Garrulus Grommeler

Scrooged . An old movie (1988). A fun movie. Love the scenes with Carol Kane as the Ghost of Christmas Present. It's all slapstick. Bill Murray getting kicked in the nuts, punched, pulled about by his lower lip, and smacked in the face . . . with a toaster! Ah, man. Loved the toaster bit. Too funny! :D

This evening, I watched The Code , a heist movie that involves the theft of two "mystery" Fabergé Imperial Eggs made in 1917. Ripley (Morgan Freeman) is a known art thief in New York City who runs into Gabriel (Antonio Banderas) on a New York subway train while casing the same job to steal some diamonds. Ripley then ropes Gabriel into joining him on the heist. Things turn nasty when Alexandra (Radha Mitchell), Ripley's god-daughter, is kidnapped by the KGB. In a story that involves the KGB, the NYPD, and the FBI, this is a fun movie that is, as the description on the DVD case describes, "full of deceit, thievery and twists at every turn." And that ain't no lie.

It's been a long time since I've blogged about a movie in this fashion. Hopefully, this new version of my blog won't degenerate into nothing more than a movie-reaction-fest. That's not what it's meant to be. In any case, I watched this last night. It's one of six movies I recently rented (so, yeah, you are going to see a short spate of movie-related posts over the next few days). Bangkok Dangerous was not as good as I'd heard it was. Not in my opinion, anyway. For a paid assassin, Joe, played by Nicolas Cage, is too damned soft-hearted (not to mention too easily swayed from the principles he espouses at the beginning of the movie). I suppose that this is meant to be his character's fatal flaw, but it comes across as too convenient. The ending has a satisfying twist, I'll admit, but Cage has done better. I've a soft-spot for movies that take place in Thailand since I lived there during my early teens. I like it when I can see not only parts of Ba