Laura is a plastic surgeon and you see several good shots of her raw material – why those girls felt they needed plastic surgery, well…!

Eventually Gustav wears Laura down and on her birthday he takes her to dinner. He doesn’t get in, but gets close and sooner rather than later he is bedding the hot doctor. He then moves in. He shows signs of mental instability and possessiveness. She gets fed up, tells him to leave and he goes beserk and tries to rape her and flees after she bites him.

The rest of the film is a where will he strike next as the jealousy of the seduction leads to danger for both Laura and one of her doctor friends. Will she end up getting cosmetic surgery herself from a medical student who wants to turn her into a spitting image of his grandmother/lover? Only watching this – which I’m not recommending – will give you those answers. Or maybe you can bribe me and I’ll tell you.

One bad thing about watching this “type” of film when it is foreign language is sometimes the words distract from what you want to see and sometimes the words cover what you want to see, say someone’s bottom!

Things learned from this movie:

1. Cosmetic surgery is best done by hot doctors.
2. One boob lower than the other? Even by just a little? Must demonstrate and get that corrected!
3. Having a gun for self-defense means that when your there by yourself you’ll just stuff it in a kitchen drawer.
4. Just because someone stops someone from killing you doesn’t mean that they are your friend.
5. If someone seems a little freaky, trust your gut.
6. Sleepwalkers have issues.
7. Remember DVDs are good for pause and rewind.

Rated Not Rated. 89 minutes (1 hour 29 minutes). Some swearing, but this one mostly contains nudity. Two or three girls have their tops off and perfect bodies on display in the doctors office, the doctor takes a phone call while a perfect bottom sits out on display. And of course, you can’t have a steamy fling without doctor taking it all off. Violence – near death on the operating room tables. Beatings. Gunplay. It’s all good.

After the initial encounter with zombies and the guys emptying dozens of rounds into one zombie who refuses to go down, you start to wonder if any of them have ever watched a zombie movie before. They’d know to shoot them in the head! Life imitates art, right?

So now the police and the bad guys have to team up. An uncomfortable alliance for sure. And the goal is to get out of the building alive. Of course you’ll have the various “scares”, which aren’t that scary. But you do get the gore! My my… Every zombie has bloody hands it seems. And blood just is everywhere in the building.

While trying to escape they meet an old man, who refers to running out of explosives in 1964 in Indo China. He’s beating these zombies up with an axe. And he appears to have a thing for Necrophilia as while the other guys argue about what to do, he’s undressing one of the dead zombie females.

The gore on the gore scale is on up there. There are the bullet wounds, the knife wounds, the breaking of bones, the face smashing scenes, the face pulverizing scenes, etc. After all, the police say, they are going there for a blood bath.

Worth noting. The film is in French. And so its subtitled. I flipped it to the English audio and didn’t read. I find it hard to read during action or horror movies. Drama, maybe, but not this. The English voice acting was ok, I guess. Sometimes the guys sounded like they were in different rooms.

And the female cop… Can’t forget her. Badass! Brings down a fridge on a zombie and willing to shoot dead between the eyes a co-worker before he turns zombie on her. Woot!

Things learned from this movie:

1. When you want a bloodbath, sometimes you get what you want.
2. Fist fights with zombies are something else!
3. Zombies are kinda dumb.
4. Zombies really move fast!
5. Zombies will surround an apparently vacant building for no reason. Hordes of them just descend on the building.
6. Escaping the building means there isn’t any zombies anywhere to be seen.
7. How good are promises between cops and crooks?
8. Can cops really take drugs?

Like zombies, gore, and violence? Then The Horde should be up your alley!

Not Rated. 90 minutes (1 hour 30 minutes). Language. Violence. Violence. Gore. Nudity. There’s one topless dead zombie and the female cop’s nipple poke through her shirt very clearly after she takes off her bullet-proof vest.

The movie is a wanna be Snatch, those Guy Ritchie movies where anything crazy can and will happen. It kind of is that way, but not really — it is fun enough, but not nearly as good. You can entertain yourself for an evening, but sometimes the Irish accent gets into the way of enjoying the movie as much as you could have. There are worse ways to spend the evening – and better ones.

Things learned from this movie:

1. Things you do against pets will come back to haunt you.
2. Car thieves will gladly swap a hot car for a recently stolen police cars.
3. Hiding your gun under your bed isn’t a good idea.
4. Hiding a gun in your boxer shorts will not get past big crime bosses.
5. Pool tables make great hiding places.
6. If you bury a body and your car battery dies, its better to burn the car so you can’t be traced.
7. If you think you see the Grimm Reaper, you probably have.
8. A whack from a baseball bat on your leg that doesn’t break the bone will feel ok in a few minutes.

Rated Not Rated. 88 minutes (1 hour 28 minutes). Lots of language and one girl tries to entice her lover by walking outside into the apartment hallway in animal print panties and a button up shirt that isn’t buttoned up and shows off her perky little boobs. Animal violence — both giving and receiving.

Honestly, it is a slow moving picture that Jan Troell presents here, but it sort of has to be. The worst part is, for people like me, its in Swedish and you have to read subtitles. But that isn’t a bad thing. It’s a beautiful picture and very touching — if you look and let it speak to you.

If you think about it, you could ask yourself some intriguing questions that are raised by the film. Why do people stay with abusive spouses? How is alcoholism so destructive and why can’t people quit or manage their addiction without it always getting the better of them? Do people have a propensity to cheat and can they not stop themselves? Why is it that some will realize how their behavior is hurting the ones they love, and even be moved by that realization, but yet are powerless to give it up? How do you make ends meet in tough times? Why is art and creativity such a great release from the cares and burdens of everyday life? Why do we have skills that we take for granted while everyone around us would treasure those skills and use them better? Can you find the charm and beauty inside everyone?

But I guess most of all, the film is entitled “Everlasting Moments” in reference to what is caught on film is an everlasting moment. You’ll never be that young again, that particular event or day will never happen again and you have it captured for it to live (as it were) forever. So like a photographer that chooses what they take a photo of and when to time it and from what point of reference to view it from, can we also mold our memories in the same way and keep the ones that look at life in the best possible way? Life is short and those around us that we love and cherish are worth the most in life how much of the bad things or bad habits should be overlooked in hopes of the future? What does keep people together, is it, as the film asked, is it love?

The film, which is based on the author’s family, ends after Maria’s death with her daughter discovering the camera and an undeveloped plate inside bearing the only photo  her mother ever took of herself, smiling back at us.

Not Rated. 131 minutes (2 hours 11 minutes) – yes, that’s two hours. But, while I started this prepared to sit and endure for the evening it flew by a lot faster than I expected.

Raquel responds to these new maids with hostility – locking them out when they go outside, not letting them back in, disinfecting anything the other maid uses, and so on. Why some of this would be troubling, well, I guess I’ve never been in that situation.

The problem for me with this movie is that it is in Spanish. I don’t speak it. So, I had to read subtitles. It’s hard to put on a movie from Netflix that maybe you are only mildly interested in when you have to stare at the screen the entire time. I mean I usually do that, but having to read subtitles wears on you after a while!

The movie was interesting if you look at it from the perspective of how do you treat those who you consider to be beneath you. For instance, perhaps the janitors at work or school.

Things learned from this movie: If you lock other help out of the house and scrub the shower after they’ve used it, they will eventually quit. As soon as you get to like someone they will also quit. If you get locked outside its ok to take off all your clothes and sunbathe. If your dad has spent a year working on a tiny sailing ship model, you can glue it back together in a few hours and he won’t notice – unless he gets home earlier than you expect.

Not Rated. 94 minutes (1 hour 34 minutes). Mild profanity, if any. Non-violent. Nudity, you get to see all the maids (except one, thank you!) nude or topless in the shower or sunning. The “man” of the house also is surprised like a deer in the headlights and stands momentarily spread-eagle like totally nude — avert your eyes! Another man’s butt makes an appearance.

]]> http://www.dvdvoice.com/2010/06/the-maid-2009/feed/ 1 http://www.dvdvoice.com/2010/02/ong-bak-2-the-beginning-2008/ http://www.dvdvoice.com/2010/02/ong-bak-2-the-beginning-2008/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:40:01 +0000 admin http://www.dvdvoice.com/?p=18 As promised, tonight I took the time to watch the sequel to Ong-Bak, Ong-Bak 2: The Beginning. I really enjoyed Ong-Bak last night and was expecting more of the same. I got it. Wow… as much martial arts as you could handle.

But, somehow it didn’t feel as satisfying as the first one. The first one was really out of nowhere, I wasn’t expecting it to be as hard hitting and good. This one, probably was on par, but just didn’t quite ring that same bell!

Since it’s called “The Beginning,” that should tip you off that it happens before Ong-Bak. Tien, Tony Jaa (who also directed), is the son of a nobleman who is orphaned and taken in by the King of the Outlaws. He is trained in all sorts of fighting styles and weaponry. Later in life he seeks revenge. He seems rather intent on killing everyone, and the last 30 minutes of the film is basically a big fight.

I’m not saying the action is good, it is, it’s just that I believe I enjoy a good martial arts movie, but I don’t truly appreciate the intricacies of it enough. Or maybe it’s that I shouldn’t do martial arts two nights in a row?

Oh, the DVD has trailers for John Woo’s Red Cliff and The Warlords. Both look good and I think I’ll have to try them sometime soon. And there was some video of Ong-Bak 3, which from the little bits looked like it may be more interesting, to me, that this one.

Rated R. 115 minutes (1 hour 55 minutes). Violence. Let me repeat that, Violence.

My first thought was to see Ground Hog Day, but I’m going to pass. I am very interested in another movie with Bill Murray that comes out this week, Zombieland! And hopefully (fingers crossed!) Netflix will send that one pronto!

Since Ong-Bak 2 is coming out this week, I decided to see them both. So for starters we hit the ground with Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior. Honestly, I knew nothing about this movie. I heard it was supposedly pretty good and an action-martial arts type film.

I was lucky, it was both sub-titled and voice-overed. I listened to it in English, I didn’t feel like reading.

Basically, Tony Jaa, Ting, lives in a tiny village. They are about to celebrate a sacred holiday that is only celebrated once every 24 years when a man named “Don” comes to the village and when he leaves steals the head of On-Bak, a Buddha like statue. One villager must go after and retrieve the head. Ting volunteers.

Country boy in the big city type movie follows. The gangs think they are too tough for him but learn otherwise, there are fights, street chases, car (or tiny taxis) chases, bar fights, and yet more fights. Some of the characters bring in a fair amount of humor and at times it felt like I was watching an anime!

Overall — very good! I really enjoyed this mindless martial-arts. Great stunts and I swear someone had to of gotten hurt filming this! At least it looked that way. If you enjoy a good action movie and want to see some stunts that rival Jackie Chan and Jet Li, then you should enjoy this one as well. And later this week I’ll see how the sequel stacks up!

2003 Rated R. 101 minutes (1 hour 41 minutes). Lots of action violence and blood. Drug use.