So I saw 'Inglourious Basterds'

Okay, you heard it here first: Quentin Tarantino is a movie-maker's movie-maker. When Hollywood threatens to collapse under its own weight, it's peeps like Tarantino who keep things afloat with bold originality and brash wittiness. It's peeps like him who bring freshness and interestingness amidst all the staleness. He and others of his ilk are in a league of their own, where he rules as top dog hands down.

You have to be if you can pull off something like Inglourious Basterds by sidestepping any and all of the proverbial landmines of which movies depicting Nazis and Jews in the same frame are fraught with. You have to be if you can make a dollop of cream look larger than life, a glass of milk like the tastiest drink in the world, the noise of the prosaic act of eating a strudel pregnant with possibilities, violence explode violently. Dialogue purl like a cool stream in the mountains on a pleasant summer day. It's cinema as cinema was meant to be made.

Tarantino is, after all, all about being cinematic. He knows what a movie can and can't do, what a movie does best, what each movie element brings to the table. All while keeping a finger on the audience's pulse: whatever it is you go through during a specific scene, it's because he wants you to; if you find yourself filling in blanks in between scenes, it's also because he wants you to.

In Inglourious Basterds we follow three parallel storylines, all set in the early 1940s of Nazi-occupied France: the first one follows the exploits of SS Col. Hans "The Jew Hunter" Landa (Christoph Waltz), the second one the fate of French-Jewish country girl Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), and the third one the mission of Lt. Aldo "The Apache" Raine (Brad Pitt) and his eight basterds (including Eli Roth as Sgt. Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz, Til Schweiger as Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz, and B.J. Novak as Pfc. Smithson "The Little Man" Utivich). The second and third storylines intertwine with the first one, but never with each other. The overall storyline of betrayal and retribution then climaxes in an inferno that would do Carrie White proud.

A masterpiece. *sheathes bowie knife*

(Running time: 153 minutes)

So I saw 'Surrogates'

What if you take virtual reality a step or two further? What if you could have a life-size, lifelike representation of yourself --a 'surrogate'-- walking and talking irl?

It would be the ultimate dream of perverts, and for everybody else it would mean saying goodbye to wrinkles and creases. Crime and disease rates would plunge to record lows, but so would quality of life, or so The Prophet (Ving Rhames) would have you believe. "A lie" is what he calls the lives of people whom are living their lives through surrogates. He and other like-minded souls, who like to keep it real and old-school, have gathered in small pockets of surrogate-free zones. Outside these pockets, surrogates walk and talk like the living dead in The Polar Express (2004).

Until operators --the peeps operating the surrogates-- start ending up dead along with their surrogates. Detective Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) is assigned to investigate and, whilst on the job, Greer (Willis) finds an excuse to go gritty and roam the streets in the flesh.

A reflection of life in the information age disguised as a who-dunnit murder mystery.

(Running time: 88 minutes)

So I saw 'The Last Legion'

It's a movie for kids, what with the protagonist being a kid (Thomas Sangster as Romulus Augustus, the last Caesar of a crumbling Roman empire). And it's a movie about Excalibur, the sword, and therefore it falls, of course, under the category of fantasy.

It also falls under the category of adventure, as Aurelius (a not-so-beefy Colin Firth), a commander of the Roman army on security detail for said last emperor, gets more than he bargained for as the very life of his young charge becomes threatened when the Goths, being Goths, launch a treacherous attack on the home of Rome's first family; kill the emperor's parents; and ship the boy to a prison island. The boy is not alone though, as he has the company of guru Ambrosinus aka Merlin (Ben Kingsley), a mysterious personality with a knack for showmanship and wise words.

The adventure begins as Aurelius, with the help of his trusty band of comrades and a mysterious but deadly beauty (Aishwarya Rai as Mira), sets out to spring the emperor. The emperor and his guru are sprung and, somehow, they chance upon a mysterious sword, which by posterity would be known by the name of Excalibur.

What's a mystery to me, though, is what purpose the sword side-story serves in the movie; leave it out and no one would be the wiser.

Back from the prison island they learn that they had been had by Rome's politicians, who apparently have cut a deal with the Goths. Aurelius is not impressed and he decides to go to Britannia in search of the Ninth Legion to have them march to Rome and confront the Goths (if I'm not mistaken --the storyline is hard to follow at times; my mind kept on wandering trying to figure out what the deal was with the sword side-story).

They locate the Ninth Legion but only to be confronted by local baddy Vortgyn (Harry Van Gorkum), who apparently has a history with Ambrosinus (something to do with the sword). The movie climaxes in a battle pitching the Ninth Legion against Vortgyn's army and ends with our young emperor denouncing war by throwing the sword into the air, which then lands on and gets stuck in a boulder.

And so the legend begins.

The Last Legion is riddled with clichés and the production has the quality of a play instead of a movie. It would've been a spectacle indeed if the movie was made with extravagant production and grown-ups in mind.

(Running time: 102 minutes)