This week's highlight: Death Race!

Death Race is Resident Evil director Paul W.S. Anderson's remake of the similarly named 1975 futuristic B-movie starring David Carradine and a still-unknown Sylvester Stallone. Strangely, the original seems to be less PC than the new one, where contestants in an automobile race score points by running over innocent bystanders. The new version seems to be more conventional, with Jason Statham playing a wrongfully-accused convict trying his luck in the titular Death Race for a one-way ticket out of prison. What's very interesting is finding Joan Allen of all people playing the prison warden. If this movie's endorsed by her, surely there must be something worthwhile here. I'm crossing my fingers it's not another AvP crap.

This week's highlight: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor!

For people who are confused by unwieldy movie sub-titles, this is the third installment in the rebooted Mummy series starring Brendan Fraser. In the US, the summer movie season is more or less officially over, but for us we've still have Wall-E scheduled way back at the end of August for some strange reason. Till then, you'll have to be contented with this widely panned movie, plus another equally deriled one, The X-files: I Want to Believe. There's still Money No Enough 2 to sate your appetite for local humour, or you could rewatch The Dark Knight like everybody else.

This week's highlight: The Dark Knight!

Batman returns! And so does The Joker, only not quite. You see, if you haven't seen Batman Begins, you probably might not know that they restarted the franchise again right from the start. Acclaimed director Christopher Nolan approaches the famous comic book superhero in a more realistic fashion, which set the trend for most superhero movies nowadays, including the recent Iron Man. Nolan is back with the same sturdy cast from Begins to tackle Batman's uber nemesis in the sequel, The Dark Knight. Tragically, Heath Ledger who played the villainous role, passed away earlier this year. The buzz has been really, really good for this one. Can't wait!

It's hard out here for a big movie freak...

Even though I have moved on to a new job after languishing in a dead-end one for nearly a decade, I still can't decide if it was the best or worst decision. With time, you can earn a lot of respect and goodwill even in a company that supposedly don't appreciate what its workers contribute, and that gives you a lot of stature and leeway in your workplace. With a new job at a more well-known company, the prospects are better but at a price: you start not necessarily at the bottom, but you still have to prove yourself all over again. And it's really damn hard to work without the stature and leeway that have been the oil that greases your engine. Throw in the pressure of excelling in night classes (my only ticket out of this career hellhole), and it has been a really pleasant experience the last four weeks. I hope to make it through another two months, and will draw strength from the cinematic tough guys I worship, who obviously went through stuff that were a lot worse.

I will also try to continue maintaining the Site and the Blog as I have not done so in the past month, partly because I pay $14 every month to keep the love going. I also realised that the online part of my life has always been keeping my sanity intact, and that sanity has been unravelling in the last thirty days that I wasn't writing or contributing anything. Thankfully, I have my bro Will2k pulling up his sleeves for our cause, who dominated the review section with his most undervalued two cents on the latest big-budget ouevres.

This post will lump belated reviews and recommendations together for your reading convenience.

WILL2K REVIEWS:

THIS WEEK'S HIGHLIGHTS

HELLBOY 2 : THE GOLDEN ARMY
I thought Hellboy was the best showcase of all of director Guillermo del Toro's weaknesses in pacing and editing blockbuster movies. His style may work on independent movies, but mainstream audiences are a restless bunch who need to be constantly prompted with big musical cues and zooming cameras. Still, his movies hold up because of the director's penchant for monsters and the supernatural, who are more often the good guys than the bad. Throw in an Indiana Jones-like opening, complete with occult-obsessed Nazis and a badass blade-wielding bad guy, and Hellboy got me hook, line and sinker. I don't know how Hellboy 2 would fare without any WW2 sequences or Kroenen, but we'll soon see.

HANCOCK

Seems like only yesterday that I saw I Am Legend, and here we have another Will Smith blockbuster already unleashed to the masses. The Fresh Prince seems determined to take on every genre out there, and Hancock is his answer to the recent superhero trend. There seems to be some effort to make things a little more interesting. Hancock isn't your usual goody-two-shoes crimebuster - the guy swears, reeks of alcohol and the people he rescued don't seem to even like him. Way too many superhero movies this year, but I'm not tired of them... yet.

This week's highlight: The Sparrow!

Was so busy packing up and moving into a new job that I left the site and the blog in neglect for more than a week. You probably should have seen The Incredible Hulk by now. I think it's about as good as Iron Man, and a good sign of things to come from Marvel. If I wasn't so busy, I would have indicated Get Smart as the movie of last week. But this week, we've got the double whammy of Wanted and Johnnie To's The Sparrow! Wanted looks good, but I'd be real crazy to recommend that over a Johnnie To movie!

This week's highlight: The Incredible Hulk!

What, you mean the Ang Lee version wasn't bad enough already? But from what I've heard, this version of Hulk is a "return-to-form" with more similarities to the comic book; and based on the denim-wearing Bruce Banner in hitchhiker mode in the poster on the left, maybe even a bit of the popular '70s TV series. Early reviews were pretty good, putting its quality on par with Iron Man. Perhaps Marvel's decision to fully control the movie production of its franchises resulted in more stringent quality controls, preventing further lapses of Ghost Rider proportions. This is probably because their survival highly depends on the long-term viability (and respectability) of their licenses, as opposed to studio execs who're just in the current comic book craze for a quick buck.

This week's highlight: Kung Fu Panda

Sex or Panda? Never saw the TV series... Panda it is. Doesn't seem as exciting as the stuff Pixar churns out, and looks a lot like another white man's condescending movie about Chinese martial arts. But Jack Black in character as the titular dà xióng mao was funny in the trailers and PSAs. The reviews sounded good, but then again, so did Crystal Skull's. Grr...

This week's highlight: The Chronicles of Narnia - Prince Caspian!

Sigh... I'm still reeling from the major disappointment that was Indiana Jones 4. What's even sadder is that it wouldn't take much for Prince Caspian to be better than that flick. It may have magic cupboard portals and talking animals, but at least that was clearly set up in the first movie to be the kind of world it belonged to. The "fridge" and "Tarzan" segments in Crystal Skull is FAR beyond and beneath the Indy universe, voodoo dolls be damned! Sigh, at least we've still got Batman: The Dark Knight...

This week's highlight: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull!

Iron Man may have been sweet, but this is the summer movie that fans, the nostalgic, and movie aficionados have been waiting for. Enthusiasts love to laud Raiders of the Lost Ark as a cinematic gem, but intentional or not, the men behind Indiana Jones (among them George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) were actually only trying to put together an entertainment piece that homages 1930s adventure movies. Some people are already complaining about the lack of sophistication in Crystal Skull's storyline. But really, what were they actually expecting from the third sequel to a movie where a guy gets famously chased by a giant freakin' boulder?

This week's highlight: Chocolate!

Directed by Ong Bak's Prachya Pinkaew but sans Tony Jaa, Chocolate seems to embody more of the same martial arts action and stunts these two are famous for. The bare-knuckled hero this time around is actually a girl, played by newcomer Yanin "Jeeja" Vismistananda. Through the power of observation, TV and M&Ms, she learns the art of ass-kicking, and found it very useful when accumulating funds for her mum's cancer treatment. I just hope this is not another one of Pinkaew's desperate attempt to make a drama rather than an all-out beat-'em-up (Tom Yum Goong being the big offender), though admittedly the trailer looks sweet.

This week's highlight: Speed Racer!

Having never watched a single Speed Racer episode, I'm going into this one not as an anime fan but as a Wachowskis supporter giving the directors their second chance after flubbing the Matrix sequels. Though they redeemed themselves a little with V for Vendetta, but they only did the screenplay adaptation, while Speed Racer would be their true directorial comeback after The Matrix Revolutions. Looking at the promo materials, you'd be an idiot if you're expecting anything more than a silly kid flick. But I still hope that it's a good kid's flick, or if we're lucky, maybe some unexpected intelligence, Wachowski-style, in the script. (Though, based on early reviews on the web, its seems that our luck has ran out.)

This week's highlight: Iron Man!

The summer blockbuster season has officially started! You've probably already booked a seat on May Day, so this Highlight is virtually pointless. But for those who aren't sure what the heck Iron Man is all about, well, it's one of Marvel's comic book characters, albeit a lesser known one as compared to Spider-man or the X-men. Like Batman, Iron Man's just a powerless human, but was rich enough to build himself a fancy metal suit that makes him fly and battle evil. Uh-huh. It's a comic book, what did you expect? Still, everything looks positive for this one, except for one review on Empireonline.com, which gave it a 3/5 stars. That's not a bad rating at all, but I was hoping it would be a slam-dunk. Oh well, there's still Indy 4 around the corner.

This week's highlight: Harold and Kumar 2 - Escape from Guantanamo Bay

The awesome thing about Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was not in that it was a good fratboy/stoner comedy, but that it was a good fratboy/stoner comedy from the perspectives of two Asian-American characters, a rarity as far as Hollywood movies go. The original title for the sequel, H&R Go to Amsterdam, sounded like a rehash set in a different environment, until they changed it to the current one, which is far more interesting. Let's just hope the makers of this movie live up to their absolutely hilarious trailers.

See other movies here.

This week's highlight: The Forbidden Kingdom

There was another movie from last week that I thought would be good, which was Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon, but you guys already made it a hit in Singapore. It had Andy Lau, Sammo Hung and Maggie Q in the same movie, but that still can't beat Forbidden Kingdom's uber team-up of the two big Js of martial arts movies, Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Sneaks this Friday, everywhere. Be prepared, though. It's in English. Who cares? Yuen freakin' Woo Ping did the fight choreography, so it's going to kick ass, no matter.

This week's highlight: Street Kings

Written by James Ellroy, writer of L.A. Confidential, and directed by David Ayer, who wrote Training Day. Stars Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans and Naomie Harris. This could be good. See other movies showing here.

This week's highlight: Be Kind Rewind

This coming week's slew of movies seem lacklustre. If you're in the US, I would recommend 21, which is likely to be the number one movie of the week. But since it's not showing in Singapore, Malaysia and some say in Batam, you might want to check out Be Kind Rewind, which already premiered last week. Talks about a bunch of video store clerks who reshot the movies they accidentally erased. Instead of being appalled by ridiculously shoddy re-enactments of famous movies, the customers actually loved them! Reviews are mixed, but tell me you're not a little bit curious? Directed by the guy who directed the awesome Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. See other movies showing here.