SURROGATES
Imagine a world where you don’t have to get up early in the morning, shower, get dressed, navigate traffic, get to work on time, dodge annoying bosses and equally annoying colleagues, avoid being given memos or suspensions for low performance evaluations or for doing such inane stuff as forgetting to turn off the light after office hours or taking too many coffee or bathroom breaks. Imagine a world where you don’t have to be subjected to the daily rudeness of people cutting in during queues, rude people in supermarkets, or groceries, or movie theaters, or inside public transportation. Imagine being spared the kind of physical torture that daily living in the modern, post-industrialized world of pollution, acid rain, excessive UV rays and crime generates. Imagine being able to stay at home, having a substitute who looks and talks like you, being able to do that for you, and all you have to do is jack into a network to be able to keep in touch with your substitute you as he/she goes through the daily rituals of modern living. Would be pretty nifty, huh?
This is the premise of the movie “Surrogates”. Based on a comic book and directed by Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines), this movie takes our growing obsession with virtual reality (SIMS, online RPG games, farmville, facebook, myspace, twitter and so on) to a whole new level: we can have virtual selves, “surrogates” who walk and talk and act like us, doing the dirty work of living our lives while we stay in the comfort of our home viewing it from the sidelines. Except there is growing dissent and the predictable marginalization of people who cannot afford surrogates and thus is the stage set for virtual, and real racial tension between those who can afford surrogates and those who don’t and oppose their use. A series of murders involving surrogates and their owners occur and into this mystery steps in US Federal Agent Tom Grier (Bruce Willis in a freakishly photoshopped face and body…with blond hair no less…and bangs) and partner, Radha Mitchell as they try to solve these crimes. A series of convoluted plots later, Grier discovers that the founder of the company that produced the surrogates (James Cromwell – in a similar role he did in “I, Robot”) had engineered the murders to bring down the company he helped create so that he can destroy not only the company but also the surrogates and their owners. Needless to say, the real Grier emerges from his self-imposed isolation to solve the mystery, destroy the surrogates and save the day.
Verdict: Hmmm….hard to tell. It was entertaining, yes, but not compelling. There is something about a freakishly photoshopped Bruce Willis that is surreal. I doubt if virtual selves can be taken out of computers and online games and software and into real life. Thus, you would have to dismiss plausibility and delve into the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of the story. You already know what this story wants to say: Don’t live like a zombie, live your life authentically, etc.etc. A lot of other sci-fi (and non-genre) movies have already successfully tackled these issues. Perhaps what this film lacks is the same kind of thing that Mostow’s other movie, Terminator III lacked: spirit, soul, sass.
THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM
Let me just say, Jackie Chan rocks and Jet Li rules. For as long as I can remember, their movies dominated my childhood, along with the movies of such B-level actors as Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren and Sylvester Stallone (macho Philippines, what can I say?). I have never seen them in one movie before, and to see them in one movie now excites like no other. And this movie, does not disappoint. Forget the plot, I watch Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies for the kung fu. 
But briefly: in the days of Middle Kingdom some thousands of years ago, the virtuous Monkey King (Jet Li) wins the favor of the Jade Emperor and thus earns the ire of the Jade Warlord who tricks him into giving up his powerful staff and his power during a duel, thereby making the Jade Warlord win the duel, imprison the Monkey King in clay and allow the Jade Warlord to rule over the kingdom ruthlessly.
Enter present-day, unlikely geeky hero —- who stumbles upon the staff while trying to save a Chinese shop owner from a gang of bullies. The staff brings him to the past, to the Middle Kingdom, where he encounters an immortal, played by Jackie Chan, a monk, played by Jet Li and a young musician hell-bent on exacting revenge on the Jade Warlord. As it happens, our unlikely geeky hero turns out to be the Chosen One, the one who will end the Jade Warlord’s reign of tyranny, free the Monkey King and usher in a new era of peace. Thus, the immortal and the monk train aforementioned hero and helps him defeat the Jade Warlord and free the Monkey King.
Suffice it to say, just watching Jackie Chan and Jet Li fight it out in their scenes together with balletic elegance is awesome. They’re like the Robert De Niro and Al Pacino of kung-fu movies.
ADVENTURELAND
Remember those times in your life when everything just persists on being shitty? When you were young and had a kick-ass degree and upon graduation realize that neither your youth nor your degree can save you from a shitty life or from getting shitty jobs that pay shit wages? Well, don’t look now but somebody came up with the bright idea of making a movie out of your life. And mine, as it happens.
Jessie Eisenberg plays fresh comparative litt major whose father gets demoted and thus has to move with the whole family to Pittsburgh to be able to survive on the father’s salary. Jessie’s dreams of graduate school and of a summer spent in Europe are dashed to pieces, and he must now get a dead-end minimum wage job at “Adventureland” as one of the operators of the games. His life would have been infinitely boring and tedious had it not been for Em (the, must-admit, cute Kristen Stewart), the cool, laidback colleague he becomes mildly interested in and who shares a mild attraction to him as well, but who is, in fact, sleeping with the resident technician cum wanna-be rockstar, played by Ryan Reynolds. Things come to a head when Eisenberg finds out that Em has, in fact, been sleeping with the married Ryan Reynolds, but they make up in the end.
