Surrogates and Wild Things

Another couple of movie reviews, or at least not reviews but my opinion on the movies.

Where The Wild Things Are (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386117/): Based on the children's book of the same title, it follows a young boy who is out of control in behavior that goes to a far off land full of 'wild things' like himself where he can be free. I remember this book from when I was a young'un and was looking forward to seeing how they managed to lengthen the book. While it does stick to a little bit of the book, there are some changes as expected there to be. However, I found that you really can not take a 20 page children's book (which about 6 pages are pure pictures with no writing, and the other 14 pages have only one sentence on each page) and turn it into a full length feature film. I found this movie to be extremely slow and boring. One could read into the whole symbolic issue of the Wild Things in that they are all pretty much some aspect of an average human personality and the one dominant personality of the Wild Things is the uncontrolled anger that Max (the young boy) shows more often than the others. Even the size of the wild things are sort of related to how strong or prevalent the personality in the boy exist. It has some interesting aspects in that regard but if you are looking for a good time movie to watch, definitely not one in my books.

Surrogates (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/): Bruce Willis plays a cop in a future world where people live and work by using body robots called 'surrogates' while the people stay safe at home in their chairs. You can be anyone or do anything without fear of attack, hurt or death. it all seems like a perfect world until the destruction of a surrogate causes the death of the user making it the first homicide in years. Willis goes about solving the mystery as what is happening and has to deal with both the surrogate users of the world plus the revolutionary band of humans that reject the use of the surrogates. Both the Mrs and I found this to be a good film. Good action, good twists and turns and who can deny the acting ability of Bruce Willis. Figure he is one actor that can spend 45 minutes running through a building, shooting bad guys and doing death defying leaps while mortally wounded and giving witty/glib side comments to the bad guys and then spend the next 20 minutes spilling his characters emotions and feelings and actually make you shed a tear for the guy. There were, of course as always in movies, a few things that made me ask 'why did that happen? what about that? you mean they did that cause of this??? seriously???' but other than that it was a good movie. I would say a movie worth spending the money and seeing.

Though speaking of movies, why are we going through such apocalyptic movies coming out in the next few months? 2012 (An epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors.), The Book Of Eli (A post-apocalyptic tale, in which a lone man fights his way across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind.), The Road (A post-apocalyptic tale of a man and his son trying to survive by any means possible) and Legion (After a terrifying biblical apocalypse descends upon the world, a group of strangers stranded in a remote truck stop diner in the Southwest unwittingly become humanity's last line of defense when they discover the diner's young waitress is pregnant with the messiah) to name only a few that come to mind. Why is that Hollywood seems to find a theme for movies and then run it into the ground with all the new releases about that thing. Wasn't it just a while back that superhero movies became the 'thing' and we were swamped with everything from Batman to the Hulk to Fantastic 4. Oh well, guess I will just enjoy the movies that come out and hope that they don't stink too badly.