Went to the theater to see The Cove, cuz who can resist a movie about slaughtering dolphins. Even though both of us had checked online before heading to the theater, and at the ticket window there was a huge poster for it, we ended up seeing District 9 instead because The Cove was no longer playing…..
Not a bad flick though. Not anything like the commercials would mislead you to expect, but whatever. Plenty of bad guys. Plenty of well done special effects. A protagonist that was compelling and refreshingly flawed. Not as amazingly awesome as many reviewers have claimed, but that should be no surprise. The pacing of the movie was relentless, which was also a nice change from your standard hollywood formulated mess.
Having no big plans for the evening, we next saw Hurt Locker, which was equally outside the standard box that producer think we need. No huge message, no over-reliance on special effects. Really, just an interesting story about an interesting group of characters….. and a ton of violence and shit blowin up. Neither of these movies required the big screen for what they are trying to do, so catching them at home would be no big loss, but neither would leave you feeling like it was a waste of money either.
The latest book by David Gunn had the smell of helpful editors smeared all over it. I think the author, who is freaking sublime at hard military science fiction was attempting to explore his boundaries a bit, and now we know where those boundaries were. It was like when I try to write a poem. The beginning took forever to pick up steam, and it wasn’t until half way through that I really wanted to keep reading. The others in the series were painful to put down from page one. If you need a refreshing read, pick up the first in this series, Death’s Head. If you liked it, jump right into Death’s Head: Maximum Offense. Hold off on this one until book 4 hits the shelves, unless you want to be left with a tacked on cliff-hanger.