Hackers-1995

This classic stars Jonnie Lee Miller and a very young and very hot Angelina Jolie.  It is great fun and was one of the first movies about hacking or even computers besides War Games a decade earlier.  The movie is completely dated now and was completely unrealistic a decade ago, but like I said.  Great fun.  I loved this movie when it came out and it hasn’t aged well.  The acting in this movie is subpar.  The plot is fun and pits a bunch of kids up against a huge corporation.  I would call it The Goonies of the computer age.  The movie launched the careers of several people.
I wanted to be a hacker after seeing this movie, but the reality is nothing like this movie.  Angelina Jolie was completely hot in this movie in a way she hasn’t replicated since.  I thought Jonnie Lee Miller was going to be a big star and I expected good things from Matthew Lillard. 
It is an interesting movie, and a lot of fun if you can suspend disbelief.  It is fairly tame, so it is pretty family friendly.  It is interesting looking at things from the movie that carry on today.  and is worth the two hours it takes to watch it. 

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Soldier (1998)

This movie came on ion tonight and I gave it a watch for the first time since seeing it in theaters.  This movie stars Kurt Russell as SGT Todd.  Todd is the soldier of the title and was trained since birth, with several others, to be a super soldiers.  The movie opens with a montage of different training that the soldiers went through and also different battles that they had fought in. 
Flash forward and the soldiers are all well decorated and Todd stands out as the best of the best.  The soldiers are aging and their numbers diminishing from combat.  Just in time, a new crop of soldiers show up.  This new group are genetically modified perfect soldiers.  To test the new soldiers Todd is pitted up against Cain 607 (Jason Scott Leigh).  Cain beats Todd in every test and eventually dispatches him in hand to hand combat with two other older soldiers, just to make it fair. 
Todd is left for dead on a trash planet and is adopted by the locals.  For whatever reason the ship comes back a couple of weeks later and they decide to wipe out the population of the planet as training for the new soldiers.  Todd has gained affection for these people in the two weeks, and decides to protect them while wiping out the new batch of soldiers, killing the leaders of the program, and liberating the old obsolete soldiers. 
The movie isn’t half bad.  I like the concept of soldiers raised from birth and the message that a non brain washed soldier will be a superior soldier to one that is basically a robot.  If you know what you are fighting for, you are more likely to win.  The really awesome thing about this movie is all the nods it makes to other science fiction movies.  Check out the trivia on imdb for a rundown.

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Anathem

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This book can not be explained in a short review. Stephenson creates a
world that is very complicated, has its own history, and creates a
language to go along with it. While some elements of the novel will be
very similar to what the reader is used to, some of the book can be very
confusing.
The story follows Erasamas, a young avout, as he is pulled out of his
math (a scientific monastery of sorts) with several of his companions to
solve a problem of the secular world. The beginning of the book is set
up to explain to you what a math is like before you get to the actual
plot. The pacing can be slow at times but lightening quick at others.
This is a very aggressive work by Stephenson and may be called his
masterpiece. Not that it is perfect, but Stephenson set out to write a
literary science fiction novel and he succeeded.
Readers of Stephenson know that he has a tendency to not end a book so
much as he stops writing it. In this book Stephenson did a good job of
wrapping things up on some degree and leaving a lot up to the
imaginations of his readers. A goal that he has been tweaking from day
one.
This book is hard to suggest to just anyone. People with very
scientific minds that love talking about and exploring theories and
science should really get into this book. The literary elite have
seemed to enjoy this book as well. This book is very deep and thought
provoking though. This isn't popular sci-fi. Personally, I loved it.

Dragon Ball Evolution

This movie barely makes it into the martial arts category for me. The martial arts is way over the top and not really focused on. This is strange because the movie is all about a “martial arts” battle at the end. In fact, the final fight scene was anticlimactic and disappointing.

The good news for this movie is that my kids loved it. Both of them are girls and take martial arts themselves and they thought the movie was a lot of fun. In the DVD extra features there is a training segment where they teach you how to do stuff from the movie and my girls got up and participated. The whole feature was corny and over the top, but my girls ate it up.

Overall it wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t good either. It is kind of fun and Jamie Chung is fun to look at. Kids from the 5-12 range will probably get a kick out of it. The martial arts content was sub part, but the movie is based off of an anime that is based off of a manga. I give it 3 exploding fists.

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