Two psychiatric giants intellectually joust in A Dangerous Method. This biopic on the complex relationship between Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Jung’s patient/mistress (played by Keira Knightley) looked riveting from the previews. I was sold on the concept from the outset. The film comes from David Cronenberg who knows how to present a highly-disturbing story. Initially the film was everything I expected. I […]

Back in 1985, long before fantasy baseball had become popular, I got involved in one of its ancestral forms and that experience exposed me to the importance of seeing baseball as a statistical entity requiring a different type of analysis. It also exposed me to the wonders of Bill James and his approach called Sabermetrics. […]

Here’s my take on The Fighter. This effort has been a major focus for its star and chief proponent Mark Wahlberg. He’d apparently been working to get this out for several years. The movie is a bit of a biopic on the life of two boxing brothers and their quirky family in Lowell, Massachusetts. The older step-brother, Dicky […]

This past Friday I took my son out to see a film I was pretty certain he’d be bored to death with in The King’s Speech. The movie stars Colin Firth as Prince Albert (the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth‘s father) and Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, a speech therapist of last resort. Prince Albert suffered for nearly his entire life with a horrible […]

I nearly forgot that I’d seen 127 Hours two weeks ago which isn’t exactly a good omen. The film is based on an actual news story that seemed, to be frank, impossible to make into a movie. It’s about an adventurous mountaineer who, alone in a remote area of Utah, manages to get trapped between […]

I ended up seeing Nowhere Boy—a biopic on John Lennon that takes us from childhood to his departure for Hamburg where The Beatles honed the skills that soon after brought them to the iconic fame we’re all familiar with. The movie delivers in just the way I think a solid biopic must. It presents a compelling, believable story that infuses […]

I’ve always viewed Facebook as one of those interesting creations that begs the question, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Once you experience these things it’s like wondering how you never connected broad daylight with the appearance of the sun. That said my experience with the service is a bit limited. Just the other day […]

Wow, what a year. This is turning out to be the slowest year for me for movies in quite a long time. Life has thrown me a couple of curveballs of late and I’ve knocked the crap out of a number of them leaving me very little time for the movie theater. The result is […]

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 Public Enemies today. The movie, about real-life 1930s era bank robber and public fascination John Dillinger, stars Johnny Depp For me, the review really should stop right there. It just gets worse from that point on. Much of the movie manages to hold its own. The look is fantastic including both the camera […]

Last week we headed out to see the latest Sean Penn film—a biopic entitled Milk. It’s the story of the first openly gay politician elected to public office in America. The story takes place mainly throughout the 1970s and appears to stay very true to the actual events of the man and his time. The […]

On Saturday we saw the Oliver Stone biopic on George W. Bush called simply, W. There really isn’t a whole lot to like here. Stone knows how to make a riveting movie and this is not one of them. It does a great job of presenting the facts (which he’s had a past tendency to play very loose with) and the acting is […]