Movie Reviews: Inglourious Basterds, Machete

Inglourious Basterds (2009): I was kinda shocked when looking at my FlickChart "list of shame" or whatever it's called, which lists highly-ranked movies that you haven't seen, and at the top of my list was Inglourious Basterds. Not only was it quite recent unlike most of the other films on the list, most of the reviews I'd read hadn't praised it completely. Safe to say, it wasn't universally positive stuff. So I watched it and yeah, it wasn't perfect. But I still really enjoyed it. The film's split up into several chapters and individually these chapters are superb. The dialogue is fantastic, particularly the one set in a bar with Basterds going undercover as Nazis. When viewed collectively I don't think it all gelled perfectly but the component parts were great. Brad Pitt's character, by the way, would have fit right into Machete. Two thumbs up.

Machete (2010): This was, well, different. It was completely and utterly absurd, a proper B movie, and completely by design. The violence was like something out of a hack-and-slash video game, the characters were cartoon characters in live action form, the sound effects were massively cliched and the dialogue was so campy. The fact that the film involved some notable faces, Robert Deniro, Lindsay Lohan, that Frank guy off Lost who got hit with the submarine door, made it all the better. Not only that, but they had a film involving Jessica Alba (internationally-known sex symbol) and Michelle Rodriguez (the woman who always plays the role of the butch tough woman) (read: lesbian) and made Michelle Rodriguez into the sexier of the two, which is probably worth some sort of award alone. I'm not a big fan of this type of movie but this was good fun. Needed a bad guy to get crushed with an ACME anvil at some point, though. One thumb up.

DanLowth @ FlickChart.com