Jimmy P's House of Movies

The Experiment is a remake of a German movie that I have no plan on seeing. Not that I don't like German cinema. It's just that I have no faith in this material. If the original is anything like this movie then I have to ask what people saw in it.

This version stars Adrian Brody and Forrest Whitaker as two strangers who are among a bigger group of strangers who decide to answer an ad they saw in the newspaper. The ad is for an experiment that offers the people who participate two weeks of work for $1000 a day. I would have answered this ad too.

I hate the subtitle to this movie. Of course money never sleeps. Money is something that is constantly moving, whether we can see it or not. We know this. So why use the subtitle that they used? I mean, they could have come up with something better like "Burstin' Bubbles" or something like that. Or they could have just put a two on it and left the subtitle off. The subtitle is the first thing I hated about this movie.

This is, of course, the sequel to the 1987 hit Wall Street. That movie is remembered for winning Michael Douglas an Oscar and giving the 80's its own catchphrase, Greed is Good. That movie was pretty good. The sequel is not.

You know how whenever a thriller hits the screens at least one critic will refer to the movie as "Hitchcockian"? And you also know how more than half of those so called "Hitchcockian" thrillers are nowhere near being able to claim such an honor? Well, I am here to tell you that, not only is Buried "Hitchcockian", but I believe that this is a movie that Hitchcock would have made if he were still alive.

I remember seeing Angus when I was in high school and really enjoying it. Of course it didn't speak to me in the way that it did to others, but I saw a lot of myself in the title character. I wasn't fat or even that smart but I was in a similar minority: I was, and still am, a film geek.

When you are a film geek in high school you have to do through many of the trial and tribulations that our hero Angus had to go through in this movie. He's a science geek and pours over his project to get into Jefferson, which I guess is a school for the really smart.

Got a slew of new trailers for you today.

The first one being The Beaver. This is the movie that Mel Gibson made right before he revealed all of his ugliness to the world. The movie looks pretty good and I am glad that Summit is going to take a chance on this movie and not send it to direct to video hell.


Next up we have Ip Man 2. This is getting a release in February here in the states, but has been available in Hong Kong for a while now. The movie is spectacular and a worthy sequel to the first Ip Man


To add to the martial arts genre I give you the new trailer for Ong Bak 3. I have yet to see this movie, but when I get my hands on it I will give you a review. This is being released next year.


And finally, what is sure to be one of the worst movies of 2011, Beastly. This movie looks like Beauty and the Beast only set in modern times and with the beast being allowed to go places.

Oliver Stone is one of the greatest living directors. He has given us the horrors of war with Platoon, along with the aftermath of war with Born on the Fourth of July. He has given us conspiracy theories with JFK and his take on the media with Natural Born Killers. Sure he has stumbled with movies like U-Turn and Alexander, but every director has had a miss or two so we can't really hold it against him.

In 1999 he gave us his take on football and all the bullshit that comes with it in Any Given Sunday, a movie that seems more prevalent now than it did when the movie came out. Since the movie's release the curtain has been pulled back on not only football, but sports in general. We have had many sports stars being accused of doing everything from taking steroids to running dog fighting rings. Its no wonder why the NFL wouldn't allow Stone to anything affiliated with the NFL in this movie.

I love jail movies. I don't know why, but it is a sub-genre that I really enjoy. I can watch almost any prison movie and be entertained, but the ones that I like the most are the breakin' out kind. Like a good heist movie, a breakin' out of jail movie offers a lot of thrills in one package. While The Escapist isn't one of the best I have seen, it is a pretty good movie.

The movie star Brian Cox, one of the best charcter actors working today, as a man who has been in prison for at least fourteen years (they never specify how many years he has been in there, but it they do say things like "nine years ago this happened"). He really misses his daughter and constantly writes to her, but his letters keep coming back "return to sender." One day he gets a letter telling him that his daughter has become a junkie and may not be long for this world. So naturally, he decides to break out of prison to see her before she ends up becoming another dead junkie.