Tag: Matt Damon

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Fantasy & Sci-fi Movie Reviews

The Adjustment Bureau – Who Writes Your Fate?

I suppose I should count myself lucky that whoever Cynthia thinks is pretty is not that pretty to my eyes.  And vice versa.  That way, she would feel happy that I am not looking at all the women whom she think are pretty on the street and she would not notice all the pretty women who I actually am … erm … OK …

Cynthia thinks that Emily Blunt is pretty.  I think the most attractive aspect of Emily is her accent.  TK and Cynthia picked “The Adjustment Bureau”.  I did not mind to tuck along.  Because Matt Damon is my hero.  To be honest, I often confuse Matt Damon with Mark Wahlberg.  Both are my heroes.

“The Adjustment Bureau” is advertised as a mix between sci-fi and romance.  The bits on sci-fi are surprisingly light.  If not for the paperback notebook with pages filled with ever changing circuit diagrams by the second, I would not be able to associate this movie with sci-fi.  Matt Damon plays a promising young politician.  One fine day, a mysterious girl appears that threatens to alter Matt’s destiny.  Hence the intervention by the Adjustment Bureau.  No matter how hard the bureau intervenes, Matt and Emily manages to find ways to defy the system of fate.  Now, looking at the state of the world today, is free will a bad thing?  Do we really have free will?  What if we do not possess free will and our fates have already been written?  If we have to fight for the right to our free will, would that make us treasuring it even more?  These are some of the questions the movie intends to prompt the audiences to ponder upon.

I enjoy watching the on-screen chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt.  I wish Emily has more airtime because I like the romance bits in this movie more than the sci-fi bits.  Some bits of the script seem a bit far-fetched.  It is the same old background of God and Angels.  The story is not as profound as Matrix (that questions along the same line), nor as refresh as Inception.  The pace does appear slow.  I went into the theater with the desire to watch Matt Damon’s performance.  It is exactly that and that only this movie has given me.

Categories
Action & Thriller

Green Zone – Far Fetched Or Being Honest?

It is Matt Damon, again in uniform, not as a super soldier but as a Chief Warrant Officer looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.  If the Americans and their allies could not find WMD after the Iraq War, could Matt Damon do the impossible?  No!  That is the bit on being honest.

When the Iraq War started, I suppose there were two groups of people.  One who supported the war and another one did not.  In fact, make it three: those who disliked the notion of war but eager to see a swift closure to the situation.  Imagine a war spinning out of control that may have a widespread implication – socially and economically in a global scale.  The question remains: If the reason of going into war was to dismantle WMD in Iraq and if none can be found after the invasion, what have the Americans and their allies achieved?  How would those who supported the war feel?  Perhaps that is why “Green Zone” is seen as anti-American or anti-war by some, an honest production by others.

Personally, my deeper query is as such: Did America go to war because of bad intelligence that WMD may exist or they went to war knowing that WMD does not exist?  “Green Zone” has made some strong claims.  And I am not certain to what extend does being faithful to historical facts lie.

Nor would I know if a Chief Warrant Officer on the ground be given such a great autonomy to pursue his personal objectives without having to notify the command center and his superior, able to reassign his people out of his team on the fly, able to initiate a personal transfer of unit also on the fly, and to embark on a solo life-threatening mission with zero intelligence and little military backup.  I am not even talking about how a local Iraqi can walk in and out of a military prison by simply following an American in uniform.

But if one can overlook these incredible scripts and claims, the filming of “Green Zone” looks authentic.  The Iraqi backdrop and the intense battle scenes, the partnership of Matt Damon and the director Paul Greengrass (Bourne series) – I would say “Green Zone” is an entertaining film.  That is if you do not think about the scripts too much.

Categories
Drama Movie Reviews

The Informant! – Still Can’t Pinpoint What Is Missing

A new move by Matt Damon

“So, do you like this movie?” asked I as the credits rolled.  Cynthia nodded, “It is entertaining.  Don’t you like this move [that I pick]?”

“…”

Matt Damon’s acting is convincing, no doubt.  I did a little research on this movie that is based on a non-fiction written by journalist Kurt Eichenwald, which in turn based on true events that happened around the lysine price-fixing conspiracy.  Matt Damon plays the whistle-blower Mark Whitacre.  Fortune 500 company Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and FBI were also involved in this conspiracy.  It is white collar crime, and the director Steven Soderbergh has certainly injected a similar level of dark comedy in “The Informant!” – much like my favorite “Traffic” and the “Ocean” trilogy.

According to my little research after I returned home, bipolar disorder – a mood disorder portrayed by Matt Damon’s character – does not seem to mean that the patient turns into an uncontrollable liar, a syndrome seems to imply by the film.  The book appears to focus on the center character Mark Whitacre ‘s meltdown and bizarre behavior resulting from the pressures of working undercover for the FBI.  And subsequently suffered from depression and have attempted suicide.  That would have made a lot of sense.  A deeper linkage to the film “The Firm” as mentioned in the book would also be nice.  The end of the book examines the unfairly long nine years sentence Mark Whitacre received – disagreed by the author of the book as well as several FBI agents.  That too would have been a better resolution than rounding up the film with yet another lie.

That, of course, is just my opinion.  Something doesn’t gel, and I still can’t pinpoint what it is.  Matt Damon, though.  I have to say he is one great actor.