A pure sense of hope against a world filled with callous motivations.

Apparently from what I’ve heard Water for Elephants is a much-beloved novel that I’m guessing Oprah recommended based on all the women in the theater the day I saw it. Obviously I never read the book but the movie was certainly quite entertaining. I went into it a bit skeptical as circus movies tend to […]

Okay, I got a little behind on some movie reviews so I need to get to these before they’re totally irrelevant. I’ll post them individually just in case I get side-tracked. I caught Jane Eyre. Here’s a classic work of literature that’s been told several times in various forms and I’ve managed to miss them […]

First I need to point out that I never read the book. Second, the theater I saw this at never mentioned it was Part I, of a trilogy no less. Lord of the Rings this isn’t. The film, from an incredibly dense novel from Ayn Rand, revolves around the trials and tribulations of a pair […]

A suburban South Korean grandmother grows fascinated with poetic prose in Poetry. The film comes with lots of adulation and pedigree. It was an official selection at several film festivals and the reviews were about as stellar as they get. In fact, as I write this it’s got a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve spoken […]

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 […]

Last week I caught the last move of the 2010 season—a film up for an Oscar for Best Animated Film confusingly called, The Illusionist. While commenting about it to others they, of course, think I’m talking about the Edward Norton film from a few years ago. This one is a foreign film about an elderly […]

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 […]

Let’s check out the Coen Brothers remake of the 1969 classic True Grit. Like many others I was shocked at this choice by the brothers as it seemed entirely disconnected from everything else they’ve ever done. However, I am a fan of the original and it’s my main connection with the super-stardom aura that was John Wayne. I’ve seen […]

In a mad dash to see just a few more films of 2010 I managed to catch three very strong ones this past weekend. The first film was the dark and foreboding Black Swan staring Natalie Portman along with Mila Kunis and Barbara Hershey. In a bit of unexpected fun the audience sat in the […]

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 […]