Taken

Taken is a new movie that was released late January, I just saw it this last weekend. The movie stars Liam Neeson and Maggie Grace. I didn't know really how cool Liam Neeson was until I'd seen this movie, I think he has the best voice in all of Hollywood. He sounds extremely badass, and looks like he can cause a lot of carnage if he wants to, verbally and physically. I found the story to be particularly interesting, I don't think this topic has been done before actually.

Bryan Mills (Neeson) is a retired government worker, or "preventer" as he likes to call himself. His wife left him due to his being away all the time, takes their daughter Kim, and marries an extremely rich business tycoon. Due to his sporadic, irregular lifestyle, Bryan rarely gets any time at all to spend with his daughter, and the gap between them increases greatly. He finally retires and moves to LA where he wants to try and reconnect with Kim. On her seventeenth birthday party, he bought for her a little karaoke machine, because last he'd heard she wanted to become a singer when she grew up, but her mom and step dad bought her a pony, a heartbroken Mills goes home and drinks it away with his old coworkers. A few days later, his daughter asks him to go out to lunch together, an eager Bryan hurries there, only to realize that this was a clever ruse on her part in order to coax him into signing a release form so she can "go to Paris," when in reality she was going on a European tour, following some random rock band. Being the paranoid man he is, he very reluctantly signs the form, still unaware of what she really plans to do.

After landing in Paris, Kim and her friend Amanda are greeted by a friendly, Parisian boy who invites them to a party that will be going on later tonight. Little do they know that they just gave their apartment address to a team of women traffickers. This is where the movie starts to get really interesting. Later that day, a crowd of Albanian men barge into their apartment and abduct both of the girls. Kim managed to explain to her dad quickly on the phone he gave her exactly what was going on, he later used the voices he heard on the phone call to track down who these men where. He finds out that Kim and Amanda are destined to become drug- addicted sex slaves for the rest of their lives. The time he has to save them until their fate is sealed? 96 hours.

Mills then takes his ex- wife's husband's private jet to Paris, where he starts kicking some Albanian ass. Possibly the coolest scene in the movie is when he's chasing down the French boy who first approached the girls, and after a couple minutes of pursuit, the kid jumps over a bridge, lives, stands up, and gets splattered everywhere by an oncoming bus. After many disguises, guns, and negotiating with the Albanian pimps, he's led to where his daughter is being auctioned off to some high class Arabians. He extorts one of the people to buy the girl so he knows where she's going, and jumps in a beastly Audi A8 and chases down the boat where she is being loaded, kills the huge, semi naked Arabian sheik who about to undress his daughter, and brings her back to the United States.

This movie is pretty cool. Don't expect something of Fight Club caliber or anything, but its a good action movie that gets the blood flowing. And its a really quick movie, there is always something happening, to keep even the most mundane, easily amused, quickly bored monkeys glued to the screen until the end.

Notorious

For those who don't know, Notorious, is the newly released biopic to the greatest rapper of all time, The Notorious B.I.G. it was released in theaters on January 16th, 2009, this last Friday. The movie itself received mostly favorable reviews from the critics and generally good to great reviews from common viewers. The movie runs just under two hours long, a definite choice for fans, haters, and people who don't even know who Biggie even was.

I personally feel the movie really captured the important events in Biggie's life. His albums release, his feud with Tupac Shakur, and his relationships with various women. His life was quite short; but in the mere 24 years that he lived, he rose from the lowly bottoms of Brooklyn to the Gucci wearing, champagne sipping tycoon that he was just before his death. Notorious does an outstanding job of making its viewers feel the emotions that Biggie was going through at various times in his life. The man who starred as Biggie himself, Jamal Woolard, was very well chosen. More than once, I found myself thinking that I was looking at the REAL Biggie Smalls, not an entirely different person. Woolard is extremely skilled at capturing certain qualities and characteristics that Biggie was known for, such as his deep, husky voice, his elitist, "I'm the king of the world" look that defined Biggie in his later years, everything, this was my biggest concern going into this movie, and I was very pleasantly surprised.

Even all of the supporting actors did excellent jobs in capturing the identities of the characters they portrayed. Anthony Mackie (Tupac Shakur) definitely takes the cake for this one though. When I first heard that it was going to be Mackie that took the role of Tupac, I was quite disappointed, I thought the director was going to scrutinize the entire country until he found some unknown, underground Tupac lookalike that was just waiting for a role like this. I honestly couldn't find ANY connections between the real Shakur, and the actor. But, when I first saw Mackie on the big screen, for a second, I thought that they were actually just playing a video of a real event, with the real Tupac, much like how many parts of the funeral were real, taped events. But after much, much, extraneous scrutiny, I realized that I was actually looking at Anthony Mackie. He was also able to portray that "I don't give a &^$#" personality that Tupac had really, really well.

The actual movie had very few flaws in it, all of the events were accurate, there wasn't any added fluff or anything, these events are all pretty much exactly how they took place. While I wasn't exactly ever there for any of these events, I am quite knowledgeable on what happened through various sources including interviews with the actual people. I didn't think that they portrayed anyone unfairly, unlike what Lil' Kim had to say. In an interview, she stated that she felt that she was being unfairly and inaccurately portrayed in this film. The claims that she wasn't quite as... dirty as she looked in the movie. I can understand that she might be holding on to some bitter memories of her with Biggie, but he portrayal was far from "inaccurate."

I would personally recommend this movie to anyone and everyone, so long as they are over the age of seventeen. There are some scenes in this film that many parents would consider inappropriate for their kids to watch, so consider this fair warning. But with that aside, like I've stated before, fans of Biggie Smalls, haters of Biggie, and people who have never even heard of him are all encouraged to watch this movie. It really clears up a lot of fog that used to surround Biggie's life, a lot of people think he's just another rapper, same as anyone else, but they are overlooking a lot of events that made this man into what he was, inside and outside of the studio.