http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5TvFI7rdwM

Looks almost exactly like The Pacifier, except with cheaper production value. Looks pretty bad, but I'll still support it.

At least his upcoming HK slate looks promising - Big Soldier, Shaolin Temple, and Armor of God 3.

Rotten - 5/10. Crappy action scenes. It's mostly just people moving their arms around and their targets flying all over the place. Not very interesting. If you have the power to control peoples' minds, and you want them to kill someone, do you really have to give them a reason? Kinda dumb. I also don't get why it has to take place in HK. I don't really mind. It's just that the ADR work is pretty bad, so you can tell it's added in later and not the actual sounds from the environment.

Julie & Julia - 7/10
A lot better than I expected. Xuan wanted to see this one since she's a Food Channel addict. The parallel story of Julia Child and Julie Powell kept my interest from beginning to end. Each of them in separate movies might put me to sleep though. Hey, it's about blogging. It's about the internet. So, that got me interested. And it wasn't boring, far from it. It's got likable and charming characters. Afterward, I wasn't checking out her blog in Salon.com. It's still there. It was so simple - just a title and a bunch of paragraphs. I was wondering if she made any money from the blog though. It doesn't seem like it. It seemed like she only made money out of the book and movie deals. I was trying to find out how many hits her blog was getting too. Nope, couldn't find it. She has a lot of comments, though.

G.I. Joe - 7/10
I'm a Stephen Sommers fan. Being a fan of action movies, I like his films the same way I like films from Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich. They're just good at mindless action movies. G.I. Joe is like a 2 hour live-action version of the cartoon, which is pretty much all I wanted to see. It was action-packed. Whatever story it had to tell, it randomly threw them in between action sequences in the form of flashbacks. Yes, whenever you can't tell a decent story, or have no idea how to tell it, just use flashbacks. The guy who plays Duke is a pretty bad actor. But, who cares. Who has time to think that kind of stuff, when you've got battles in sea, land, and air.

District 9 - 9/10
I can't believe the filmmakers were able to make this movie for just $30M. It looked like it cost a lot more. It was intense. I thought the premise was original. It has realistic look and feel. The robotics at the end were pretty cool.

I was trying to write a full review for this but failed miserably because of lack of writing skillz and time. So here's the short version. I like it. Aight?

Xuan said her sister got a horror movie called "Sudoku" starring Jackie Chan. Knowing how I love Jackie Chan and sudoku, she said that with an exclamation mark. My reaction: sudoku? horror movie? Jackie Chan? That's puzzle I could easily put together. It must be the latest Jackie Chan movie "Shinjuku Incident." It's not a horror movie, it's a gorey gangster movie set in Japan about Chinese immigrants. No martial arts. Jackie does his best to pretend he couldn't fight. It's strange to see him hold a stick, surrounded by a group of thugs, and trying really hard to act like he doesn't know how to use it. It looks pretty unnatural, actually - not how you would expect a normal person to use it. So you get a lot of that in the movie.

To make ends meet, you see Jackie's character and his posse start off by selling fake phone cards and then fake accessories. One thing leads to another and he and his posse turns into a full-blown "HK triad," helping a local Yakuza gang kill off their their rivals. They also get into the drug business. That's when Jackie's character decides that they've ventured too far into the dark side and decides to help a local cop shut off the entire operation and capture affiliated Yakuza leaders.

Even without martial arts, the film is gripping. The story is decent; the acting pretty good; and the production value is high. I only wish Jackie Chan's character would kick some major ass though. A lot of times you see Jackie doing great action in a crappy movie. Now, he's in a decent movie, but he doesn't fight. It's a pretty good movie by itself, but it would have been excellent if he threw in some kung fu.

The posters for Knowing look awfully familiar to the ones for Armageddon. I guess it's fitting since they're both disaster movies about the end of the world. I prefer Armageddon though. That was silly and fun and had lots of cool action scenes.

Knowing was a strange concoction. It's a end of the world, disaster movie filmed like a horror movie. It's like the Ring mixed with - I don't know - any disaster movie. There's that creepy little girl that hears whispers. I had to finish this one alone cuz Xuan doesn't like horror movies. And I was scared watching it late at night. But it's a disaster movie! Damn it. I shouldn't be scared! I should just be enjoying watching people running around screaming while things get blown up behind them. There are stuff getting blown up, but a lot of it feels very passive. It's also very predictable. Xuan told me exactly what's gonna happen after the first 5 minutes. Still, I couldn't turn it off. It's eeriness drew me in.