One-Half Razor

Stay Away

  • Title: Stay
  • IMDb: link

There seems to be a belief in Hollywood that if you make an incomprehensible film that looks pretty and add a twist ending that shocks the audience but doesn’t fulfill the needs of the movie to explain what is happening then you’ve met your obligation to the audience.  Stay is an unfathomable mess of a movie that meanders its way through flashbacks, reversals, timestops, and fancy camera tricks.  All well and good, but in the end the film has nothing to say.  It’s as if we’re watching a film student’s exercise in using different film and storytelling techniques, but the professor forgot to look over his script to see that there is no story there.  I went to see Doom on the same day I saw Stay and folks that’s enough to drive most people out of movie theaters for years.  I don’t mind taking one for the team now and then, but two in ten hours…well, I wouldn’t wish that on even my worst enemy—maybe Rob Schneider and Carrot Top.

There setup includes psychiatrist Sam Foster (Ewan McGreggor) treating a new suicidal patient named Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling).  Sam also has a girlfriend who once tried to commit suicide Lila (Naomi Watts) who he constantly worries about while he tries to find a way to stop Henry from doing the same thing.

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Stealth

  • Title: Stealth
  • IMDB: link

stealth-posterEver wonder what would happen if you took half the script for Iron Eagle 2 and half the script for Short Circuit and removed anything remotely good, or funny, or interesting?  I didn’t either, but obviously the makers of this film needed to solve this philosophical dilemma.

Stealth is the worst type of summer movie: a summer action adventure film that breaks all the rules of reality and the world in which it takes place indiscriminately.  The movie steals plot, story, scenes, and characters from everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to War Games to Firefox, and yet can’t seem to capture any single moment of believability, fun, or excitement.

Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, and Josh Lucas play Navy pilots who have been specially trained to fly a new jet fighter.  The commander of this project (Sam Shepard) shows up to introduce them to their new team member.  EDI (who will be referred to as Johnny Number Five for the rest of this review)  is a new jet that is controlled completely by a state of the art computer intelligence.  The crew is uneasy about letting a computer into the squad, and even more so after Johnny Number Five is hit by lightning and starts to think for himself.

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