A few more...

17. The Big Sleep. Classic noir thriller, with the added twist that Humphrey Bogart and Rita Hayworth's on-screen chemistry was buttressed by their off-screen interest in one another.
18. Maxed-Out. A mediocre documentary about the nation's debt problem. Alternates too much between the nation's debt problem with the issues facing people who are having a hard time avoiding bankruptcy. Some lessons between the groups are similar, but the causes are disparate that there aren't very many good take-aways from the movie.
19. Baader-Meinhoff Complex. The true story of the German terrorist group Baader-Meinhoff who tried to incite a socialist revolution in the 60's and 70's. Some of the most interesting parts of the movie are watching the members of the "Complex" alternatively either completely out of their element (such as their training in Lebanon) and their passionate conviction in their cause when they were behind bars.
20. The 39 Steps. A rom-com disguised as a thriller. While there's quite a bit of intrigue in the first half, and a very satisfying ending, the second half seemed plodding because of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll's cute little tussles as a couple that finds themselves literally shackled to one-another.

Movies watched over the last month

Here they are:
1. Avatar. I think we all know what this one is about.
2. La Femme Nikita. A completely average assassin movie.
3. All The President's Men. The well-known, gripping watergate thriller.
4. Ox-Bow Incident. Follows a group of cowboys seeking vigilante justice against a cattle rustler. Very emotional, and far more impactful than...
5. Fury. A 1936 film with Sylvia Sydney and Spencer Tracey. The couple is engaged to marry, everything's going well...when an incident of mistaken identity puts Tracey at the center of a manhunt. A proto-noir movie.
6. The Vanishing. A dutch 80's film with an interesting premise and a creepy conclusion that follows a dutch couple vacationing in France. Someone else may just be following them.
7. The Third Man. My favorite film noir I've seen so far. Just magnificent, claustrophobic cinematography that match the fast-paced plot well. A mid-movie twist, which is apparently common knowledge, took me completely by surprise.
8. Double Indemnity. Classic film noir. Nothing ever goes as planned!
9. Empire of the Sun. Completely overrated, in my opinion. Has a very Spielberg sheen that gives the whole movie a feeling of fakeness. I suppose Malkovich is interesting, but all the rousing orchestral score and crane shots of "period crowds" just put me off. Too epic for its own good.
10. Dial "M" for Murder. Hitchcock's classic crime thriller. Has an interesting play-like feel (which makes sense considering its source material).
11. Vanishing Point. A highly dated atmospheric piece from the 1970s that follows a car delivery person as they race across the southwestern US. He meets the hippies, the religious revivalists, partakes in 70's drug culture. There are some exciting sequences at the beginning, all filmed with real drivers, of course, but even at a lean hour-twenty the movie feels like a crawl by the end.
12. Night of the Hunter. I really like Robert Mitchum, and would absolutely run screaming for my life if I were to run into his infamous preacher character. Genuinely creepy as he assimilates himself into an unsuspecting country town on a search for stolen money. The movie is brought down by some unbelievably gullible townsfolk, as well as a strangely didactic and unclimactic ending. Best watched for the famous "love-hate" speech and some really interesting sequences, such as the chase in the cellar and his interactions with only the children.
13. Samurai Trilogy 3: Duel at Genriyu Island. The third movie in the Musashi historical trilogy about the real-life samurai swordfighter. The entire movie is a build-up for the final duel, which lasts only five minutes but delivers some incredible shots of Musashi and his counterpart as they fight on the beach.
14. Bullitt. Well, 70's cool doesn't seem to hold up to well. I found this quite dull and slow, with brief spurts of violence and the requisite "how does McQueen STAY so damn cool?"
15. The Big Sleep. Full of nice quotes with a fun mystery that has a great payoff of action and suspense at the end. Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe: "Did I hurt you sugar?" and the woman responds, "You and every other man I've ever met."

More to list later...

Terminator: Salvation

I watched this movie on blu-ray, a 50-inch tv screen, and with a very nice surround-sound setup. I say that because I don't think the movie would've been half as impactful otherwise (this is a bad thing). The immersion was stunning, and all the more so in comparison with how the movie felt on my little home LCD screen with simple stereo (and which in itself was still a big jump from the tube set I had before). To give a concrete example, the first ten minutes of the movie end with a big explosion, and as we are lulled into watching Christian Bale take stock of his surroundings there's a jump-scare as a terminator hand lands on his shoulder. Watching it on my TV at home, I thought, "Oh." On the 50 inch screen, knowing it was coming, I jumped in my seat.

And despite the stunning audio-visual setup, this film was pretty bad. Sure, the movie cost millions upon millions of dollars, and the visual effects are getting ever-closer to photo-realism, but the core of this story was simply too hollow to sustain itself for almost two hours. The whole terminator franchise is now tied to a superfluous idea of time travel continuums, which is never explored in this new movie beyond, "you have to save this person, or you're not going to be born!" (I think). As we complicated film-buffs know, there's other ways to invest yourself in a character's actions, time-travel not being a very popular choice. The idea is that John Connor (Christian Bale), who we've seen as either yet-to-be conceived, as a kid, and as a young adult in the first three terminator movies, is now an adult leading the human resistance against a world dominated by "Skynet," an evil artificial intelligence with an army of terminator robots at its command.

The walk-away impression I got from the movie was that there's a really neat, Max Max-style sequel that was struggling under the weight of the previous terminator movies. We're meant to believe that a human "resistance" has been fighting against the terminators for a decade or so (my timeline's a bit shaky). Remember that opening scene from the second terminator movie, once James Cameron had a bit of budget to burn? We saw a big, trench-warfare style fight between humans and the terminators. Things were pretty evenly matched.

Well, to some degree that fight continues as envisioned. Except things aren't looking up for the humans. At all. We're told that there are only two people left defending all of LA, and they consist of a teenager and a mute child (whose character is never explained) who traipse around the city, springing elaborate metal traps on chaingun-weilding terminators. They've been doing this for ten years? And yet they haven't been able to fix a small, transistor radio, which would've tuned them into John Connor's regular broadcasts.

Good sci-fi rarely takes the time to explain every niggling detail of the imaginary world that it invents. It instead has to create a suspension of disbelief through a combination of atmosphere and a drip of details about why human existence in the future is different. When we watch even the well-equipped arm of the resistance be simply annihilated by giant robots, it's hard to believe that a bunch of lower-level resistance people are eeking out an existence at a gas station. But going into the details of why this movie universe doesn't "work" would be beside the point, as it's just indicative of the lack of emotional investment in the characters.

Christian Bale does a fine job for the most part with what he's given to say. There's a funny moment where he's basically doing a deep-voice contest between him and Michael Ironside, but his pregnant pauses and hard looks give you a good idea of how difficult this conflict has been on him (as well as the camera crew...)

Jake Worthington plays a death-row inmate who has mysteriously come back to life years after his execution, and he may or may not be the key to saving humanity (spoiler: he is the key). Most of the other characters are forgettable, especially Connor's pregnant wife, who has a couple wretched line-deliveries and an unexplained pregnancy.

Oh, wait. I forgot why we all came to see this movie.

"I'll be back...if my worldwide returns are good enough."