Another weekend seeing two films. This one was the Paul Rudd vehicle Our Idiot Brother. The definition of “comedy” is recorded as: “Professional entertainment consisting of jokes and satirical sketches, intended to make an audience laugh.” Using that as a basis for this movie I’d have to say its got major issues. Here we get Rudd as the […]

An opportunistic Irish cop teams up with a by-the-book FBI agent to go after a local group of drug smugglers in The Guard. This movie, starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle, introduces us to Sgt. Gerry Boyle (Gleeson), who just happens to be a cop from Ireland. In fact, this is the first oddity of […]

Woody Allen movies are generally a hit-or-miss affair to the extreme. When they hit they really resonate and create wonderful lasting memories that can be shared with new viewers time and again or even with a bunch who’ve already seen the film a dozen times. When they miss they miss so completely that you wonder […]

On a lazy Sunday with little else out that seemed worthy I decided to give Bridesmaids a shot. Why the reluctance? Well, first of all, I think the star, Kristen Wig is cute but I never found her all that funny on Saturday Night Live. They also tried the bait-and-switch approach I despise by suggesting […]

Rango is the very first animated film from the magicians at Industrial Light & Magic who’ve raised the technology bar in Hollywood so many times over the years that they’ve made it seem commonplace to do so. This first effort has first effort written all over it. The look is typical ILM. In other words […]

Ah, the rigors of traveling for business. I do it all the time and often find time to hit the local cinema to appease my endless movie fix. This time I ended up seeing a rather timely film about travelling for business. It’s Cedar Rapids starring Ed Helms (from The Hangover, The Office and The Daily […]

A politically incorrect womanizer finds love, loss and understanding in Barney’s Version. Here we get to experience a fantastic bit of film-making with story telling of the highest caliber. Every so often a film comes along that just reaches out, grabs you and resonates down to your very core. For me this is one of […]

Disney‘s 50th animated movie, as the pre-show credits point out, is their latest film Tangled. This is essentially a Disneyfied re-imagining of the Rapunzel fairy tale most popularized by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Disney has a long tradition of taking the basic elements of these stories and recreating them as more interesting family fare as most […]

I was looking for something a with a bit of a driving pulse and that brings me to Red. It boasts a cadre of capable stars in Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman. The opening credits included a logo for DC Comics suggesting this story is taken from an existing comic but if so I wasn’t aware of it […]

While traveling for business I managed to catch the new animated sensation, Despicable Me. I saw it last week and just never got around to writing it up which, pretty much, foretells how that’s going to go. Despicable Me is another in a growing list of major animated films in 2010. This one focuses on an aging […]

It’s been 15 years already since we first became enamored with Woody, Buzz and the rest of the gang in the very first Pixar movie, Toy Story. Just as we’ve grown up with them, so has their owner Andy, and it’s here that Toy Story 3 brings the story to a wonderful climax that once […]

This past week I saw two films that were both noteworthy. The first film is Please Give. It stars Catherine Keener as Kate and Oliver Platt as her husband Alex. Kate and Alex are moderately successful furniture store owners that procure their inventory by more or less stalking the estates of occupants who are either […]