star trek & the brothers bloom
Last night, I watched Star Trek(2009) and The Brothers Bloom.
I came into Star Trek with some fairly high expectations. Everyone seemed to be raving about how well made it was. Overall, I was disappointed. It was basically the Wrath of Khan with Romulans. With an infinite number of potential plot points, why did they need to fall back to retreading what was already done (and arguably far better) in past movies? Equally annoying was the reliance on time travel. Other than in the Back to the Future trilogy, time travel is always used as a cheat for poor plot development. The special effects were decent, but hardly breathtaking. The acting was very mixed. Some characters (notably Nero and Spock) were absolutely horrible. Zachary Quinto can't act his way out of a paper bag. He was terrible in Heroes (which is an abomination of a TV show), and wasn't any better in this film. His poor performance was further highlighted by the fact that the 'real' Spock was in this film too. Scotty, Chekov and Sulu were pretty good. Kirk was mediocre for the most part. Perhaps this films works alot better for people who have never seen any of the past movies or TV series.
I also had high expectations of the Brothers Bloom, and came out disappointed. For a film that's supposed to be about conmen, I was hoping for lots of unexpected twists, yet every single plot point was so predictable. I kept hoping that at least the ending would be shocking, yet it was exactly what they set it up to be from the start. On top of that, the acting was atrocious. No one in this film seemed to want to make any effort. Granted, Adrien Brody is pretty lazy in most films, just putting out the sad, sorry, mopey face all the time, but this one was even worse.