I watched this movie on Netflix’s Roku device. This is wonderful way to watch oldies and goodies on TV. The only complaint I have is the lack of caption on the movies. Sometimes, it’s hard to comprehend the speech without the captions.

Luke, the central character in the movie, portrayed by Paul Newman is a renegade young guy, who is glutton for punishments. Luke got drunk and starting cutting off the parking meters. After being imprisoned in a country-side prison with a sadistic warden, Luke kept running away from the prison for at least 3 times. The last time he ran away, he went out with a big bang, shot by the sharp shooter of the prison.

The most impressive plot in this movie is his eating 58 eggs within an hour to win a bet. Playing up to the prison guards is pretty funny too. You just know that he’s going to get hurt but he kept doing it.

Paul Newman’s performance in the movie was outstanding. Without his performance, this movie doesn’t really have sufficient plot to keep people interested, except for the commodarie among the prisoners, which is not realistic given what we know about today’s prisoners. I don’t know if the prisoners nowadays are being treated the same way; it’s what “doing the hard time” is all about.

Paul Newman just died of lung cancer on 9/26/08 at the age of 83. The old blue-eye left us lots of movies including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, great charities, and Paul Newman food products.

I’ll slowly catch up to his old movies now I have the Roku.

Mark Twain is famous for his “Huckleberry” and “Tom Sawyer” novels. He has many famous quotes that have been recited many times. I haven’t known much about his life. This PBS-produced autobiography depicts Samuel Clement’s life from his childhood in the south to his death in New York.

Mark Twain, Samuel Clement’s pen name, has a rather tragic personal life. All of his family members, his wife and all but one of his 4 daughters and one son died before him. His business acumen or lack thereof caused his financial distress and forced him to go back to the lecture circuit at his old age of 60. And he managed repaid all of his debts eventually. But it took the toll on his family. Nevertheless, his propensity for vanity and spotlight makes him a true American or “the American.”

Mark Twain is the quintessential standup comedian with a flare for literature. He recognized the evil in slavery (thus the novel “Huckleberry Finn” and spoke up against big businesses, politics and imperialism.

I was amazed how well traveled he was in that era. He traveled to all over America, Europe, middle east and even India. I think the only place he hadn’t traveled was China. I believe these give him a worldview perspective. Though his other novels did not enjoy as much acclamation as “Huckleberry” and “Tom Sawyer” but there are so many of them.

The biography shows lots of pictures from his young age until his death, thanks to the invention of photography and even movie in his life time. These are real tresures. Mark Twain left us lots of legacy and his literature gifts. In a way, he re-defined the American literature.

Today, we finally went to see the movie “Batman: The Dark Knight.” We weren’t sure if our daughter can handle the violence but we went anyway. We had a hard time keeping her staying in her seat.

The movie was way too long. It seems so many characters were added in to make the movie longer than necessary, e.g. Harvey Dent, the two-face villain seems to be two-for-the-price-of-one villain. Is it necessary? Probably not. But it makes the love triangle among Bruce Wayne, Rachel, and Harvey, a bit more interesting.

The Joker was portrayed by Heath Ledger, his last performance before his sudden death on January 22, 2008, just a few months before the premier of this movie. Joker seems to be the ultimate nemesis for the Batman that almost results in his turning himself in. The Joker is particular adept at pushing people’s buttons and bringing out people’s weaknesses or simply inherent human weaknesses. For example, he uses the prisoner dilemma game when he set up the two fairy boats to face the threat being blown apart if they don’t take the first action. He also pushes Harvey Dent to become a villain from a go-by-the-book city attorney. Joker has a couple of good lines. I particular like “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Isn’t that the truth? Sooner or later, people will find faults in you and bring out the worst in you. Batman is the classic example.

I didn’t care for the constant blow-up of bomb, car wrecks, fire on money, hospital’s being blown up, Rachel’s being blown up, and etc. There seems to be non-stop destructions in the movie. Joker seems to have more resources than the entire Gothem police department.

The Batman has a few new tricks up his sleeves like the dog-proof suit in keeping with the spirit of “continuous improvement,” and the ability for the computer to track all of the cell phone call conversation on the fly. The Batmobile was crashed and self destructed but the Batmotorcyle was equally impressive – just like a video game.

Overall, I rate this Batman movie a ‘B’. The wonderful acting of Joker makes his character quite believable and I actually feel sorry for him, being a freak among his organized-crime friends. There is a couple of good twists like Gordon’s fake death and his saving Batman’s life, and fact that people don’t want to blow the other people us give us a glimmer of hope for humanity, contrary to Joker’s belief.

For the Independence Day, the family decided to take it easy and go out for a Matinee movie instead. We went to see “Wall-E.” We figured it’s probably fun for my 6-year-old daughter. Sure, another no-brainer robot movie from Disney to stir up a child’s imagination. Why not?

I was pleasantly surprised by how futuristic and foretelling the movie is. The move is about a ever curious, lonely, garbage-collector robot fell in a love with a more advanced earth probing robot,named Eva, from Axiom, its mother ship that houses many of the human refugees in space after leaving the earth that had turned inhabitable due to pollution. Not knowing the plot, I discovered along the way where Eva came from, what its mission is, what Axiom is, and why humans became the way they were (fat, lazy, and lack critical thinking). The twists are: the controlling robots were the “bad” guys but were under the “policy” dictated by the Axiom founder and the people turned to fat and boring vegetables that follow the routines they were given.

Wall-E is a cute, passionate, curious, industrious robot that every viewer can relate to. He was smart to stock up on spare parts for himself and during his lonely time watched some of the old ’60’s movies to kill time. Of course, he transformed himself into a small box when he put himself in the sleep mode. How ingenious he is. Isn’t that how human evolves from where we were before? The irony is that the humans inside Axiom are just the opposite. How foretelling it is if we human manage to design all the robots that take up all the dirty jobs of serving us, what will we become or evolve into?

The love story between Wall-E and Eva was a bit of stretch but I suppose it’s hard to bring up the “human-ness” in Wall-E without this. The way how Eva was touched by the caring and pursuit of Wall-E and reciprocated to rescue Wall-E also serves as a good human-like story.

A couple of interesting observations: The Eva robot looks like a Nintendo Wii character with the joints missing. In other words, the fingers, arms, head are sort of floating without connections, not bound by law of physics. Is that the future robot we come to expect? Also, the TV’s people are watching are their vehicle chairs are being projected like a hologram – I think this is quite doable.

The movie ended when the people of Axiom decided to come back home and leave the vegetated state was also a nice twist. The captain showed his leadership of battling the controlling robot and bringing back the “Noah’s Ark.” Of course, come into the earth and come out in the atmosphere at that state (without vegetation) without any sort of air supply could have killed them at once. But wearing masks out of the space ship could kill the dramatic moment.

Overall, I like the movie a lot. It’s entertaining and satirical at the same time. How many movies can do that?

Indiana Jones possesses a memorable past time within my heart. I remembered I watched the Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was studying at UCLA in 1981 and then the Temple of the Doom in 1984. It was the movie that brought out the youth and the craving for adventure of the audiences. Especially in this day and age of working constantly, having a little adventure can really satisfy one’s fantasy. Indiana Jones does that and does that well. This new movies provides the same setting and added a little new wrinkles to the now older Indiana Jones. Unbeknown to him, he has a son and a sweet heart who loves him dearly. Why not? Indiana always gets his woman. He’s a quintessential 007 with a whip and a trade-marked hat.

This Indiana Jones movie is still fast pace – very little dull moments. He’s constantly moving into and out of danger zone: running from machine gun bullets, surviving the atomic bomb blast in a lead-lined refrigerator, falling through 3 water falls in a jeep, surviving many fist fights among the killer ants, being rescued from quick sand with a snake, fighting with the bad guys on a car without falling out, and etc. He probably uses up his nine lives in a few short minutes – statistically improbably. But it’s a movie for everyone who hopes to have the same kind of luck.

As far as the storyline, I think it’s a little dull or should I say skull. The skull with a huge magnetism kept people guessing what it is and what it does. Linking any supernatural things to the extraterrestrial is the forte of Steven Spielberg. The old Astec castle with many hidden traps and short cuts turn into a giant space ship. It’s a big stretch but it’s almost predictable because many historians have speculated on the extreme high level of intelligence of these people. It’s a cop-out. Why not give these aboriginal people the credit? Perhaps, it’s a tough sell.

Throughout the movie, this tough young kid, who turns out to be his son, had to comb his greased hair constantly brought back to the old ’50 culture of the Harley Davidson gangs. It’s a bit cliche but if it appeals to the aged baby boomer (probably the targeted audience) – more power to them.

The new villains this time are the Russians, communists Given the Iron Curtain, Cold War era of the ’50 and ’60, this is probably a good fit. Besides, you can’t keep blaming the Germen or it gets pretty dry. The stated motivation for Russians to pursue the skulls is for the mind control – a Stalin’s passion, I suppose. It didn’t seem to be very believable in that era when surviving economically as a whole is the main argument for the communist ideology. I can imagine this would be a good weapon of mass destruction for the extremist nowadays though.

One of the villains is Dr. Jones’ colleague who betrayed him that got him in trouble. But I don’t understand why he kept having him tag along just to be sold out again later. It seems to point to Indiana Jones’ poor judgment of character or simply too bent on friendship.

Overall, it’s not bad entertainment value at $6 (matinée) each but no more. It certainly saves me lots of gas and $ if the whole family has to go out for a similar adventure, if I dare take on one like that.

The winning combination of Jackie Chan and Jet Li finally comes to fruition in this movie “The Forbidden Kingdom.” This movie is a slight variation of the Monkey King or West Quest legendary story we all heard about while growing up in Taiwan and China. It appeals to the kids because the Monkey King (Sun Wu Kong) is a bona fide manifestation of a child, who enjoys monkeying around.

The Gongfu scenes were numerous and satisfying to the audiences who wanted the see Jackie Chan fighting with Jet Li. Jackie showed off his many type of Gongfu styles: drunk, mantis, snake, and etc. Jet Li does a good job on different weapon styles like spear.

Including an Italian American boy from Chinatown make the movie easier to relate for the American audiences. But the plot draws parallelism to the Kungfu Kid movie when both masters are teaching to boy Gongfu. It’s a bit stretching to think Gongfu can be taught in such a short time. Wouldn’t it be nice?

Of course, what’s a Gongfu movie without the victor winning the heart of the girl. To me the girl’s desire to seek vengeance against the bad warlord seems to be orthogonal to the movie plot. Her acting wasn’t so great or believable anyway. She appears to be added as a second thought.

Making the warlord the bad guy seems to embarrass the Jade Emperor, the supreme God, who probably doesn’t deserve to be the God if he does not possess good management skill to appoint the right leadership on his behalf. But that’s taken from the management angle – nothing to do with entertainment.

Overall, the movie has plenty of actions. That was great. Leveraging the old mystical story of the Monkey King was a smart thing to keep the Chinese audiences interested. At the end when Jet Li turned into one of the hair of the Monkey King was a nice twist and kept me guessing. But the movie plot can be refined further and the casting of the girl and the boy can be improved.

Here is the trailer for the movie. Love to see other collaborations between Jet Li and Jackie Chan in the future.