My free trial of Blockbuster Online has been allowing me to catch up on my movie viewing (and get my hands on some Jackie Chan movies I didn't even know existed). So far, so good. Even if I should have changed the order of some of the things in my queue...

The good:

Howl's Moving Castle: A wonderful fantasy story with some dashes of science fiction thrown in just for fun. A lot goes on throughout the movie, but the main story is the budding romance between the wizard Howl (voice of Comicon favorite Christian Bale in the English dub) and a young girl who was cursed by one of the villains with a spell that turns her into an old woman.

There is a war going on between two kingdoms that involves mostly shape changing wizards and funky looking bomber planes duking it out in the skies that adds tension to the main story. So not only do you get to see the inventive use of fantasy one would expect from the director of Spirited Away, but you also get to see weird looking fighter planes and ornithopters and stuff.

My favorite character was probably the fire elemental with the voice provided by Billy Crystal (of all people) in the dub.

Highly recommended.

Young Master: An early Jackie Chan period film that would appeal to people like me who also enjoyed the first Drunken Master and Snake in Eagle Talon Shadow. You can see glimmers of things that would become Jackie staples later, such as the great scene where he's foiling a bank robbery by using a combination of drunken boxing moves and Chaplin-esque physical comedy. And doing gymnastic moves on a hitching post for no particular reason.

Highly recommended.

The bad:

After the Sunset: This might have been a better movie if it wasn't directed by Brett Ratner. Pierce Brosnan and Salma Hayeck are fine as a pair of jewel thieves trying to go straight while living on a tropical island... but overall, it sucks just enough to be annoying. The highlight is probably Don Cheadle as a local crime boss.

The deleted scenes and the director's commentary make it easy to assume that the movie would have been better if they would have left in some of the stuff they ended up rewriting or just cutting for some reason. Ratner and his producer had some legitimate reasons for being concerned about the original ending... but it's not like their solution was better. And Pierce Brosnan's character would have seemed more likeable if they left in some of the deleted bits.

Not recommended.

Bandidas: Salma Hayeck and Penelope Cruz are friends in real life, so they decided to do a western together directed by their friend Luc Besson. With Steve Zahn in there as their wacky sidekick who actually can make himself useful when the plot requires it, this should have been a lot of fun. It isn't.

The "high concept" is sort of "Zorro meets Butch and Sundance... with breasts." After their fathers both get killed by bad guys working for a large American bank, precocious Mexican Farm girl Cruz and spoiled noblewoman Hayek start robbing the bad guys' banks and giving the money to poor people who are being driven off their land.

The movie is supposed to be at least as bad ass as the first Young Guns, but it aims more for playful and cute. It's supposed to be cute that Hayek can't shoot and that she starts throwing improbably large knives with superhuman accuracy instead. It's supposed to be cute that Cruz has never kissed a guy before. It's supposed to be cute that the two women fight over Zahn even though he's engaged and Hayek isn't really interested in him. Throw in some comments about clothes and other girl stuff that are supposed to be funny, but aren't and what you have is a whole lot of dumb stuff padding out the movie between the action scenes that actually work. There are maybe five cool parts in the whole movie.

Not recommended.

Blades of Glory: I had heard good things, but I found out the hard way that I'm just not into watching Will Ferrall do his Neil Diamond impression while taunting Napoleon Dynamite. Jon Heder had some good moments, but for me it all went downhill after Chas got fired from that ice show where he played the wizard. Too many Saturday Night Live people, maybe? I dunno. I ended up messing around on the 'net while trying to decide if I wanted to turn the movie off or not.

Not recommended.

I enjoyed BLADES but it's minor fluff next to the great TALLADEGA.

BANDIDAS is the only other one I've seen recently (though I saw YOUNG MASTER long ago, and also liked it). What a waste of two smokin' babes.

I recently did see another early Chan, YOUNG TIGER, where he plays a villain who has on his face a mole the size of Mount Fuji. (Sorry, don't know any Chinese mountains by name.)

Considering how fun the good parts in Bandidas are (such as that heist at the bank with the pressure activated alarm system), it really pissed me off that the rest of the movie sucks and blows simultaneously.

Instead of more funny action sequences like that one and more examples of Steve Zahn's scientific know-how, we got way too much stuff trying to convince us that Salma Hayeck was the smart and sophisticated one and "sexy" stuff that was anything but.

I guess the idea was to give the three stars characters where they didn't really have to act, but this is clearly a case where the actors had more fun making the movie than anybody else will ever have watching it.

Beowulf and Grendel: This movie is a loose, but still entertaining adaptation of the Beowulf epic. It is kind of fun thanks to casting people such as Stellan Skarsgard (Hrothgar) and Tony Curran. Gerard Butler's performance as Beowulf is pretty cool. He's a smart bad ass tempered with some gentleness who ends up feeling some sympathy for the monster he is supposed to kill.

But it's kind of weird to realize that The 13th Warrior is actually a better Beowulf movie than this one, where they didn't use any CGI or blatantly implausible stuff and they shot on location in Iceland to create a pretty accurate version of the old poem's setting.

Much like The 13th Warrior, the slightly revisionist (and simplified) version of the story is supposed to be what really happened between Beowulf, Grendel, and Grendel's mother.

One of the characters is composing a poem that embellishes the details of what happened (and just happens to contain lines from the source material). There's a mildly funny bit at the end where one of the other characters starts complaining about the part where Grendel is said to be descended from Cain, which leads to a literary discussion with one of the other Geats.

It's okay, but they spend too much time trying to make us understand that Grendel wasn't all bad. And that he was sort of justified in getting revenge on Hrothgar and his warriors. Mildly recommended.

Ever see the Christopher Lambert Beowulf? Oh, how god-awful...

Is that the one where it's actually in some sort of post-apocalyptic future and Lambert has a bunch of funky "high tech" weapons? If so... god-awful doesn't begin to capture how bad it was.

yep, and yep...

The Departed: I was leery about this one because I can't stand Alec Baldwin and Leonardo DiCaprio... but dang is this a great movie. I'm still upset about the ending (and the lack of a director's commentary that might explain it), but that quibble aside it's completely wicked awesome.

Highly recommended.

Stranger Than Fiction: A surprisingly sweet and fun movie, and the metafiction stuff mostly works. Dustin Hoffman rules. Will Ferrell is far more likeable than I usually find him (even if Hoffman is funnier).

Recommended.

Fearless Hyena: Another early Jackie Chan movie. It starts with Chan having to wear disguises to keep his grandfather from finding out that he's fighting people for money and then the movie abruptly makes a dark turn and becomes a revenge story. With some help from a family friend, he learns weird martial arts techniques based on various emotional states. It's kind of like a mixture of drunken boxing and Shaolin techniques for resisting pain. The movie's okay, but not as fun as Young Master.

Recommended.

Just rented Stranger Than Fiction and Little Miss Sunshine.

Dumas you were right about STF, very surprising and fun.

And I highly recommend LMS, A really odd little film, filled with unique but still relatable characters that was very satisfying.

I had a hard time getting into Little Miss Sunshine because it reminded me of my own family. But once I sort of got over that, I found it pretty entertaining.

Alan Arkin and Steve Carrell were great. Greg Kinnear did a little too good of a job of making me hate him at first, but after he came to his senses it was easy to be more sympathetic to him.