I’ve seen three of the movies on the Netflix Queue I listed a few weeks ago and thought I’d give a mini-review. I liked two of the three pretty well: In the Valley of Elah and Rendition. I stopped the third movie, Margot at the Wedding, about 15 minutes in because it was so boring.

The most interesting part of In the Valley of Elah was the title. Growing up in church, the daughter of a preacher, and the product of a Christian school, the story of David and Goliath is a story I know very well. However, I never remember reading the location of the battle — the Valley of Elah (I Samuel 17:19).

The movie had a couple of other things going for it, too. I liked the father/son devotion as Tommy Lee Jones, who played the dad, searched for his son. It had a crime-solving element, which I liked, and it touched on the issues soldiers deal with after war which I think is important for us to recognize as a real problem.

Rendition also dealt with war, more particularly terrorism. An Egyptian man who lives in America is detained as a suspected terrorist, and questioned and tortured by a group in another country. The man in charge of questioning is tied to the terrorist act in question but in a different way. It was clever how  these two main plots were intertwined and how it all came together in the end. It was shocking, too, to think that (innocent) people suspected of terrorism can be detained and tortured in this way. I put this movie in at 9 p.m. expecting to fall asleep half way through and finish it the following night. But it was engaging enough that, like a good book, I couldn’t stop and watched it all the way through.

Some new additions to the Netflix Queue are:

The Golden Compass

Reservation Road

Untraceable

Stranger Than Fiction

Flags of our Fathers

Mad Money