Jay Lagare

If I look back the past few years, I’d be hard-pressed to name an action actress more badass than Kate Beckinsale. Yes, the lead of romance movies like Serendepity and Pearl Harbor. Now, after a short absence, she’s back in the franchise that launched her action career.  She reprises her role as Selene, a vampire “death dealer” (that means exactly what it says). The story  is frankly ho-hum: The humans found out about vampires and lycans and, with the help of UV flashlights and silver bullets, set out exterminating them. Fast-forward 12 years later and Selene awakens from cryo-stasis, freed by a mysterious benefactor and soon after escapes from captivity. She later finds her liberator, not her mate as she expected, but her progeny. She also finds a world where humans are still vigorously hunting the remnants of the vampires but strangely less so the lycans. Digging through the mystery, she finds a powerful pack of lycans planning on harvesting her daughter as a source for biological fixer-uppers. That’s a big no-no and she proceeded to shoot and slice through the lycans in the coolest, most impossible, matter-of-fact way possible. Did I say Kate Beckinsale is badass? Hell, yeah!

Watched Contagion last night. This movie is the polar opposite of Outbreak. Much like what The Thin Red Line (yay!) is to Saving Private Ryan (nay!). It may be boring to many but I actually found it quite interesting. In particular, the movie’s focus on the life cycle of a pandemic, the lives of those affected, and– to an extent– the role of the Internet. With the spread of the disease as the backdrop, the movie takes you through how it affects the lives of ordinary people who lost (or are about to lose) loved ones, the doctors desperately helping the sick, the doctors running against the clock looking for a cure, the government striving to contain the chaos as society disintegrates. It’s a doomsday scenario but it’s a very plausible doomsday scenario. And that makes the movie feel very real.

Hanna is a spy thriller and growing-of-age drama. Sort of like Leon but different, quite different. Erik (Eric Bana) is a widowed ex-CIA officer living in remote isolation with his daughter Hanna. He is raising Hanna to prepare her for going out into the world. And that world just happens to be a worst case scenario. Toss in shades of the Grimms’ fairy tales (e.g. Cate Blanchett is “The Witch”) and the almost surreal (watch it) and you have a quite an interesting movie. The action choreography needs a bit of work but is quite passable.