I really enjoyed the multiple storyline plot of this movie. The plot follows the lives of Henry’s different patients and the inextricable and subtle connection they have to one another. Throughout the first half of the movie I really was taken by the struggle Henry faced when helping others. The flow of the movie was rather good as the movie was really well written. The dialogue was natural and was very well delivered by the actors. Robin Williams also makes a short appearance as an alcoholic, sex addicted, ageing movie star! The cinematography was also well done. Shots were pleasing to the eye and the editing from what I remember was spot on.

Overall this was a very enjoyable movie. I would recommend it to those who like medium to slower paced movies such as American Beauty or Lost in Translation. Also anyone who is a fan of Kevin Spacey’s acting and delivery will be very pleased with his role in the movie. I would give this movie an eight and a half or nine out of ten. I would watch it again.

Since I wasn’t in town long, we decided to have a pre-film BBQ, it was at the BBQ that I found out that no one else was quite as excited about Oblivion as me. In fact, quite a few SMEx’ers had very low expectations for Tom Cruise’s first SciFi film since the 2005 War of the Worlds.  After some delicious food, we decided to play some arcade games to decide who gets to ride in the car down to the cinema, and who has to take the bus. It’s been a long while since I played Street Fighter 2, and I was surprised at how many special moves I managed to remember. I’m also proud to say that I achieved the highest score on Donkey Kong, earning me a cramped ride to Colosseum.

The one thing that has stuck with me the most from Oblivion has been the soundtrack from M83. I actually found myself going out and finding it on Spotify, and i’m listening to it now as I write this review. We don’t often thing about OST’s when writing these reviews, but a great soundtrack can really make a movie. This one adds atmosphere, really helping to build the deserted world.

Visually Oblivion was stunning, I recently learnt that a lot of the backdrops from the Sky Tower were actually real Hawaiian horizons, which were projected onto the set, rather than green-screened in during post production. Allowing for better, more accurate lighting and real reflections in the set environment, hopefully we’ll see more of these kind of techniques in the future.

Oblivion is set in a future where we’ve had to abandon the Earth after nuking the planet to save ourselves from an alien invasion. All the humans now live on Titan but a few remain to guard the machines farming the seas for hydrogen energy. Jack Harper is one of the engineers on the Earth who is tasked with maintaining and repairing the drones that remain.

The story has some unexpected twists and turns, which are revealed gradually rather than all at once. This kept the story engaging and interesting even for the people with the lowest expectations!

Overall Oblivion was a solid movie, which will put high expectations in my mind on the other new SciFi IPs, After Earth and Elysium which are both coming up later this year! Hopefully my next visit to Oslo will coincide with one of these releases.

Not having seen the first GI Joe, sometimes I felt like I wasn’t sure what was going on.  But after talking to others later, I don’t know if seeing the first one would have made all that much difference actually since the story line tended to jump around a bit.  The story about the martial arts dudes just kinda popped up randomly and for a minute, I wasn’t sure it was the same movie. Very odd. As was the new “grand master” dude with the really unbelievable and crappy voice. Who is that? But, that said, ninjas are basically way cool and one of my favorite parts was ninja’ing (if that’s a verb?) all over mountain cliff faces on bungy ropes. In 3D this looked spectacular and since it’s the closest I’ll ever get to doing something like that, I got a vicarious thrill from it.

I think I have used the term “rollicking fun” before and I hate to repeat myself, but – it just was. Damn rollicking damn fun.

And I want Bruce Willis’ kitchen.

Anyway, this movie was a masterpiece of giving the audience what they expect; the references to the 1939 The Wizard of Oz were numerous, starting with the opening.

For those who forgot, The Wizard of Oz opened, as any movie of its time, in classic black-and-white. This lasted until Judy Garland, er, I mean Dorothy, arrived in Oz. Then there was a true explosion of over-saturated colours. There was even this brief shot from inside the house (still in black-and-white) looking out to the land of Oz (in colours).

Needless to say, when this movie opened, not only in black-and-white, but in 4:3 aspect ratio, I was thrilled as a little child: I knew my expectations had been anticipated and would be met. And, without revealing too much of the plot, the movie delivered as it had promised. The child-like optimism from the ’39 classic are still here, but with special effects that L. Frank Baum couldn’t have dreamt of.

Everything from scarecrow to the poppy field gets an appearance, but one thing had me surprised, I must admit: I had temporarily forgotten that Disney had recently acquired LucasArts and the Star Wars franchise. I must admit that there was a certain special effect typically associated with StarWars that I had not seen coming in this flick. Not bad, but a bit unexpected.

All in all, it was everything you might expect from the poster, but not more.

Anyway, cut to the start of the movie. I immediately got that cheap movie feeling. The acting was bad (he really can’t act), some obvious hooks are thrown out (for instance the cool red car that the jerk parks in a firetruck zone only to be wrecked later on by Arnie) so I was thinking this was going to be a long hour and a half. And for the first 30 minutes or so I was right. The movie offers you nothing original or surprising. A convict gets busted out of jail, a police officer tries to catch him, boring.

But at some point, I don’t know exactly when (I think it was when the small Mexican deputy grabs a medieval sword and says: “You never know”) you realize that the makers of this movie are fully aware of their weak plot and decided to capitalize on this by making it a fun movie. And as soon as you look at the movie in that light your appreciation goes up from a mere 4 to at least a 7. The actor that deserves most of the credit for this is not Arnold but good old Johnny Knoxville. His retarded behavior completely lifts up the movie and will have you laughing on numerous occasions. Add to that a couple of cliche stunts and one-liners by Arnie and you are definitely good for the remaining hour of the movie.

So, in my eyes this movie was good, very unexpectedly good. And because of this element of surprise I might call this movie, dare I say it, the best one so far of this SMEX year.

Parker is a movie based on a series of books by Donald E. Westlake. They all revolve around the professional thief Parker. This isn’t the first time one of the novels has hit the big screen. Some of you may remember Payback with Mel Gibson from a few years ago. In that movie his name was Porter, and it was based on a different book, but it’s still same idea, a bad guy trying to set things right.

Jason Statham does an awful lot of movies, and this turned out not to be his worst. Even though this movie was borderline OK. J.Lo was Statham’s opposite number in this movie, and I was hoping for this to be some kind of cool movie like 1998′s Out of Sight but sadly even J.Lo couldn’t save it.

There was a number of decent action scenes, but nothing really unexpected happened. Check it out when it hits DVD.

We arrived a bit late to the meeting point, and could verify that the the weekend had been hard on some members, who were sipping water or plain coke to help the recovery. This was another success on attendance, I think it was 12 of us? Smex has started 2013 in good shape.
Also this weekend marks the first miss of the year, Cheeselund was a no-show despite several attempts to contact him. As mentioned, the weekend was hard for some.

Not nearly as hard as any given day on John McClane’s live though, just when you think what can possibly happen to make him have a bad day, there is some scumbag in some corner of the world ready to make him say “yippi kay yee ..”
McClane manage to keep his shoes on all the movie this time, when he goes to Russia to check on his son John McClane Junior, who I bet only Adam remembers from the original Die Hard (1998) when they got ambushed interviewed by Richard Thornburg after he threatens the maid to get her deported.
Little John is all grown up now (like Lucy McClane) and he involved with some bad guys in Russia, where John Sr. will go to see what he can do to help him out, or at least to say good bye, as there is a chance he will spend life in prison over there.

Of course, once in Russia, things are not exactly as they seem, and in less time that it takes you to open your bottle of water, the McClanes are involved in a car chase around Moscu that left more damage than the meteorite.
For the religious people, you should be happy to know that Officer McClane is as religious as ever, and the amount of “Jeezus” per minute is a high as any previous Die Hard, so this is a good Sunday Movie.

For the eye candy (if car chases, Chernobyl, MI-24 explosions etc are not enough) there is of course Lucy McClane and Irina, played by Yuliya Snigir, and she is F I N E.

For those who watch Top Gear, you will notice that Office McClane even had time to test the horn in the new Kia cee`d without missing a beat on the movie, really remarkable.

What else can I say, if you have watched the previous 4 Die Hard, you need to watch this one too!

Now, about the film. Goddamn, that was one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen. Was it as good as the full trailer made it look? It was Better! Much better. There is ridiculous amount of witch-killing, all competing for the “Most entertaining kill of all time” award. It is a fairy tale alright, every single weapon in the film is absolutely ludicrous while at the same time providing massive amounts of fun. Body parts will be flying in all directions and you’ll see witch-killing methods you wouldn’t believe. Then there’s the funny play on what happens to you when a witch feeds you candy for weeks, but I’ll leave it for you to see for yourselves.

Probably due to the director the film didn’t have a too Hollywood feel to it which is a Good Thing ™. The cast is absolutely awesome as well and manages to make this fairy tale fascinating to watch. Also, I have to say that pretty much every girl with a human face in this film was a really pretty one. It’s a bit difficult not to stare at Gemma Arterton while she’s wearing that attire. And the human face of the bad witch… Damn, is Famke Jannsen really 47 years old? That woman is stupidly beautiful.

Although time has passed, the memories of that afternoon are still vivid on my mind. How can one forget a snowy Sunday in Oslo? it’s not like there are many of those. To mark the occasion even more solemnly, Colosseum was the chosen Kino — the quintessential theatre for the Sunday Movie Experience.

The pre-movie beers took place at Den Gamle Major, where: Lissy, Guest, Oleg, Adam, Christian, Ingunn, Elin, Anton (hereafter referred as whats-his-face) and myself reunited for tales of gaming, snow, rightsizing, adsizing, and travels.

We sadly lost two people crossing the street to the kino, but spirits remained high, and arrived at the featured presentation: Frankenweenie (3-D).

Directed and produced by Tim Burton, Frankenweenie is based on a 1984 a short film done also by him.

Not surprisingly, the movie is stop-motion, and I thought the level of detail was beyond any of the previous ones. Watching the short film, it’s amazing to see that many shots are recreated almost perfectly.

The movie itself is a homage/parody of —not only— Frankenstein, but also the old horror movie genre. I didn’t get many of the references, but you notice the elements are there for specific reasons.

I enjoyed the movie, it has a good flow, funny moments and impressive visual design. You could argue that it’s more fitting for watching at home, but unless you have a 65-in TV with 3-D, better to see it in SMEx.

First things first though. Before the movie, we met at a bar for a beer or none. There was beer swirling, beer spilling, and beer from fancy glasses (though not as fancy as the fanciest glasses around, it seems). I don’t remember much of what we talked about; which is just like things should be, I suppose.

Ok, back to the movie. It being a Tarantino movie, I expected a lot of blood and body parts away from their usual places. And yes, the movie had its share of bloody scenes, though surprisingly they were presented in rather unexpected ways. I don’t think I ever giggled so much in a brutal movie scenes before. And having Boss Nigger in mind just added to the fun! Which brings me another highlight: the music. The movie features a whole range of music styles, in unexpected and enjoyable combinations. Tarantino manages to pull off a mixture of light-hearted comedy with serious scenes around the topic of slavery. And thanks to brilliant acting, it was easy to be immersed in the movie most times. I mean, what can I say, Christoph Waltz is just brilliant, and so were the rest of the main actors. Only few scenes felt a little long. The worst bit, for me, was Tarantino himself appearing on screen; it was out of place in so many ways. All in all, a both extremely enjoyable and thought-provoking movie. Highly recommended!