Future Shock

Even as the world has not quite gotten over Shyamalan-bashing, Shyamalan himself has moved on to a reasonably good piece of work in After Earth. The Pursuit of Happyness showed the intense father-son pairing of Will Smith and Jaden Smith. After Earth takes us to the same pairing. A spaceship carying the duo crash-lands on a (now abandoned by humans) Earth. With lead Will Smith (Cypher Paige) incapacitated, son Jaden Smith (Kitai Paige) is entrusted with a perilous mission to cross a hundred kilometers of hostile terrain to activate an emergency beacon. With an Earth that is perhaps labeled a tad more hostile than the way it has evolved, and friends and enemies alike in nature, Kitai has to battle a plethora of calamities and a paucity of resources, and draws upon generous doses of inspirational pep talk to get to his objective. A movie that has, at the time of writing, faced the harshness of (clearly undeserved) extreme reviews

13/20

Secret Space

 Of all the secrets of the universe that are shared between Agent J (Will Smith) and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), there is one secret that K refuses to share. It appears that the same has to do with the Biglodyan alien invasion and the fact that K failed to contain it. J must travel back in time, to July 15^th 1969 – a day before the lunar quest lifted off from Cape Canaveral – to hook up with the younger Agent K (Josh Brolin) to try to alter the course of human-alien history. If the purpose of Men in Black III was to portray something unexpected, then the same did not happen at all. Save and except for - the secret we spoke of first, and why the same needed to be kept a secret at all from K. Men in Black III remains a watchable franchise as always, and well on its way to many more sequels

13.5/20

Han-Cock-And-Bull

It seems that Will Smith's superhero/last-man-standing fixation is not unlike some adolescent complex that started with Independence Day, continued with I Robot, MIB and I Am Legend and has sadly survived stellar roles in movies like The Pursuit of Happiness and Ali. Hancock is a tawdry attempt to invent a hip-hop superhero who forms an unlikely on-off screen pair with - you'll never guess - Charlize Theron - remember her Academy Award for Monster - who too takes a fairly unidirectional nosedive in the quality sweepstakes. This is a truly poor movie that has absoultely no redeeming quality except the now hackneyed special effects - if someone is attempting to create a superhero genre and a great and spellbinding series, they would be lucky to survive their first edition with their fingers intact - much like what happens to the guys who call Hancock a#$hole in the movie

Parenthood

Today we went out with Rikk to Barista for the first time. He started crying almost immediately. It was only with patience and comforting him, that we were able to get him to settle down. Parenthood is teaching me patience and self-discipline. Kramer vs Kramer explores the pain of divorce and throws Meryl Streep's self-indulgent departure ostensibly for self-discovery in harsh light against Dustin Hoffman's renewal, self-sacrifice and determination. Through a great deal of patience and discipline, the man Kramer develops a hitherto nonexistent bond with the son Kramer, without giving away too much by way of career. In contrast, The Pursuit of Happyness pits Will Smith in an elemental struggle to secure a permanent position in a big brokerage while battling poverty and being a single parent. It is interesting that after a gap of 27 years material success is clearly shown as pretty much an imperative in the latter movie, and is something of an afterthought in the former. Who says times are not getting tougher??