The latest Nicholas Sparks novel to be filmed is Safe Haven. It’s another romance surrounded by elements that threaten an otherwise obvious love affair. I must admit that I’m a huge fan of The Notebook which has gotten me no shortage of curious looks from various friends but I still contend it’s a great love […]
I wish that I had a winning formula for anything — perhaps video game design or writing — that would produce money at a regular rate with different versions of that same formula. Nicholas Sparks seems to have a knack for writing romantic dramas that get turned into movies starring pretty actors kissing in the rain. Some […]
World War II seems to be an endless supply of perspectives and stories that surface in books, movies and various other forms of historical records. The best of these introduce something unexpected and perhaps unsettling to the way you look at a group, location or ideology. Lore uses all of the familiar tropes of fairy […]
A teenage girl in Nazi Germany is left to look after her younger siblings in the closing months of World War II in Lore. There are few subject matters that have been the focus of more films than the Holocaust. Countless films have covered the period from virtually every conceivable perspective to the point of […]
Vampires seemed to be all the rage for a while as far as classic horror movie types. Thanks to The Walking Dead and other successful properties like the novel World War Z and the movie Zombieland, zombies have given the vampires a run for the money. Warm Bodies began life as a 2011 novel from […]
Zombie stories have been the same, more or less, from the dawn of their creation. We know zombies are dead humans infected by some apocalyptic virus leaving them in an undead state doomed to shuffle somewhat aimlessly around collapsing cities and towns forever on the lookout for one thing—brains. It’s mindless existence if it could be called […]
Oscar-nominated director David O’Russell gives us a romantic comedy starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Jacki Weaver and more. Each of the four stars have also been nominated in their respective categories and the movie’s been nominated for best picture. This is, without question, a quirky film that happens to have been shot locally […]
For several weeks (months?) I’ve been acutely aware of the new Hitchcock film starring Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock. Anyone who’s seen a movie lately will know why it’s so easily brought to mind. Hopkins, in full character, has been greeting movie-goers to a funny parody asking people not to text during the movie as […]
I feel cheated. The previews for Anna Karenina did absolutely nothing to prepare me for the unique approach of this telling of the famous Leo Tolstoy story—and I suspect this was very much on purpose. Many people are probably familiar with the tale as there have been decades of books movies, plays and more. However, […]
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is based on the best-selling novel by Stephen Chbosky. The people I saw it with had heard of the book but hadn’t read it. I had no idea about its origin so I went into the story entirely cold. I didn’t expect much based on the previews I’d seen […]
The other film of the week is Woody Allen‘s latest endeavor—To Rome with Love. Here we get a tale that involves us in the story lines of several groups of people all centered around Rome. First there’s Hayley and her new Italian boyfriend Michelangelo (Alison Pill and Flavio Parenti) and her parents, Jerry and Phyllis (Woody Allen and Judy Davis) […]
Here’s a film we didn’t plan to see. My party and I were there to catch another film (Brave) when one of the people in the group suggested we see the new Woody Allen movie first and then see the other film making it a double-header. So, we went about getting tickets and found our […]