This is a wonderful movie documenting the life of Muhammad Ali. I don’t even like boxing, but I would have to say that I admire Ali. He’s got an incredible amount of charisma, it’s almost impossible not to like him — or at least respect his character. Geoff told me to watch this movie, and he was indeed right to recommend it. It was especially interesting to watch it after seeing Will Smith’s performance in Ali. (****)

Whenever I watch TV, I try to avoid watching previews of movies. I like to be surprised by movies and that is impossible to do if you’ve seen all the good bits in the previews. I also try to avoid hearing anything about the plot or any opinions on the show other than whether it is worth seeing or not. That way I can watch the movie and come up with my own opinions. I managed to do that quite often when I was living in Japan because I didn’t have a TV. It’s a bit harder to do here in Canada, but I managed to do it for this movie. I knew that it had Russell Crowe in it (not one of my favourites) and that’s about it. And my clean-slate opinion? It’s not a bad movie. It’s rather long, and I thought it was about to end several times, but having seen it all the way to the end, I can see why most of the scenes were left in. I enjoyed this movie more than I thought I would. (***)

The animation in this movie is incredible. And I had heard that the plot was lame, but it isn’t really that bad. I quite enjoyed this movie and hope that we will see more like it in the future. (You have to like science fiction to enjoy it, and you have to remember not to be too critical about the plot — it’s not about the plot.) If you see the credits at the end, you can see that that it was a U.S./Japan team effort. I would be interested to see how the two cultures worked together on a project like this. (***)