Trollhunter — May be the greatest thing to ever come out of Norway. And I’m including the Nobel Peace Prize and the paper clip in that assessment.  Seriously.  Go watch it.  It’s on Netflix, so us Americans have no reason NOT to watch it.

Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle, is pretty much a great movie.  The premise sounds like an incredibly silly disaster movie, but it is crafted not for explosions and computer-generated mayhem.  The sun is dying and Earth sends two ships to reignite the sun by exploding a massive (and completely theoretical) nuclear device inside the star.  The Icarus I was sent some seven years prior to the movie but did not complete its mission and has since been lost.  The Icarus II was sent using the last of the world’s fissile material and is the final chance for human survival.

What follows is a relatively “hard” science fiction movie where actions have consequences, mistakes cost lives, and the lives of the few are measured against billions.  Above is my patented quality/time graph for Sunshine, and as you can tell I definitely liked the movie.  I recently picked up the bluray for cheap and it was pretty damn good.  Perhaps the best part is the two commentaries on the disc, one by the director and the other by Brian Cox, the film’s science advisor and a physicist working at CERN.  By far the best part is when Cox says that one of the characters mistakes the temperature of space for absolute zero, but derides her as a “botanist” so that makes sense.  Anyway, go watch it.  It’s pretty amazing.

And yes, there is a point on the graph where it breaks outside the axis.  It is that amazing.

How to Train Your Dragon, which really should be called “How to not prepare Chris for an ending” is perhaps the best animated movie Dreamworks has come out with.  And fuck. That ending.  I really, really liked the movie.  Also David Tennant is in it, if that suits your fancy.

Rango — Ever since I saw the first trailer for Rango I’ve wanted to see it and it didn’t disappoint.  Rango is a great little western animated film about what it takes to be a hero. It stars Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, and Abigail Breslin. And Bill Nighy. And Timothy Olyphant.  It’s good and everyone should see it.

Daybreakers — I don’t even think I could explain how poorly executed this movie was. There is something of an interesting movie buried in here but it is extremely incoherent. In my opinion, the best narratives are logically consistent. That is, you start by postulating some axioms (in this case: (1) vampirism exists, (2) a vampire that does not drink sufficient blood turns feral, (3) a blood substitute may exist, (4) a cure exists).  From these axioms you can then build a tale, for instance combining axioms 1 and 2 to create the human blood farm that is the setting of most of the story.  Add in a dash of #3 and you get a pharmaceutical company dealing with diminishing returns from a decreasing human stock.  You can continue this process to craft a decent and consistent enough story.  And for about half the movie they do a reasonably average job of doing this.

Then they screw it up by ignoring two or three of these axioms altogether.  Because these axioms get ignored characters start acting unlike how they did at the beginning; the plot frays apart.  You get an ending which makes positively no sense.  In fact they spend about two-thirds of the movie on axiom #4 only to reveal that the original axiom has a few corollaries that would otherwise change the calculus of the entire movie.

There is, actually, an elegant solution to this movie’s problems of course. It’s pure math: if (spoiler alert) drinking blood from someone cured of vampirism makes a vampire also cured of vampirism then the quickest, easiest way to spread the cure would be to hook up the protagonist to one of the blood bank machines.  The infrastructure is all there to infect the rest of society with the cure, and yet none of the characters even think to use it?  This creates a noble sacrifice, the movie has a bitter sweet ending that the characters are forced to earn instead of kind of falling into a successful result, and it creates a nice arc between the protagonist at the beginning of the film and at the end of the film.

Machete is a spin-off movie from the great 2007 double feature Grindhouse. In Grindhouse we got to see a great “fake” trailer for Machete before director Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror.  Well, they decided to make it real, and this is the result.  Machete is not a movie you take seriously. If you do, you will end up on Fox News and claiming that latinos want to kill white people in their sleep.

Here’s the thing though. It’s just like the Grindhouse movies. Crazy yet awesome things happen. In Planet Terror they stick a machine gun on lead Rose McGowan’s leg. Bruce Willis killed Osama bin Laden and was dosed with zombie gas! Sayid from lost collects testicles! In Death Proof, Rosario Dawson puts her boot through Kurt Russell’s face. These are things that are not going to happen. Similarly, the idea that a Mexican drug cartel is pulling the strings of a rabid anti-immigration Texas state senator who uses his free time to shoot border crossing illegals is a farce.  We all know that the rabid anti-immigration supporters are backed by the private prison industry that incarcerates illegal immigrants.

Look. If you didn’t enjoy Grindhouse, you’re not going to enjoy this film. If you did, you still may not. But if you like the idea of a crazy action movie throwback, go watch it because it won’t disappoint.

“Be careful. These guys — they play rough. Their administration has been born in controversy, national shame, and illegality — and it is my bet that’s the way they’ll go out.”

The Special Relationship is the third and final movie in Peter Morgan’s Blair trilogy which included the other awesome movies The Deal, and The Queen.  Once again Michael Sheen takes on the role of Tony Blair, and again he just works perfectly as Blair with all his triumphs and faults.  Dennis Quaid plays Bill Clinton, more as a caricature than anything else.  The real scene stealer is Hope Davis as Hillary Clinton. She often sounds like Hilary, and she’s pretty spot on especially when the film covers the Monica Lewinsky crisis. In many ways it’s not as good as The Queen or The Deal, but it’s a fitting end to the Blair Trilogy.  Really it’s just sad that this didn’t get the theatrical release it deserved in either the United States or the United Kingdom.