A View from Mars:

The Jacket (B). I'm not exactly sure as to why I sought this movie out but I happened to catch a trailer for it and thought to myself that I would eventually need to see it as it deals with one of my favorite genres, time travel. Adrien Brody stars as a Gulf War vet who was mistaken for dead (think Jacob's Ladder) and then later rehabilitated through some military experiments that probably were not on the up-and-up. We soon flash forward to Brody's stereotypical adjustment to life after the war, as he's hitchhiking to who knows where. During this journey, he stumbles across a small girl and her inebriated mother on the side of the road and helps them fix their truck, establishing him as the saintly loner. This same journey leads to a dead cop's body, and predictably Brody is found guilty and sentenced to a psychiatric ward where he again is subjected to more experiments. This is where the time travel begins, through the unique medium of a straight jacket and morgue drawer no less, and you are left to wonder what is real and what is imagined. I found this movie satisfying enough as long as you stay away from trying to incorporate Stephen Hawking's "Grandfather Paradox" into the story, where as you go back in time and kill your grandfather then you were never born which leads to how you were able to go back in time to kill him in the first place. Good rental, maybe matinee, not worth full price late night admission.

Video review

Saw (B+). This may go down as my highest rated rank of a movie in the horror/scary category and I'm not ashamed to say so. The movie races off the blocks with 2 men chained by foot at opposite ends of a nasty looking warehouse basement room with a dead man in the middle. Neither of the men know exactly how they got there or why. They soon find out that they are pretty much pawns in a game that will eventually lead to someone else's murder or death for themselves. The movie paces itself back and forth between the 2 men trying to figure out this "game," and the detectives on the case of this demented games master who actually has never murdered anyone, only forced the players to do it in the interest of saving their own lives. I have to hands down admit that I truly enjoyed this story and was very glad that the ending exceeded my expectations as I thought I knew where it was heading but was surprisingly wrong. Great rental for any night.