MULTIBALL MULTIBALL

The Lost Room:

"You like science movies?" my buddy asks. He's the kind of guy who goes to the movie rental place and just grabs random stuff. This is not a good sign.
"Uhh you mean science fiction? Well I sure did like Starship Troopers when I was 15 so let's go for it."
A scifi original miniseries (or something), it promises only failure. What it delivers will rock your world. We didn't stop watching this thing until all six hours of it were over, pretty much the only marathon viewing I've ever done of anything.

The thing about this series is that it is totally original and compelling. Here's the premise: A detective comes into possession of a hotel room key that opens any door. On the other side of that door is an empty, cheap motel room. He can enter it and close the door, and when he re-opens the door it leads to any door in the entire world. The only problem: At one point, the door closes on his daughter while she's still in the room, and when he opens it again, she's gone.

But that's not all: Every object that's supposed to be in the room is missing. In the first episode, we find a guy who has a pen that microwaves people to death. Also, there's a woman with a nail file that knocks people unconscious when she holds it to the light. There's a comb that, when used, stops time for 10 seconds. Spectacles that inhibit combustion. A deck of cards that drives you insane. A pencil that, when tapped, makes a penny. These "objects," as they are known by their collectors, are all taken from the mysterious motel room, and each one has a strange power that seems totally unrelated to the object. Why do they exist? What does the room have to do with it? I figured it out by watching the whole series, and you should too.


Deja Vu:

Another entry in the "I found this movie at the movie store, so it must be good" files, this one is not really as good or interesting as The Lost Room. Set in New Orleans (for no good reason other than the city is a charity case), some terrorist blows up a ferry full of smiling, happy Navy seamen, their smiling, happy families and a few random smiling, happy passengers. Denzel Washington is called in to investigate the case, where he promptly finds a hot dead body and falls in love with her. C'mon, man, the CSI guys don't get the hots for every cute corpse that comes through the morgue. This is why you work in post-Katrina New Orleans and not in a cool city like Las Vegas, Miami or New York.

Little does Denzel know that he's not the only one to be assigned to this case. A super-secret government team with their own experimental chronosphere recruits Denzel to sit in front of a big monitor to look back in time four days and try to figure out who commits the crime. Denzel figures out pretty quickly that he's not really looking at a monitor screen, but through a time portal. Maybe because their lies about how their system "really" works are so insane and retarded that no idiot would believe them. Unfortunately, their explanation for how their "wormhole through time" works is just as bad. Anyway, as Denzel is busy playing peeping tom with the still-alive version of the pretty corpse (as she existed four days ago) when he decides to shoot a laser pointer at her head through the screen, which promptly breaks the whole thing somehow. Then he starts hollering at everyone to tell him the truth, and then things really start happening.

Denzel comes up with some pretty innovative ideas for how to use a time machine. Maybe instead of dicking around with it to see what happened back in the past we could, I daresay, go back in time and prevent the ferry bomb from going off? Gee, I dunno... We only went to Harvard and invented a time portal, it's not like we could creatively come up with ways to use it.



Smokin' Aces:

Here's a fun little flick, along the lines of Lock Stock and Two Smokin' Barrells and Snatch. If you've seen either of these movies and went apeshit over them when you first saw them, then you'll probably go apeshit over this one too. It has the same overblown "style" and quirkiness and goofy characters as the first two movies, and if you're easily amused by that kind of thing then, surprise!, here's more of the same.

Each of the goofy and/or formulaic characters in this movie is an assassin, all after the million-dollar price put on a mob boss/magician's head. Oh yeah, and they're all introduced by their names being printed REALLY BIG ON THE SCREEN AS THE ACTION PAUSES (with their profession printed in smaller letters below). If that little detail makes you mahogany hard with excitement, then this movie's for you.

-Two FBI agents (good guys)
-Ben Afleck and his two ex-cop pals (semi-good guys)
-Two Black chick assassins. The hot chick/master of disguise is a good guy. Her militant-feminist and less-hot lesbian pal with the ENORMOUS semi-auto .50 caliber sniper rifle is is not a good guy.
-South-American professional assassin/torturer who kills people with wrist blades and chewed off his own fingerprints (bad guy)
-Three neo-nazi kamikaze chainsaw-wielding kill-crazy assassins (good guys. J/K)
-Master of Disguise assassin who kills people and sticks their faces in a machine that makes a rubber mask and then assumes their identity to kill more people (bad guy)
-The mysterious "Swede" who's supposedly the most professional assassin on Earth. He figures prominently in the significant plot twist at the end (neutral guy?)
-Random cross-dressing lawyer
-Random karate kid with ADD who talks like a rap star
-Random people who die

There is a twist, as mentioned, and it's pretty big. I'm, like, a genius though so I figured it out before they explained it (at length) at the movie's end. Geniuses like me can't watch movies like this or the Sixth Sense because we figure out the plot twist and ruin it for everyone else. Ok, i'm not really a genius (I was kicked out of G.A.T.E for eating paste) but the twist is pretty easy to figure out.

Also for Ben Aflek-haters: You might want to see this movie! *hint*