I watched four movies this week in airplanes; The Time Traveler’s Wife, District 9, All About Steve & Love Happens.

Two of those movies were pretty good. You can guess which ones I liked.

None of them were any good compared with the movie I saw tonight – Gran Torino.

I finally saw “Dark Knight” in the Imax theater at the Minnesota Zoo. It ws well worth the trek down to Appley Valley to see the movie. I thought it was a great thriller. Amazingly it was not cartoonish and explored themes of good and evil in thought provoking ways. I loved the rethought prisoner’s dillemna presented in the movie as well as how that “problem” resolved itself.

Wonder Woman 03, originally uploaded by bbaltimore.

I was sitting around thinking about what comic book heroes hadn’t been made into movies. The one that jumped out at me was Wonder Woman. It turns out that there was something going on, but it appears to have gone off the rails somehow.

We aren’t going to have a woman president as far as I can tell, can’t we have a female super hero on the big screen?

Can you tell Linda Carter was one of my first “loves”.

The Crystal Skull from The British Museum 1a, originally uploaded by Y-Not ?.

The movie was ok. Some parts were good old fashioned blockbuster summer fun. The ending left me feeling like somehow there had been a collision in the elevator between the Indiana Jones screenwriter and the X-Files screenwriter. When they bent down to retrieve the mess of papers on the floor they mixed up a few pages. No one noticed until the movie was complete.

I saw Iron Man recently at the theater. It was a fun summer movie. In fact I think it’s my favorite comic to big screen movie so far with the possible exception of Road to Perdition. I can’t wait to see the other more movies from Marvel if they are all this good. They can’t possibly be as bad as that Hulk movie from a few years ago.

I finally broke down and checked out the “The Darjeeling Limited”. After my trip to India I knew I had to see it. The movie was fantastically beautiful. Although it wasn’t the India I visited and the story wasn’t mine I recognized myself in the movie in quite a few places.

Fitna the movie is out on YouTube now. I watched it. As a movie it wasn’t that great. it cherry picks some hateful speech and juxtaposes it with violent images. I’m not sure it deserves the press it is getting. I suppose the editing is ok and it’s always nice to see ideas “hoisted by their own petard.”

The reaction it is getting in certain parts of the world is the predictable condemnation, followed by governments wringing their hands wishing their citizens wouldn’t get the thin-skinned folks hopped up again. I’ve seen this news cycle before, I’m sure I’ll see it again.

Kudos to google/youtube for keeping the video up all weekend. I’m sure it’s been up on the servers long enough for them to have received numerous threats.

Three years later you run into the same movie on an unexpected night and you wonder will it be the same — will you love it as much as the first time. The movie, “Lost in Translation” still works for me. I’m not sure I’ll feel the same way when I see Juno three years from now.

The Simpsons movie was well worth the price of admission. It takes a lot to make me laugh out loud at a movie and I actually guffawed several times.

Where were you last Thursday night?

If you weren’t at the Riverview Theater to see the local screening of Raiders you missed out on something pretty cool.

A couple of years ago I read a few news items about a couple of kids who made a scene for scene version of Raiders of the Lost Ark . They were 12 when they started and they finished at age 19. [Read more at Harry's Reviews, Wired and MPR] I immediately wanted to see the movie, but figured it would never get released as it would be impossible to clear the rights given that it was a derived work from a major studio. Fast forward to last week when I get an IM from some guy who said it was playing at the Riverview Theater and did I want to check it out. You bet I did, it had been years since I had seen the original news story.

The file was $10 a head, $8 if you came in costume. One guy showed up with a quite convincing Jones get-up and cracked a whip over the audience to start the show. I decided against the costume myself.

When the movie started with it’s crappy distorted color and some obviously very young kids walking through a forest I was a little worried it was going to be awful. It didn’t take much time for the production values to fade away. I spent the rest of the movie completely blown away at how faithful these kids were to the original movie and how they had copied the entire movie in an obsessive way that reflected a kind of love of the original movie bordering on a sick compulsion. It was a thing of beauty.

I don’t know how these kids survived the filming. The fire scenes were painful to watch as a parent wondering how the kids didn’t manage to burn their house down.

The movie was fun. It didn’t add a lot to the original classic other than the fact that when the Harrison Ford lines are said by a teenager you realize exactly how stupendously ridiculous they actually are.

They only show the film for charity events as a way to keep from butting heads with the studio lawyers. If you have a chance to see this film jump at it.