This past week I got around to seeing Tim Burton‘s incarnation of Alice in Wonderland. As a child I’d read the stories and found them a bit lacking. Maybe it was the female heroine. Maybe it was the goofy characters but I mainly felt they just weren’t very interesting stories. More to the point I […]

My best friend suggested we see something other than the big movie of the week and so we headed off to see The Ghost Writer. The reviews were all pretty glowing and it sounded like a curiously delicious film. The Ghost Writer stars Ewan McGregor as a successful (but unknown) ghost writer who’s given a […]

I’ve had mixed feelings about Martin Scorsese‘s films. Most recently we were offered The Departed and while much of it was clearly brilliant the plot had holes big enough to fly an airship through them. Seeing previews of Shutter Island made me think quite a bit about his past efforts and how many of them […]

As the blizzard of 2010 approached us I decided to go check out the new movie Frozen. It’s a lower-budget independent film that reminded me at once of Open Water—a no-frills movie shot almost entirely in a single oddly claustrophobic set with people you’ve never seen before. Let me say that I’ve enjoyed similar films […]

2009 was a year I’m glad is now behind us. I lost my mother, lost my job, got hit by a drunk driver, saw both of my cars mangled in accidents (in addition to the one with the drunk driver) and, most appropriately, saw less movies as a result. The total was 34 which was […]

This past week I caught my first official film of the 2010 season and it was quite memorable. The film, A Town Called Panic, is quite a strangle experience but well worth the risk. I’ve come to realize that there’s no way to adequately explain the film as it all sounds absolutely ludicrous on the […]

This week found me stuffing in another 2009 film in Clint Eastwood‘s latest film Invictus. The movie focuses on a specific segment of Nelson Mandela‘s early Presidency in which he enlists the aid of the national rugby team to help cure the ills of his fragile country. Mandela, played exceptionally by Morgan Freeman (as if […]

I saw George Clooney‘s latest this past weekend—Up in the Air. The movie’s about a consultant who gets paid to fire people for companies that don’t want to do the dirty work themselves. It was a bittersweet experience to say the least. My job ended in July and I haven’t found anything myself yet so […]

I have to be honest and say that everything I saw about Avatar before it came out made me think it’d be a complete letdown if not a total disaster. The only hope I had was that it was being handled by James Cameron. Cameron has been through such concerns before. People may not recall, […]

Finally got around to seeing Fantastic Mr. Fox. This is the stop-action movie adaptation of the popular book by Roald Dahl. It’s impossible to see the movie and not compare it with the more famous Wallace and Gromit as it shares the same style, look, and feel. I should also mention that, try as I […]

I finally got around to seeing The Men Who Stare at Goats. The previews for this one had me thinking that it looked like a dark comedy that might be a bit too dark. Yet it still had something that kept me interested in it. One of the big concerns was the director, Grant Heslof, […]

This weekend found me catching the latest Philip Seymour Hoffman film — Pirate Radio. The story is very loosely based on actual events regarding a radio station broadcasting into England from a cargo ship out at sea during the mid-1960s. On-screen text tells us that the majority of England are fans except for British government officials […]