Barshki

It sounds like nothing too special and it's only PG-13 but this movie is brutal. The acting is great, usually in a horror movie about young people dying the actors just terrible, but these actors, both major and minor, are fantastic. It's more than just "look scared!" "act cocky!" "act snooty!" Everyone has a real human range of emotion, this movie will break your heart at least a couple of times. It dares to stare in to the souls of the victims and the actors pull it off great. Of course having great dialog helps too.

The writing and story are very well thought out. This movie has a lot to say about being human. Make no mistake that it is bleak and it is terrifying. I felt real danger and tragedy in their situations. Sure it's PG-13 and lacks the horror of mutilated corpses and whatnot, but it's doesn't need it, it is scary enough on its own. It could have very easily gone the zombie route as far as the infected go but that would have castrated the emotions of the story. It's also partially a Body Horror movie, since it's about a virus that can take a few days to show up in its victim and is airborne. It analyzes the terror of wondering if you're infected, constantly searching your body for signs and being afraid of not only other people, but of yourself and what you can do to your friends. It also explores what inhuman lengths people will go to preserve their survival. It's not about the death of humankind, it's about the death of humanity.

This movie scared me and made me very uncomfortable but I think it only works if you really let it put its hooks in to you. It's not the greatest movie ever but it deserves so much more recognition than it's receiving right now.

GO SEE THIS MOVIE IN THE THEATER WHILE YOU STILL CAN!

Why does it suck? let's see, this movie is far too advanced for silly things like, "back-story", "proper narrative", "coherency", or "believability". Take the action for example, so all the characters can inexplicably jump 50 ft in the air and stay there fighting for upwards of 15 seconds, fine, it's a fantasy movie, laws of physics don't matter. But there is a difference between being realistic, and being believable. It doesn't need to be realistic, but it does need to be believable. The way the action was executed was not believable, I felt like I was watching a bad anime on PCP. Sky captain was not realistic but believable, so was the Matrix, FF:AC was not. Oh and thanks for the comic relief with Reno and what's-his-name, HILARIOUS! My sides were splitting! Actually it was totally awkward and dumb, especially since the comic relief was a few of the only characters that looked like real people. OK the graphics weren't horrible, but there were numerous flickering and aliasing errors in there and that's just lazy. BUT HAY NICE HAIR! Maybe it should be renamed to Final Fantasy VII: Hair Hoedown. How does hardcore rouge warriors like Cloud and Sephiroth take time to style their hair so retarded every day? And where do they keep their styling gel? When designing the people they did a really good job with the textures, movements and muscles to make it look realistic. Then some one had the bright idea to mutate their faces to look like the grotesque lovechild of a GQ catalogue and an Anime. Mostly in the face, everyone had this Anime structure that just doesn't work in realistic CG.

Oh God the music! Yay it's almost all the music from the original game. Maybe this would be a good thing if most of the game's music wasn't awful to begin with. In the DVD extras the composer said (Paraphrase) "I have seen other rock bands that had orchestras and I wonder why they never worked" I thought to myself, now you know. But he didn't, he went on to say that it turned out great. Apparently he must have been listening to someone else's music when he said it was good. Yeah, totally dig the shredtastic metal guitar with the poorly made orchestral/chorus parts and the live rock show filtered drums. The 80's are back! With great lines (some taken from "memorable" quotes on IMDb) like "Dilly Dally, Shilly Shally. Isn't it time you did the forgiving?" or "I thought of a present for you" or "You came... even though you were about to break." How could you lose? Cloud's one step closer to the edge, and he's about to break! And hey lets have all supporting characters drop in out of nowhere at the same time, it seems they were all just hanging out in the hood already. Yuffie must have jumped from outside of the city and jumped so high that she needed a parachute to land safely. But being a ninja (Who wears short-shorts and knee high combat boots?) with the ability to jump around really fast didn't stop her from standing there waiting to get blown away by the Bahamut with a wide eyed stare of mental retardation. Oh silly Barret! Your gun jams at the worst times! I want a gun that glows green electric arcs in the center when it jams.

Oh and lets talk about the violence, Those creature sure do look pointy and fearsome, but I wouldn't mind having them around because it seems that all they do is tackle you real good. No biting no clawing, just tackling. Cloud sure is a remarkable guy that gets shot in the face, destroying his goggles but just giving him a scratch. Or the number of times Cloud slices the hell out of Sephiroth without leaving a mark but all it took to penetrate Cloud was a poke in the shoulder. And it was so cute how every enemy didn't die they just …… faaaade awaaaaaayyy.

Good job on a fantastic movie Square!

Have you heard of Stay? If you're here you must have but I'll bet it wasn't too long ago that you found out about it. It's a movie that came out late last year with little fanfare, was dismissed as a poor movie by critics and quickly ushered back out of theaters.

It's a crying shame.

It was a wonderful movie. My favorite type of movies are psychological horror movies. Favorites include: Jacob's Ladder, Mulholland Dr., Donnie Darko, and in a similar realm, Momento and Fight Club. I love seeing a good representation of the human mind on film and that is exactly what this film shows so well.

It's about a college student (Ryan Gosling) who tells his shrink (Ewan McGregor) that he is going to kill himself on the stroke of midnight this Saturday, leaving his shrink to enlist the help of his formerly suicidal girlfriend (Naomi Watts) to figure out why he wants to kill himself and how to stop him, while his world falls apart.

It's directed by Marc Forster of Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland fame. The movie has been called pretentious, shallow, ridiculous, bewildering, absurd, and empty by many reviewers. Personally I think that they didn't have the patience for it and/or were put off by its extravagant visuals and cuts. I thought it was great and deserves much more credit than it has received.

The movie's visual style is very interesting and jarring in a good way. It had me constantly saying to my girlfriend "did you see that?" Full of slight of the hand camera/editing tricks. Nearly everything in the movie is symbolic of other things or ideas in the movie. The acting is very good, especially among the lesser characters. Everything in the movie feels so unreal, but that is serves some purpose even if one couldn't know what it is right away. A second viewing would reveal many new things. In the end much of the movie is left up to interpretation and my girlfriend and I had a good conversation about our ideas on what things meant in the movie. After thinking about it for a day I'm pretty sure that I could explain everything in the movie, even what the hell is up with Ewan McGregor's pants, Why Gosling wanted to commit suicide and the twins and triplets.

It was fun was figuring out what the rest of the movie meant after seeing its end, the solution. The movie is like a code and the end is the decryption key. It differs from other "sixth sense" type surprise ending movies because everything you would see in the movie before the end would not act as a clue to what it all means or what the ending is. It's more like decrypting a diary than a problem with a solution to it.

Basically, any movie buff owes it to themselves to see this movie. I rented it but after seeing it I fully intend to purchase the DVD.