I’m still trying to catch up on some reviews, especially since I injured my knee recently and I have a little time on my hands.  So, this will be the first of a few reviews deemed Knee Injury ’11.

Attack the Block is the kind of movie you have to watch more than once.  There are two reasons for that.  Reason number one:  If you’re not up on your English slang, especially when the accent is rather heavy like it is here, you’ll have have to watch a second time (and possibly a third and fourth) to catch what all is said and what is meant by it.  Reason number two:  It’s just a good movie.  It has that late night feel to it, even if it does feel too cool for the room at times.  Short and sweet, it’s about a group of inner city London teens fending off some big, furry, mouth-glowing, aliens who invade their turf.  It’s fierce, fast, and funny, though the ending overdoes it in the message department.  4 out of 5

Moon was the debut feature film of director Duncan Jones, and remains a favorite of mine.  Source Code is his second film, and a mainstream Hollywood sci-fi foray.  It’s not on the same level as Moon, but displays a lot of the same heart and soul that can be found in that masterpiece.  Military pilot Colter Stephens (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds himself inhabiting the body of a man on a train that explodes.  It’s Stephen’s mission to locate the bomb and the bomber, and he only has eight minutes to do it.  Through the miracles of some radical science, he is able to share the dead man’s brain.  He has to piece the puzzle together each time the program starts over.  Stephens is also trying to unravel the mystery of how he got recruited into this science program because the last thing he remembers is flying a helicopter in Afghanistan.  It’s the kind of movie that isn’t easily explained, you just have to watch it.  4 out of 5

Kafka is Steven Soderbergh’s best film.  That’s my opinion.  I just thought I’d throw that out there.  Contagion is a zombie movie without zombies, or, at least, that’s how I saw it.  To be exact, I saw it as a zombie movie for the sweater-wearing, high-rise apartment dwelling, Ira Levin reading percentage of the population.  Not that there’s anything really wrong with that.  A killer new virus is spreading around the world and it’s, well, killing off a butt load of people.  The virus spreads, the sick people die, the not sick go criminal and loot, and the husband of the woman that brought the illness back to the U.S. discovers his wife was cheating on him.  Things don’t happen so much in that order, but it’s the highlights.  This is an interesting movie, the disease side of it anyways.  The rest of it, the “human” side, let’s call it, is less interesting.  It begins on Day 2, and at the end we see how the entire thing started on Day 1, but by then I really didn’t care. 3 out of 5

John Jason

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