Culture

The Book of Eli gives us yet another post-apocalyptic end of the world saga. This time, Eli (Denzel Washington) walks through barren wasteland carrying a machete and a Bible. It's almost like Eli travels in the footsteps of Viggo Mortensen, who recently set down his own apocalyptic travelogue in The Road. With the washed-out landscape, deserted and decaying skyways, junked cars, rotting skeletons and onramps to nowhere, both have the feel of post nuclear Westerns. Shot in New Mexico with the Sony RED digital camera, Book of Eli, at the very least features some impressive massacre scenes.
In Eli, due to some divine intervention, the title character must walk “west.” Referring to “before the flash,” a holy war of sorts that blew up the sun, everyone now wears protective (and sometimes designer) sunglasses and no one person under 40 knows how to read or has ever seen a television. Water is scarce and people have turned to cannibalism, but it's all about Eli and his journey. This includes fending off marauding Road Warrior-like thugs (who rape, murder and pillage around every turn), dispatching people with his mystical fighting skills, ending up in a town that resembles a post-apocalyptic Deadwood, adopting an apprentice against his better judgment, going head – to-head with an evil villain and, of course, spreading the gospel. Eli, a true Bible thumper, severs limbs and decapitates with a ninja assassin's flair while trying to remain righteous. Eli doesn't turn the other cheek, but he will chop one off.

Now here's something strange: Extraordinary Measures is essentially a bad television movie played out on a big screen – a banal exercise in paint-by-numbers drama – and then, unbeknownst to itself, it's also a powerful cinematic critique of the American medical industrial complex.
From the director of What Happens In Vegas, this is an idiot savant of a movie. Utterly oblivious to the recent political battles over health care reform, Extraordinary Measures has blundered onto the scene, and by the dullness of its narrative, far exceeds the comparatively mild attempts of Sicko and John Q in exposing the American health care system's dark side.

Colin Firth has crafted a career out of amusing performances as buttoned-down gentlemen in frothy comedies or period dramas. To many he is simply Mr.

Beginning with ultra-cool shots and dreamlike photography, Daybreakers shows promise, but with all of its flourishing potential (and tons of blood and gore) it starts to fall apart midway and never recovers. The Spierig Brothers directed The Undead, a fairly unknown and underrated Australian zombies-from-space flick, but this time the pair of sibling directors traded in zombies for vampires and daytime for night. Daybeakers is an apocalyptic vision wherein vampires rule the world that proves strong in some parts and disappointingly bad in others.
Thanks to a viral epidemic a decade ago, most of the world's population has turned into vampires (the non-sparkly, non-sexy sort of vampires), and a huge corporation oversees a sterile, clinical slaughterhouse that creates the world's blood supply. A brute-force vampire military hunts and herds humans like cattle, but still the blood supply is dwindling. Ethical vampire chemist Edward (Ethan Hawke) is attempting to find a blood substitute but it's not that easy. Without human blood, vampires are starving to death, their physical deterioration resembling bat-winged meth-heads. The covert underground consists of a few straggling human survivors wielding cross bows and shotguns.

Although this movie will be spoken of generally as “the one Heath Ledger was making when he died,” the latest work from the director of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam, is not exactly a Heath Ledger movie. He's hardly in it. And while it's natural to eagerly await the scenes in which he appears – as attractive and talented as he was – to do so while watching The Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus would be a waste.
If you want some pure, unadulterated Heath Ledger, watch Brokeback Mountain or I'm Not There. Equally, do not expect to see much of the three actors who stepped in for Ledger: Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law, as their scenes amount to about 20 minutes. Instead, go see this one because it's made by an interesting writer-director whose mix of substance and style is consistently daring and thought provoking.