothing to keep her busy except for food. Julie decides to cook her way through Julia Child's cook book to get her through a year of her life. Julia decides to take cooking classes and finds her true passion.

The movie follows the story of the two women. Julie, over her year of cooking and blogging and finally living her life. Julia, over many years of cooking and try to write her cookbook that would eventually inspire so many.

Both Adams and Streep to a great job at endearing themselves to the audience. Stanley Tucci also did an excellent job at playing Paul Child.

Julie & Julia gets three kernels - entertaining on many levels.

District 9

District 9 - I only barely knew what this movie was about before I went to it. I learned that it was about aliens who came to earth and were living in kind of an alien ghetto. That is all I knew. The concept is kind of neat. A ship full of aliens ended up over Johannesburg twenty years earlier (than the movie). A company, I guess you would call it, took control and created a neighbourhood for the aliens. It turned into kind of a slum city with a weird sort of hierarchy and black-market (for things like cat food...a delicacy, don't you know). When the movie picks up, the aliens need to be moved to a different area...a more spacious kind of city, which in reality is a concentration camp.

Wikus, pretty much the main character along with one of the aliens, is in charge of the relocation. The rest of the plot I will put under white...hilite to read. Wikus accidentally infects himself with a black substance that is essentially turning him into one of the aliens. The substance was supposed to be used as fuel to get the ship going so they could return to home. The company kidnapped Wikus to perform experiments on him and after escaping he teams up with the alien. They form a friendship out of necessity and that's about all I'll say.

Now to the reaction/thoughts part of the movie. I found that besides the beginning, the pace of the movie did not vary at all. As a result, it kind of felt 5 hours long! Not so fun. It was pretty much just gore and death and shooting and vapourizing. There were a lot of disgusting moments in this movie.

District 9 gets one kernel - could have been a really cool movie if the story had had more depth, but it was just not enjoyable to watch at all.