Taxi to the Dark Side should infuriate you. It’s a competent documentary exploring exactly what kind of dysfunctional system we setup in Afghanistan and Iraq in the service of the ‘war on terror.’ Its main focus is the story of an Afghani taxi driver who gets picked up by American forces and ends up dead, exploring the people involved, the policies that lead to his death, and the aftereffects. It’s chilling, infuriating, and tragic. Anyone interested in evidence of just how incompetent and evil the Bush administration was should check out this film, then you should track down Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and kick them in the balls. I’m not kidding.

I have wildly varied taste in movies. I’ll sit down to watch something like Cache, then turn to something like Outlander next, and find things to enjoy in each of them. Outlander is a competently executed modern B movie. A spaceship crashes on Medieval Norway, and the lone survivor is soon captured by a local viking village. It turns out his ship had been infiltrated by a vicious space dog/lizard from beyond, and the rest of the movie features viking on viking, viking on spaceman, and viking+spaceman on space dog/lizard action, pretty much nonstop. It’s a fun B movie ride and not much more. The story tries to build some tenderness and a sense of character with the spaceman’s backstory, but the acting’s not up to the task so it fell flat for me. The special effects are decent, better than I expected actually, and the action is generally well executed. Worth a look if you like competent but unexceptional Sci fi. Here’s the trailer to give you a sense of it:

I watched Cache with Susan last night. It’s a bit hard to categorize the film – on the one hand in many ways it’s a thriller, but it’s missing some of the requisite parts. For one thing, there’s almost no physical violence – almost everything that happens revolves around dramatic tensions between the major characters. The story follows a well off French family who begin recieving creepy videotapes, cards, and phone calls. The father begins to suspect who’s involved after one of the tapes shows his childhood home, and this leads to the film’s central conflict.

Truth be told I think the movie went straight over our heads. It wasn’t till afterwords as we sat discussing it that it occured to us that in part it’s an allegory for France’s relationship with Algeria, something that would have been much clearer to the film’s original French audience. We were also non-plussed by the ending, which comes abruptly and seemingly without any resolution of the central tensions. It strikes me now that this was really the point – there is no pat resolution to the issues that are explored, they’re ongoing and the resolution remains to be seen.

Anyway, I enjoyed the film – it’s well acted and has some decent cinematography, plus it’s really thought provoking. I doubt that many folks who read my site would enjoy it though – it’s also slow, deliberate, and very reliant on interpretation – this is a show, not tell, movie. There are shots that last for minutes where nothing, seemingly, happens, and I suspect that would drive most of my friends nuts. Still, I really enjoyed it and I think Susan did too.

I watched Pineapple Express over the weekend, which may surprise folks since it’s not really in tune with my tastes, but I loved the Cheech and Chong movies back in the day and enjoyed the 40 year old Virgin and Superbad, which had some of the same folks involved, so I figured why not give it a shot. I shouldn’t have bothered. It starts off ok, introducing the main character, his dope dealer, and the improbable series of events that leads to them spending the movie fleeing a gang of murderous thugs, but the whole thing feels like amateur hour with bad acting, sophmoric humor, a plot full of holes, and an unsatisfying ending. My recommendation? Stay away.