Capt. Ramsey: You do qualify your remarks. If someone asked me if we should bomb Japan, a simple “Yes.” By all means sir, drop that fucker, twice! I don’t mean to suggest that you’re indecisive, Mr Hunter. Not at all. Just, uh… complicated. ‘course, that’s the way the Navy wants you. Me, they wanted simple.

Hunter: Well, you certainly fooled them, sir.

Capt. Ramsey: [chuckles] Be careful there, Mr Hunter. It’s all I’ve got to rely on, being a simple-minded son of a bitch. Rickover gave me my command, a checklist, a target and a button to push. All I gotta know is how to push it, they tell me when. They seem to want you to know why.

Hunter: I would hope they’d want us all to know why, sir.

The above is an interesting conversation between Gene Hackman (Capt.Ramsey) and Hunter (Denzel Washington).

Fury is about a group of such ‘simple’ soldiers and a complicated young recruit who is just assigned to be the co-driver of their tank, ‘Fury’.
As ‘Fury’ rides roughshod over the battle terrains, and flirts with danger and destruction, this group of men, deal the ravages of the war in their own way.  Brad Pitt plays the tough team leader with a spark of conscience, and does a good job of it. So is the rest of the cast. Director David Ayer depicts the war in the brutality that it deserves and it makes you uncomfortable in quite a few scenes. (Like the shooting of the an old German etc)

In the end, ‘Fury’, is a story of coming of age and reconciliation, both for the young guy and the rest of the team. As the horrors of war are heaped on them, they emerge clean with their intentions.

Movies I was reminded of: Saving Private Ryan.

Some movies benefit from star power and some sag under their weight.

Gone Girl falls in to the first category. David Fincher, Ben Afleck and Rosamund Pike contribute their bit and rescue ‘Gone Girl’  from the stigma of a B-grade film. It has enough twists to keep you hooked on till the end, and the unexpected ending though sounds abrupt, differentiates this film from other domestic thrillers.

Rosamund Pike deserves a special mention and she she plays her character to perfection…almost a ‘Meryl Streep’esque performance.

The subtexts about marriage and love though do not contribute much to the thriller aspect of the movie, does leave you wonder  if crime were behind every fortune and some marriages 🙂

Movies I was reminded of: Body Heat, Fatal Attraction, Sleeping with the enemy, What Lies Beneath, Geethanjali (Manitrathnam), Unfaithful, Chinatown, Mr.and Mrs.Smith, The Others, Jagged Edge, 8 Million Ways to Die.

This is my first movie rental on Google play which I chromecasted to a HD TV. It was a HD version for Rs.120…video quality is good, but that of audio is not up to the mark. Guess this is a feature with digital copies as well,  just like the physical DVDs and Blu-Rays available in India.

‘Rise of the planet of Apes (2011)’ is a decent science fiction with a good enough script that lends the required emotional wrap for an action film. It also sports spectacular special effects.

Here are some excerpts from reviews online (From Simian Disobedience )

 Here Caesar plots his escape and, with a developing species consciousness, devises a program of ape solidarity, while Rise becomes a very effective self-contained jailhouse drama, replete with nemesis guard (Tom Felton), prison yard bully (“Rocket”), and the wise old lifer (“Maurice”), a shaggy, melancholy baboon. (Director Wyatt’s previous film, 2008’s The Escapist, was, incidentally, a prison-break picture.)

At this point we’ve spent so much time with Caesar that our identification with the primate is complete, and the ensuing orgy of destruction is played more for a vicarious rush than horror. Some fantastic images follow: A tree-lined suburban street showered with leaves as an invisible army swings through the canopy; a zoo breakout, with apes repurposing wrought-iron fence spikes as spears; the age-old rivalry between gorilla and helicopter. The final shot denotes the ambitions of the apes and 20th Century Fox, respectively: Empire, and franchise.

and RogerEbert.com

That said, the movie has its pleasures, although human intelligence is not one of them. Caesar, to begin with, is a wonderfully executed character, a product of special effects and a motion-capture performance by Andy Serkis, who earlier gave us Gollum in “Lord of the Rings” (and returns in the upcoming “The Hobbit”). One never knows exactly where the human ends and the effects begin, but Serkis and/or Caesar gives the best performance in the movie.