booksmooviesnwhisky

Joe Gould says in the movie 'People are sentimental..", I am sure the crew of this movie is! The story and the screenplay does some very overt attempts at tugging at the heart strings. Succeeds at times. I am not sure if putting subtler dialogs and scenes would have helped. There are some characters that are made fairy tale-ish one dimensional. Like Max Baer or Jimmy Johnston. Or Jimmy Braddock himself.

But that being said, it is an excellent movie. Russel Crowe is brilliant. The helplessness, the power, the integrity he can bring on his face is amazing. Insider, LA Confidential, Gladiator, Beautiful Mind and this one.. he has perfected his nuances. Paul Giamatti is also amazing. He should be getting meatier roles after his last two performances. Craig Bierko pulls a pretty fine Max Baer. Its not hard to imagine his Max Baer as a Hollywood star and a "Clown and a Killer".

Only (a very very tiny) disappointment in acting Renée Zellweger. Don't get me wrong, she is brilliant. I am surprised by how nicely she can pull the jersey accent. She is completely at ease and doesn't look like she's acting except in last few scenes.

All in all, 7/10

I liked Bourne Supremacy better than Bourne Identity. Reason being that I loved the book (identity) and hated the way the mellowed the plot by making it a pure hollywood CIA movie. But Supremacy, was much more loosely coupled to its book. And I didnt much like the book anyways.

Its a very fast paced action movie with lots of "new" spy techniques and tactics, and a solid performance by Matt Damon and Brian Cox.

The thing I liked about this movie the most was the return of some of the elements that marked the cold war spy movies. It had a agent gone "rogue",CIA and criminals hunting him down with equal ruthlesness, and after a long time, a Russian Assasin hot on his train, with trademark(of hollywood) stubble and a scowl. It has car chases, fist fights, gadgets everything you need a spy film.

A remarkable thing is the amount darkness in the lead character. He is an assasin and he acts like one. bourne character has been converted to quite a complex character instead of the wronged nice assasin of ludlum books. He kills with cold blood, and cries when he thinks of some times of his life. Same goes for other characters.

All in all, The movie is definitely worth a watch.

Going by standards of the hindi movies recently made, this wansnt too bad. It started off quite well, but then due to technological overdose got badly messed up.

Devgan is okay. He is what he usually is. Abhishek is better than usual. But frankly none of them look even a tad like Army officers.