Director's Inflight Film Review

OKINAWA, JAPAN -- I know you all were concerned about me getting to Japan safe and sound, so I'm blogging to let you know that I'm OK.  I took Singapore Airlines over, which has had the best food, service, and tryna flight attendants of any airline I've flown.  Now that I'm here I've started writing my script, got the first scene done yesterday.  I bought the swedish rosetta stone so I'm going to finally try to learn the mother tongue.  I also brought a bunch of recipes with me for meals and also for swedish pastries and cookies that I've wanted to learn how to make for a long time.  You'll be surprised to learn that because of jet lag and the time difference I've switched my sleep schedule so now I wake up at 8am on my own - no alarm clocks or yelling. 

On the plane over I saw Body of Lies by Ridley Scott, it was a good movie, had some good action as expected, but just didn't really do it for me.  There wasn't much of a sense of closure at the end or change for the main character.  Yes they caught the evil terrorist, yes he realized how f'd up things are in the middle east, but what is it telling us that we don't already know?  I liked how it followed an operative on the ground in a city in Iraq, it's an interesting setting with interesting characters.  But I kind of felt that the love story was tacked on and the end was a total Deus Ex Machina.  We all know by now that Ridley Scott is a great director, but in this case it was the story itself that pulled the movie down from great to just good.

Second up is Hellboy 2 from Benicio del Toro, director of Pan's Labyrinth and the upcoming Hobbit movies.  I haven't seen the first Hellboy, so I'm judging this one on its own, and it was pretty good, not really what I expected at all.  I thought that the story was kind of silly, but the characters and imagination make up for that.  You have some wierd characters and creatures, most of which aren't CGI, which I appreciated.  Hellboy is like an anti-superhero.  He drinks in the shower, gets drunk, has girl problems, and is an asshole.  Basically, if Skip was a superhero he would be Hellboy.  But most importantly this movie was just fun.