The Rant D’Jour is one of those observational deals. Aren’t they all?
It is the great equalizer. Everyone has to submit. Birth, death, taxes and…the visit to the…more
-30-
Blog Post for Tuesday 3/22/11 – 36 degrees with a WINTER STORM WATCH issued. Oh joy.
Tuesday Morning Review
I have lucked out lately and have seen a bunch of really good movies. I hardly know which one to review today. My taste has been running more towards documentary fare but sometimes you just want to sit back, eat the popcorn and get swept away in a good story.
Unstoppable is that kind of movie. It’s not deep, it does not have great acting or deal with serious social issues.
It’s just 98 minutes of pure entertainment.
Denzel Washington stars as an aging out of his job train engineer. Chris Pine (Star Trek) is his young, wet behind the ears conductor. The two play nicely against each other and there is certain amount of shared circumstance in their personal lives that works to bond them together.
But the star of the show is a half mile long out of control train loaded with lethal explosive chemicals. And the real acting is done by the huge locomotive pulling a “Missile the size of the Chrysler building” as one character calls it.
There is a movie called “The Bear” which I watched with the long-suffering wife years ago. After we saw it my wife’s comment was “that bear could almost talk.”
Well, that locomotive could almost talk. Kudos to the sound engineers for giving that thing it’s voice, which at times sounded almost like it was a growling, primordial dinosaur.
Maybe it’s just me. But there was some sort of deep seated, primitive lizard type of fear response generated by that bellowing beast as it stalked the Pennsylvania countryside. I will admit, it scared the dickens out of me.
Portions of the movie were actually filmed in Pennsylvania so for me, seeing familiar landscape in the context of that potential apocalypse definitely heightened the experience. Here is some bystander footage shot, according to the id in Emporium, PA October 7, 2009.
This is a movie that would have been great to see on a large screen and really could have been brought alive in a 3-D IMAX theater.
The special effects, sound (it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound Editing) and editing were all world class. The film’s budget was $100 million and, as they say, you could see all of it on the screen. Rated PG-13
-30-
