The missus and I were initially going to see this a couple months ago at the Los Angeles Film Festival (North) but one of us was sick. Can't remember which one. This has happened in previous years. That must be the season for us to get sick. So I've been looking forward to this one for a while now, and I've been making a special effort not to read anything about it. I'm glad I did that.

This is a difficult movie to recommend, though I really liked it. It's a genre film, a weird modern-day film set in LA but filmed like an 80's, existential thriller. I've complained a lot about the slow pacing of films as of late (Contagion, The Debt) and the pacing on this film is even slower than those for the first half, but the difference is that things were actually happening to advance the plot. The first 7-8 minutes of the film have virtually no dialogue but tell a story in and of itself in such a precise and interesting way that it comes off as particularly brilliant. The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, doesn't really show us anything we haven't seen in other films over the years, but his aptitude for the language of filmmaking and storytelling comes off as astonishingly fresh. Overall the movie seems to do a lot with seemingly little. Little dialog. Little action. Surprisingly little driving. It's heavy on subtlety and mood but the more I think about it, 24 hours removed from seeing it, the more depth I feel was there than what I first realized.

In an interview I just read, Refn says, referring to the minimalist dialog in the movie, "We don’t do radio plays or plays. We do movies, which is about what you see. Or what you don’t see." I couldn't exactly put my finger on it at the time, but this is really the most brilliant thing about it. The audience is left to fill in the details, if they think they need to, without being beat over the head with exploratory scenes that add nothing to the story. When a character with an injured leg, when asked about said injury, replies "I've paid my debt", you know exactly what he means without spending 10 minutes going back to see how he got injured.

All this subtlety and nuance will turn a lot of people off. Another thing that will turn some people off is the R rating. Or, more accurately, the reason for the R rating. I don't want to give anything away, but I'll say that it earns that rating pretty soundly, and there is not a lot of sex, drugs, nudity or hard language in the film. 'Nuff said.

If you're the kind of moviegoer that likes to have things spelled out for you, then don't bother with Driver. It's not a particularly complicated story, nor is there anything to 'get' or 'not get'. It doesn't make you think or contemplate anything, though there does seem to be a whole other story bubbling just under the surface. It's more an exercise in mood and style but with enough character to keep me involved and interested throughout. I always wanted to know what was coming next. It sucked me into the time and place (an almost loving tribute to the grittiness of LA) and really worked for me.

I'm 40 years old. I've lived a little. I like to think that I'm at least semi-intelligent. At the very least I don't think I'm a total buffoon. I see anywhere from 40-50 movies a year, not counting what I might watch on TV. I feel my movie vocabulary is pretty well developed. Yet sometimes a movie comes out that is critically acclaimed and I just don't know what the fuck is going on. Contagion is one of those movies. Perhaps the critics are judging based on the names associated with the movie and not the movie itself, in which case Contagion gets an A+++. But it has been a while since I've seen a movie that is so slow, so boring, so without tension, so lacking in any drama whatsoever and just so dumb. It had all the excitement of my high school chemistry class, and I hated that goddamned class. (No offense, Coach K.)

My wife pointed out how astonishing it was that it maintained the exact same level of boring from the first frame to the last. None of the characters were developed enough for me to care if they lived or died. Merely mentioning the millions of people who died (spoiler alert!) from the virus does not, repeat NOT, create any sympathy from the audience. It's just a number that someone throws out while we watch these boring scientists do boring sciency things. Even the end credits were boring, the way they flashed on screen like at the end of a TV show instead of doing the slow crawl that we expect from modern Hollywood films.

I should have known something was afoot when Demetry Martin showed up. At least they killed off Gwyneth Paltrow immediately.

As is my recent tradition, I'd like to rail on the details that they missed, aside from the big detail of making a move that wasn't a complete waste of time:

1. There are not 3,000,000 people in San Francisco. I don't even know where that number came from, as there are twice that in the entire Bay Area. Describing anything in the Bay Area as having a population of 3 million would require combining a few random cities, like Oakland plus San Francisco, San Jose and most of Marin County.

2. Warner Bros.' own press states "Contagion follows the rapid progress of a lethal airborne virus..." while the movie makes it very clear, over and over, that the virus is spread through touch.

3. At one point Morpheus asks if the immunization could be put in the water to 'cure everyone at once'. As we all know, immunizing people does not cure anything, it prevents them from getting something. They never said anything about cures in the movie, they were not looking to save the sick.

4. Jude Law's character had one horrendous buck tooth. It was so poorly done that in one closeup you could clearly see his real tooth behind the buck. Hollywood has solved the problem of fake teeth (see The Hangover or Beetlejuice.) Not sure where they got these makeup guys from.

The only redeeming aspect of the whole movie is that in one scene they showed Sutro Tower. If you don't know what Sutro Tower is, it's because you don't live nor have never visited San Francisco. It's only the most prominent feature of our skyline yet the popular media never depicts it. Kudos to Contagion for showing it but the rest of the movie can go to hell for making The Debt look good.

I don't recall where I heard about this move or what really compelled me to see it, other than it being a documentary and I hadn't seen one for a while. I didn't have a clue who Ayrton Senna was. Boy am I glad I found out. This turned out to be one of my favorite movies of the year, definitely in my top 5 and we still have more than three months to go.

Senna was a Formula 1 driver in the late 80's and early 90's and to this day is considered by most people to be the best F1 driver in history. The documentary is less of a straight biography but more of a profile of a person and a sport during a specific timeframe. It covers Senna in-depth but also gives a good sense of the sport of F1 racing, the politics, the rivalries, the technology, everything. The most ingenious part of the film is that it was told completely using archival footage. No talking heads. No contemporary interviews. No graphics. Just 20 year-old plus film and audio, much of it of Senna himself. Many of the audio recordings of his siblings, media personalities and other racers talked about him in the present tense, which helped to give the film a great, dated quality that put you into that time and place. I felt more like I was watching the events as they happened rather than watching a modern presentation of it. Pure brilliance.

Senna himself was a great character, too. Personality and charisma to spare, I couldn't wait to find out what he was going to say next. Senna the man and Senna the movie were thoroughly engrossing, dare I say captivating.

So, you could say I liked this one. You won't see a better documentary this year, and I'm hard pressed to remember very many I've seen in the past few years that I liked better. Go see this.

SNOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEE! I find it hard to believe a movie about spying and espionage could be so boring, but I kept thinking I may just want to take a nap at this one. We saw it at my work so it would have been a major faux pas to get up and walk out.

There was just nothing at stake here, except the reputations of three Mossad agents who were bickering assholes through the entire movie. No emotional weight whatsoever. I didn't care for any of the characters, no matter what age they were.

The plotting was exceptionally slow, too. After what I thought was the first 90% of the movie dragged on and on, I discovered that only an hour of real time had elapsed. Ungh. I should have faked a heart attack at that point. Ha ha. Man, the more I think about it the more contempt I feel for this movie.

Aside from the lame plot, weak psychological angles, horrendous accents, stiff acting and cheap 'twist' at the end, which wasn't a twist, it was stupid ... there were a bunch of little technical things, lack of attention to detail, that really made the movie seem like amateur hour.

Case 1: These Mossad agents were holding a hostage in an apartment in Berlin. They repeatedly put a piece of tape over his mouth so he wouldn't make noise, yet the agents routinely did kung fu in the livingroom, plus had loud, heated arguments amongst themselves. They had nothing to worry about as far as noise from the hostage.

Case 2: Fingerprints do not glow under a black light unless you put something on them.

Case 3: A point is made to show Helen Mirren's character as a bit of a notable person. She breaks into a journalist's desk because he is researching an article that may expose a lie she and her cohorts told 30 years ago. She finds a picture of herself in the file and exclaims to one of the others on the phone "He knows what I look like!" No shit, you think? The movie went to great lengths to show that she had achieved a level of notoriety in the 30 years since the incident, and she's surprised that a journalist, of all people, would know what looked like? Or who she even was? Everyone on Earth should have known who she was and she's surprised that a journalist researching an article about the person she allegedly killed might have done a little background check?

Case 4: My wife pointed out that the male leads' acting pairs (the old and young versions of the characters) were not even close to looking correct. One of them was vaguely white as a younger guy and was Italian as an adult. The directing and editing was so bad throughout that I didn't even notice.

Case 5: Helen Mirren claimed to kill the guy in the alley, near the street. Yet nobody thought to check for blood or perhaps a body? Where did they claim the dude went after she shot him? They never covered this.

So, I guess you could say I didn't like this. I didn't like it one bit. What a waste of time.

Yep, it's French. A French thriller. A French thriller that pretty much blew away almost every other movie I've seen so far this year. This will easily be in my top five, perhaps even my top 1 depending on how the rest of the year goes. This is how action movies should be made. Short (80 minutes), taught, fast but well paced, and filled with intriguing characters and bits of realism sprinkled throughout the absurdity. As with The Mechanic earlier this year, I have to give a big thumbs up to the writing. Even given the abbreviated running time of the movie, characters are fleshed out, betrayals well documented, allegiances properly blurred just enough to make you wonder who the bad guys really are. The germ of the plot is one of my favorites, the everyman thrust into an extraordinary situation. The actors all played well together and even the final resolution was satisfying. This was the first movie I can think of this year, aside from the aforementioned The Mechanic, where I didn't leave the theater thinking 'It was great, except ...'. I couldn't find anything to complain about and anyone interested in the action/thriller/noir genre/tradition should seek this one out.

What the hell, man. I wasn't going to touch this thing with a 10 foot pole, then it got a bunch of good reviews. Shit. I couldn't stay away. It turns out this movie is better than anyone expected, even with James Franco phoning in his performance. The real performances you want to see, though, are Andy Serkis as the chimp. The creature CG on this was pretty incredible. The close-in shots were really well done while some of the wider shots did look a little CG-ish. But overall, an amazing job by Weta Digital.

Anyway, the story meshed nicely with what we know happened in the original Planet of the Apes. It fits well with the Apes canon. It was interesting to see the main monkey, Cesar, start out as a baby, go through some early stages of life, then the brooding 'teenager' then develop into leader of the monkeys. His character was the best written, that's for sure.

Without giving too much away, I thought their handling of human extinction was an interesting idea, albeit an afterthought in the movie. If memory serves, this is the only part that doesn't fit in with the original storyline, but it doesn't really matter.

My main complaints about the movie were James Franco's performance, which was kinda wooden and boring. Someone that's actually a full time actor might have done a better job, like say Christopher Lloyd or Gene Wilder. Any mad scientist would have done. I also thought they went out of their way to put too many references to the first Planet of the Apes film in there. Having Malfoy utter Heston's classic 'Damn dirty ape' line in a different context was really, really stupid. There were also references to some of the monkeys (apes! damn it!) being ancestors to characters from the original movie. They also showed the spaceship from the original taking off and a newspaper headline saying that they were lost in space. Kinda not necessary.

But overall, surprisingly satisfying summer fare.

This one will be hard to find but is worth seeking out. It stars Brendan Gleeson as an Irish cop in a small town that gets mixed up in an investigation of a drug trafficking ring lead by the FBI's Don Cheadle. The writer/director is the brother of the guy that made In Bruges. The humor has the same sensibility, the plot the same types of twists but this one is a little more straight and less farcical. It took a bit to get bast Gleeson's accent and I still missed some jokes, but the writing and pace were great and overall it was pretty enjoyable.

It's been a long time since I can remember liking a movie that had so many cliches in it. But what this romantic comedy has going for it is Ryan Gossling and Emma Stone, two of my favorite people Throw in Steve Carrel and you can't really go wrong, no matter how many 'by the book' things they do. There were enough unconventional scenes and story lines to keep it interesting, but I mostly liked Gossling plus Stone and her sidekick. This one is rated PG-13 so it's not as raunchy as Friends With Benefits, but it's still worth seeing if you're in the mood for a romantic comedy with not a lot of swearing in it.

Not to be confused with that piece of crap Ashton Kucher movie from earlier this year. I didn't see that one but still, I know it was a piece of shit.

I was pleasantly surprised by how good this one was. It's another in a recent line of R-rated comedies and it was surprisingly well written. I was laughing all the way through. That doesn't often happen with romantic comedies.

Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis are both good looking people and have good chemistry on-screen. Both are very funny. You also get some Kunis side-boob and more bare Timberlake ass than you would normally want to see. I guess you have to take the good with the bad.

Emma Stone made sort of a cameo that was one of the more hilarious side-bars I've seen in a movie in a long time. Shaun White (the snowboarder/skateboarder) had a couple cameos that were equally funny. Dude can't act to save his life but they gave him one of the best lines in the movie.

The plot was predictable, you knew how it was going to turn out, but it didn't matter. You just wanted to watch the two interact, as well as interact with a great supporting cast which included Woody Harrelson, whom I normally don't like. The only flaw I might want to point out is that I thought the Richard Jenkins character was a bit of a bummer, and the resolution of the admittedly cliched ending was basically him saying 'Go get em, Tiger!' But overall it didn't really matter. There was enough other good stuff in it to hold my attention and after a lot of disappointments this year it was nice to see a movie that exceeded my expectations by such a large margin.

This was a rare occasion where my wife heard about a movie before I did. Attack the Block is a low-budget, British alien invasion movie, but it has a lot going for it. It was cleverly written and put a new spin on alien invasion movies. It's probably the best alien movie I've seen since District 9.

The story starts off with a group of teenage British thugs mugging a woman. That mugging is interrupted by an alien falling to Earth nearby. That event puts into motion various actions that put both the victim and the thugs at the forefront of fighting off the ensuing invasion. The reason behind this is pretty clever but I won't say anything about it here in case anyone wants to see the movie. The plot mechinations to get to that point are well planned out and revealed in fits and starts that really made great use of pacing.

The aliens themselves were pretty cool and unique, too. The resembled bears rather than lizards, but with glow-in-the-dark teeth. Pretty menacing. Having a few of those chasing you down a dim corridor, or perhaps attacking you while you are in a rubbish bin, were pretty effective at frightening my wife. Ha ha. (Hi, baby!) They avoided perpetuating the cliche that aliens that attack us will be slimy and scaly, while likely staying within their low budget for creature effects. In any case, it all fell together and worked for me. This one is worth a look if you like simple, suspenseful, yet clever movies about alien invasions.

One thing I will part with is a small complaint. I thought the young actors playing the thugs were terrible. This may be due to inexperience, and maybe due to the writing. I don't know any British teenagers but there is no way they say 'check it' as much as these characters. If I come across a real live British teenager that says that to me I'm going to punch him. It didn't ruin the movie, and you got used to it, but I thought some of the kid actors were trying to hard (or were directed to try too hard.)

I hate to have to do this, as I was really looking forward to this one, but I ended up not really liking this at all. It lacked some polish in many areas, including both script/writing and the overall look of the film.

The pacing was too slow. Not enough really happened. It didn't have a movie 'feel' to it, it felt more like a TV show. It actually looked like one, too. I'm not sure what was going on. We have one of the best theaters in the world at work with a professional projectionist, so I don't think it was that. But the print looked washed out to me, especially in the third act when they were outdoors most of the time. Everything was pasty white. The dirt was light colored. It was not pretty to look at. This took away from the depth you usually get when watching movies in a theater. I know this movie was expensive to make but it looked cheap. The effects were fine, but the color was so flat it was distracting.

Without giving too much away, Olivia Wilde's character was nearly useless, and she didn't have to be a woman. She could have been another man or even the dog and her purpose in the plot would have been the same. As it was she just rode around with the guys being pretty. I'm not denying she's nice to look at, and she's super-cute when she's wearing a cowboy hat, but the male characters were appropriately dirty, dinged up and bloody, and every time they showed her she was pristine, had perfect makeup and huge white teeth. It was distracting.

Her character, again trying to be vague as to not give anything away, drew no interest from anyone, as a woman, for 99% of the movie. No romance, no attraction. For the most part Daniel Craig's character was repulsed by her most of the time. Yet at the end when everything is blowing up, folks were suddenly interested in where she was and if she was going to make it, etc., with certain undertones insinuating that she and Daniel Craig should/would hook up. There is one important plot point that would make this impossible, and even disgusting, so it was really odd to tack that on at the end. I'm wondering if her character was filmed with two different purposes in mind that they planned on deciding on later, but then they accidentally mixed them up in post. It just made no sense.

One more thing I can complain about is Daniel Craig's voice. I think he did an okay American accent, but he didn't talk much and when he did it sounded dubbed. Lots of ADR on his part to the point where it was almost comical.

Paul Dano was in this one and what can I say except that he was as terrible as usual. At least he wasn't in it for most of the running time.

I don't think this is a case of having too high of hopes as it still would have missed the mark if I had medium hopes or low expectations. Just a misfire all around.

Hurray! Finally, a documentary! If my 40 year old self went back to tell my 15 year old self that I'd look forward to documentaries, I'd have thought I was nuts. But most of the more memorable movies I've seen in the last decade or so have been documentaries (Shut Up and Sing, Planet B-Boy, Note By Note, etc.)  I don't know that this one will be as memorable five years from now but it was a really good story about A Tribe Called Quest, the pioneering hip-hop group, and their trials and tribulations over the last 20 years or so. This was a documentary where the members of the group are all still alive and participated in the film, so it was really interesting to get different members' take on events that unfolded and to see how they all had very different perspectives on their relationships to each other and the group.

The film was directed by Michael Rapaport, who is an incredibly terrible actor who I hate to see on screen, but behind the camera he managed to put together a pretty good film with excellent pacing and editing. I think he should stay on that side of said camera more, he'll be way more successful.

Even if you don't like hip-hop or have never heard of A Tribe Called Quest, this one is worth seeing. It's like Behind the Music on steroids, except the band itself does much of the narrators job.

Not bad, not bad at all. Not groundbreaking in any way but a well executed old fashioned superhero movie. By old fashioned, I sort of mean that literally. The movie took place in the 40's and had all the style that entails, including a sort of color-sepia tone to the print projected on the screen. It was a nice touch.

The story was brisk, the acting good, and the effects were pretty good, especially the whimpifying of Chris what's his name from Scott Pilgrim. The skateboarder guy. Anyway, worth seeing but I'm not sure the 3D was needed. It was well done but for me it didn't add anything to the experience.

This one turned out to be about what I expected, which is to say I really liked it. Despite the lack of ILM participation, the effects were very good and the 3D was used sparingly but to great effect. Which is to say they didn't focus so much on the human characters with the 3D and blew their wad on some of the effects, which turned out great. Two standout scenes in particular were the scene in the vault with the multiplying objects, as well as the initial attack on Hogwart's. Nice eye candy.

While I will admit that while the film was pretty true to the book and did its best to tie up some loose ends, I think they tried to cram in too much. People who haven't read the book may be left scratching their heads. They allude to a lot of things that were only in the books. Not much that is truly important to the plot, but things that will make you wonder 'Why did they put that in there?'

This half-chapter in the Harry Potter saga has the shortest running time of all the movies, and I think it suffers for it (along with the script issues mentioned above.) I think they could have done better if they took out some of the 'winks' to the true Potter fans that read the book(s), and spent some time building on the tension that they worked so hard on in Part 1. As well as the few mano a mano fights were staged and produced, the overall battle of Hogwarts did not seem grand enough for me. There were some impressive wide shots and set pieces, but having just watched the Bluray of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there was really no comparison as far as the overall war. No scenes, like in Lord of the Rings, where you can see hundreds if not thousands of combatants charging into battle all at once. A lot of the staging after the battle starts was from too close in and it made it harder to care what happened, even though I already knew. There are ways to make the inevitable interesting to look at.

One other little complaint: Not enough Luna. She's the best character in the book series and was only used sparingly in part 2.

Anyway, I still liked it a lot but it could have been better if it was constructed in such a way that you didn't have to have read the book to understand it.

Spoiler alert. Seriously, if you haven't read the book, do not finish reading this review.

One thing that I think they skimped on, related to my complaint about the battle of Hogwarts and their focus on things that didn't necessarily make sense in the context of the movie, were some of the deaths that occurred during the battle. Tonks and the Werewolf just show up dead at one point, as well as one of the Weasely twins. We don't get to see how they died and thus I think we lost a certain emotional 'heavyness' that I recall was more pronounced in the book. This is just one thing they chose to not focus on that they could have done a better job at, while taking out some of the cruft that didn't move the story along.

Lame name, pretty good movie. I had low expectations but they were soundly surpassed. I laughed way more than I thought I would. This one definitely earns its R rating. Colin Farrel was funnier than he is usually called on to be. Kevin Spacey played a really good douche. Laughs across the board for the cast. What's his ass from It's Always Sunnier ... made me laugh the most, I think. In any case, this one is well worth your time if you're in the mood for a good, harmless, R-rated comedy.

I have to admit, even though I'm on Team Brad, that Jennifer Aniston played a pretty good, uh ... slut ...? Yeah, let's call it that. Asmost endless opportunities for comedy at the dentist's office. Props to director Seth Gordon for putting the star of one of his other movies, King of Kong, in the movie. Apparently Steve Wiebe played 'Head of Security' but I don't recall a head of security being on-screen at any given time. At one point Kevin Spacey's character calls a Head of Security on the phone but I can't recall if anyone answered. Perhaps Steve's part was cut but he was still given a credit? He was listed right near the top during the ending credits, though. Maybe he just wants his SAG card and Seth threw him a bone?

The main thing I can say about this one is that it was better than the first two, especially better than the second one. It took most of the same kind of shit from the others but took out some of the attempts at camp. No minstrel robots, no robot testicles, very few robot puns, etc. But that still leaves us with basically a lot of exposition and shit blowing up. If there is one thing Michael Bay knows, it's blowing shit up, and a lot of the visuals and set pieces in this one were very well done. Homeboy has the technical shit down. The 3D was also very well done without being extremely overdone. I had the benefit of seeing this at work, in one of the best theaters in the nation, with one of the best projectionists in the business. The overall look was pretty bright and shiny, which is not normal for a live-action(ish) 3D movie. I didn't feel like I was watching the movie through a thin cloth.

I've only been out of the theater for about an hour and I couldn't tell you what the hell the movie was about. It wasn't overly complex or anything, but it just doesn't matter in these kinds of films. They're not made to wow you with plot. Something about some bad robots and some good robots and then one of the good robots (spoiler alert!) is actually bad. Then they destroy Chicago.

Shia was good, but a bit more manic than usual. I think. Can't remember. He seemed like he yelled a lot more in this one. He had one scene where he hilariously screamed like a little girl. I know a lot of people don't like him but I do. John Turturo also was great, as usual. The new Megan Fox was okay, I guess. She's British so it's hard to tell if she can act or not. Everything she said just sounded so regal. She's a model but was not called upon to wash cars or fix motorcycles or whatever stupid crap Bay had Fox doing in the first two. She held her own when on screen with robots and whatnot, so good for her.

I got to see this one a few days early and I have to say it was a bit of a letdown. I'm not sure why it is getting such great reviews. Maybe it was a victim of too-high expectations but despite the good direction, effects, pacing, etc., it is an empty shell where the substance of a movie should have been. I felt like in the end, I didn't know anything about these characters and it didn't really matter if the alien killed them all.

All the cliche'd movie characters were there: the widowed sheriff's deputy who doesn't really know his son, the nerd with a crush on the hot tween, the pyromaniac kid, the one with a nervous stomach that throws up a lot, the fat hyperactive one. They characters, especially the kids, wore their quirks on their sleeves and may as well have not had names. The time spent spinning wheels on these cliches took away from the other half of the story, the escaped creature part of it. That half of the story I would have liked to have seen more of. The movie felt like two parts, one great, one mediocre, which never quite meshed.

While not a colossal waste of time, I left the theater wanting more, or in some cases less.

I liked the first one better but this one was pretty good, too. I'm not sure it needed to be in 3-D and the 'haze' associated with 3D projection was pretty pronounced. This one just didn't seem to have the 'pop' that the first one had. This movie was geared more toward kids but there were some scary elements that made one kid cry in our theater. Of course, I think that kid was in infant so maybe it was just time for crying. Ha ha. Anyway, maybe a little boring but not bad. I would like to call out the special effects, which I thought were superb. The fireworks and other fire-based effects were the only thing bright and lively on the screen.

Not bad, not bad at all. This imagining of the origin of the X-Men was tight and action packed. The effects were pretty good and I left fully satisfied. It was a perfect mix of action, storytelling with just the right touch of comedy. Not much else to say about it. Thumbs up.

The LA Film Festival (North) is back! Wooooooo! What this means is we'll be able to see some obscure movies over the next week, and there's usually one or two gems in there. This one was not it but it was still a pretty interesting story. Made you think a little bit.

The main premise was that another, seemingly parallel Earth has been discovered, and we are sending people to it. The story centers around a character with high ambitions who's life is sidetracked by a car accident. The second part of the story involves her connection with another person involved in that accident (not that you're going to see this movie, but I'm trying not to put any spoilers in here.)

The movie started out interesting then ran into some pacing issues. I almost felt like I was watching two different movies intertwined in the second act. It just didn't fit together nicely. However, the ending does tie everything together fairly well, especially the last three seconds or so of the film. Seriously, I let out an audible gasp at the end, which I never do. It was pretty damn clever and lead to a pretty long discussion of it in the car on the way home.

This is worth checking out if you want to see something different and unique but I think you really need to be an avid moviegoer to enjoy it through and through.

There is not much to say about this movie except that it was just as good as the first one. They used the same exact formula and more or less the same characters, and it worked. Very funny.

Hmmmmm. This one turned out to be way more boring than it could have. This is a documentary by Werner Herzog shot in 3D. It's about the Chauvet caves in Southern France. Look them it, it really should have been more interesting but something about the pace and style of the doc made it a bit of a snoozer. I will say that the cinematography and 3D really made the visuals pop. I almost think it may have been more interesting if were were allowed to just soak in what was on the screen and not be distracted by the sound. I really was hoping to like this one, there is enough in the caves to be interested about but the presentation here just fell flat.

I wasn't expecting much when I went into this one, but my expectations were grossly exceeded. Surprising, since this came from the same studio though brought us Iron Man 2. I'm not really 'keen' on the Thor mythology, Loki, Valhalla, etc., but they explained just enough so that everything made sense (in their world.) Despite the length of the movie (nearly two hours) I thought it was lean and well paced. The acting was good all across the board (special shout out to Kat Dennings, who killed it.)

One of the main things I liked about it (spoiler alert) was that Thor was not really Thor for most of the picture. This was largely a fish out of water story for the second act and I was surprised at how sharp some of the comedy was.

The effects were pretty good but I would like to complain about the walkway leading up to the teleporter thingy. It looked kind of cartoony. Other than that it was well done and the visuals were pretty sharp. I didn't even know that this movie was in 3D (post converted) and it really didn't need it. There were a couple of scenes that looked pretty cool in 3D but overall there was enough on the screen to keep you busy without having to focus on three dimensions.

Anyway, this turned out to be one of the better movies I've seen this year so far. Thumbs up.

I have to admit to a little man love toward Morgan Spurlock. I like the guy. He has the same sense of humor I have so I'd be hard pressed to not like something he does, though I have to admit I've skipped his last two outings (Where in the World is Osama bin Laden and What Would Jesus Buy?) This movie was different from Supersize Me in that Morgan didn't seem to really have an angle, opinion or hypothesis about the subject, which was advertising, specifically product placement in movies. His stated goal was to make a movie about product placement which itself was paid for by product placement. By all counts it looks like he succeeded.

Much of the movie is Morgan being Morgan and that's what I pay to see, but it was interesting to see the process by which products are placed in movies. There was one short part about (shit, forgot the term) something to the effect of neural marketing. They sat Morgan in an MRI machine and took readings as they showed him certain images. The guy pointed at a scan of his brain when he was looking at some sort of Coke commercial and said 'That's addiction'. It was interesting how they study people's reaction to certain images or suggestions and then (seemingly, though they didn't go that far) tailor advertising toward a certain audience.

It was also sort of creepy to see video of Sao Paulo, Brazil, which has recently banned all outdoor advertising. I think it speaks to American's, and my specifically, acceptance of advertising in all aspects of life that the absence of them looks weird and, frankly, a little bit ugly. That wasn't really the point of the movie or even that scene but it was certainly an eye opener to me.

Like I said, there was no angle, hypothesis or conclusion, just a story about Morgan going through his little quest. It was still very entertaining and eye-opening in some (probably) unintended ways. I'm betting this will be on my top 10 of the year, if not the top 5.

Yes, I'm keeping the spelling the way they had it up until about two weeks ago, I think it's 22% more awesome. Anyway, I didn't see any of the other 'fast' movies so I have nothing to compare this one to, but standing on its own this one wasn't too bad. It was pretty entertaining in a mindless, stupid way. The movie itself seemed to know it was over the top ridiculous so everyone was along for the ride. I think the Rock (no, we will never call him Dwayne Johnson) had the stupidest line which was also hilarious at the same time. That's just how the dialog was:

Cop: I have some good news and some bad news.

Rock: You know I like my dessert first.

Cop: [gives him the good news.]

Rock: Okay, now gimme the vegetables.

Anyway, stupid and funny, like the whole movie, except with some pretty spectacular set pieces and stuntwork. I know there was a good amount of CG in there but a lot of the driving and whatnot looked too real to be fake, you know? There were a lot of stunt players in the credits and there was some standout work up there on screen.

Fast 5ive is a good kickoff movie for the summer season. It's been getting some good reviews so I expect it to clean up at the box office.

This weekend was a twofer. We originally wanted (well, at least I wanted as I was dictating the movie schedule today) to see something else. Turns out the theater was closed on account of Easter, plus we were nowhere near in the area at the correct time. So we rode down to another theater and saw this well reviewed movie. It was not that great. My overall feeling is that this would have made a good short story, and maybe it was a short story, but there just wasn't enough in it to warrant a full length feature. There was a lot of filler that was not essential for the telling of the story. Several hours removed from the viewing I think I've also come to the conclusion that Theodore "Ted" Logan (no, I did not have to look that up) and Vera Farmiga have little to no chemistry on screen. Vera's character, now that I think about it, was somewhat bipolar and a bit shrill at times. Not very endearing to me.

I tell you who was endearing, James Caan. Goddamn, he stole every scene he was in. He did an awesome job and I would have been happy to sit through 90 minutes of just him. But alas, instead we were just left with this dud that happened to have a bunch of good scenes with James Caan in them.

I probably would never have seen this one on my own, but my wife kinda sorta wanted to see it, and it was free, and we like going to Marin and doing stuff. In any case, it was better than I expected. The story was pretty well paced, there were no dead spots in the movie. It didn't seem like it was 2 hours long. The acting was pretty good, especially by the evil Cristoph Waltz. It got a little melodramatic at times but a lot of people around us fell for that, what with the crying and clapping for the elephant.

So, it was good, but just not my bag. Two things I'd like to mention:

1. I was lead to believe by the title that there would be multiple elephants. There was only one elephant.

2. There was one time when I almost laughed at an unintentionally funny moment. It wasn't one of those times when something was so awful it was funny. It was just a bad decision by the director. There was a very dramatic, sad scene involving the elephant where other characters (aside from the Vampire and June Carter Cash) come running to the scene. One of the characters in the movie is a midget clown, and in this scene he comes running urgently in from stage right, except he's dressed in his full clown regalia, with facepaint, a little sheriff's outfit and a comical oversized badge. This is the only scene in the movie where I recall he was in this garb and it was very out of place and secretly hilarious.

Not bad. Not bad at all. I had a few nitpicks earlier in the day about this one but maybe I care less about them now. This was a pretty well crafted thriller than had elements of a sort of time travel, body replacement and romance mushed together with an exploding train. Ha ha, kinda difficult to imagine all those together but it was well executed. It's good to see a few movies based on original content, meaning not a sequel or comic book.

Spoiler alert: The one big thing I think they got wrong was when Prince of Persia was flashing into and out of his alternate universe(es), they consistently showed clips of him with the girl at the 'bean' in Chicago. The train never made it anywhere near Chicago in the eight minutes he had, so I thought that this foreshadowing kind of ruined part of the ending for me. I just *knew* he'd end up in some alternate reality where he got the girl. I didn't really formulate how he would arrive at that but I think they could have held that part out, it didn't do anything except unnecessarily reveal where the story was really going.

Second spoiler alert: I'm still on the fence about the story of him and his father, too. For some reason it seemed shoehorned into the script. I think they could have done a better job with it, somehow gave that storyline more depth. It almost seemed like and afterthought to me.

In any case, neither of those things ruined the movie or made it bad, just two nitpicks they could have done better. Still worth seeing if you like interesting thrillers.

Yes, I saw Arthur. My honey is out of town and I had a few hours to kill while my motorcycle was in the shop. So there.

There is no real reason for this movie to exist, but it wasn't terrible. I've seen two worse movies already this year. It was pretty innocuous but Russel Brand is charming in his own way. Luis Guzman stole a few scenes. There were some good jokes and banter, but as far as romantic comedies go, it wasn't that romantic.

I was 9 or 10 when the original Arthur came out and the only thing I remember about it was that incessant, annoying laugh from Dudley Moore that made me, even at that age, want to punch him in the face contsantly until he went unconscious. Thankfully, Brand doesn't try to mimic Moore and makes Arthur more of his own character. Just on those merits alone I'd say this remake is better than the original.

Yes, I saw hop. Here was my original plan.

My wife is out of town and we sort of have a rivalry about movies. Well, she does. She insists that we see the same number of movies in a given year, but they don't have to be the same set of movies. The free screening in Marin (North of here) was Hop and she made a joke about me seeing it to 'get ahead' in our little game, which only she plays. Anyway, yeah, it would be funny if I did that. So I did.

The second part of the plan was that after the movie I would keep heading North on the 101 and go for a nice motorcycle ride. The fly in the ointment was that after the movie I realized I had forgotten my wallet at home. Shit. I got back home at a decent time so I decided to go on with the trip, it's just that I had to waste about 30 miles of driving, plus go over the Golden Gate bridge ($5) a second time. Joke was on me, I guess!

Anyway, the movie rightly sucked. It wasn't horrible. If I were 10 or younger I'd probably have loved it, and there were a zillion kids in the theater that seemed to enjoy it. The movie really is targeted at young kids. There are no stupid pop references or in-jokes for the parents, save for a couple of the soundtrack choices. As a kids movie you could do worse. There were actually a few good jokes:

1) The face the bunny was making as he was pooping jelly beans.

2) Russel Brand's live cameo, a stage hand calling for 'Eb' backstage, instead of pronouncing the initials (E.B.)

3) The bunny pretending to be a wind-up toy.

Anyway, that was it. I've obviously seen one worse movie this year so far, but if you have a young kid they'd probably like this one.

Wow. What a tremendous, tremendous misfire. Yes, it deserved two 'tremendouses'. I'ts hard to even describe what went wrong with this thing because so little went right. On paper, you'd think that a movie with the following things in it might turn out slightly entertaining, at least to the average dude:

half-naked chicks

half-naked chicks fighting with samurai swords

half-naked chicks firing big guns

steam-powered zombie nazis

robots

people being stabbed

people being shot

a dragon

helicopter chasing a train

blimps exploding

Scott Glenn

did I mention there were half-naked chicks?

What this movie really represents is all the cool things a 14 year-old videogame addict would like to see in a movie, then the same 14 year-old gets to actually write the movie, too. There was no order to the chaos. There was no emotional resonance to make you care about any of the characters. What passes for plot made no sense in the context of a movie, though it would have made sense in the context of a videogame (collect these five things, then you're free.) There was seemingly no connection between the five things or reason for collecting them. I almost feel like this movie was a collection of puzzle pieces from a dozen different puzzles.

The visuals were decent, there was a lot to look at. But you can only look at a series of pretty, disconnected paintings for so long before you get bored. I actually dozed off for a few minutes. For a movie that tried so hard it's difficult to figure out why it was so uninteresting. The only redeeming quality I can think of is that I did stay glued to my seat the whole time. I didn't feel compelled to walk out because I couldn't wait to see how far off the rails it could fly. That train flew pretty goddamned far.

It's sort of a shame, too. I liked The Watchmen and I think Zack Snyder has some directing chops. Not so much with the writing. I had read somewhere that Snyder did not have final cut and he turned in a hard R rated movie, which the studio ended up cutting down to a PG-13 on their own. I kind of believe it, as according to IMDB, filming on this ended over a year ago. It's been in post for 14 months and Snyder is already working pre-production for the next Superman movie. In any case, I can't imagine taking even 20 minutes of this released cut, mixing it in with any other footage and coming out with a decent movie.

It would be interesting to find out one day what this thing looked like on paper when it was greenlit, and how different it ended up. But I don't even want to waste my time trying to find that out. Ten years from now (or maybe next week) Sucker Punch might replace Ishtar as the gold standard of Hollywood misfires. It was a good run, Ishtar, but there is a new boss in town. Ugh.

Period dramas really are not my cup of tea, but it was playing at work and my wife wanted to see it so I took the bullet. It wasn't bad, in fact I think it was pretty good. Hard to tell for sure. The acting was good, the story was a little bit nutty (but I guess that's how it is, my wife tells me it was true to the book), the scenery was nice. Just doesn't do it for me. The one thing I could complain about, specifically, was the cinematography. There was a good amount of handheld work, which you don't normally see in period dramas. On top of having a sort of Cloverfield look to some of the movie, it was poorly done. At least on the handheld stuff, the frame wasn't centered, it was way too jiggly and heads were often cropped off the top of the screen. Very incongruous and annoying to me.

Anyway, if you're a chick and you like this kind of thing, you'd probably enjoy it. If you're a dude, skip it unless you owe one to your significant other.

Hmmmmm..... HMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmm... This movie was not quite what I thought it would be, though I liked what it ended up being. It's hard to explain without ruining it for those who have not seen it. I'll say that a great deal of the movie focused more on romance than science fiction, though the science fiction part played a major role in the romance. Overall, the story just wasn't all there for me. More specifically, the ending. It wasn't bad, I think, but perhaps it was presented in the wrong way. I just read the trivia on IMDB and it said that they re-shot a new ending months after they were done with the original filming. I would have liked to see the ending they had originally intended, it sounded like what I wanted to hear. It might also be a good idea to read the original short story to see how that ended.

My main gripe is that there was a certain nugget of plot that they focused on during the movie, and at the end they didn't really explain it. I guess it wasn't enough for me to say 'that's how it is', even though much of the plot was presented that way. I felt like they were building up to a certain climax, very deliberately, and then they delivered something completely different. It didn't ruin it, but it left me scratching my head a little bit. It's worth noting that this didn't bother my wife at all. So different strokes, I guess.

I do have to say that Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have great chemistry on screen. I'd like to see both of them in another movie one day. Amy Adams better make sure she has solid footing on that pedestal I put her on because Emily Blunt could easily knock her off of it without much effort.

Well, Rango is certainly different. I was hoping to like this movie more but it fell a little flat for me. I think the story was a bit too disjointed and it didn't stick to the main point of the plot enough. Or, perhaps the plot was too simple. In any case, I hate to say it, but it definitely did not need to be two hours long.

I think the movie just couldn't decide what it wanted to be. A straight western? A bizarre allegory? Commentary on mysticism? An anthropomorphic comedy? It changed gears so often that it was hard to get into any one theme for any length of time, and I think that's what hurt it.

There were some inspired set pieces and a few funny jokes here and there, but overall the movie lacked momentum. Rango, the character, is being billed as a lizard going through an existential crisis, and when the movie addresses that it is at its best. My favorite scenes by far didn't come up until the third act when Rango finally finds himself, so to speak. I thought there was a lot to be said about the nature of existence, one's purpose in life and the decisions they make, but it took 90 minutes for the movie to get there.

The main thing that held it together was the unbelievable visuals, and I'm not saying that just because ILM made them. It's worth going to see Rango just to be stunned by what you see up on the screen. If a studio can get a good, compelling story together and get ILM to animate it, watch your backs, Pixar.

It is interesting to note that Roger Deakins has a credit as 'visual consultant' for Rango. Rango was 'shot' in a more traditional sense than other animated movies, and it shows. It's hard to explain, but aside from being robbed of an Oscar for True Grit, Roger has shot many visually compelling movies to come out in the last couple decades, starting with Sid and Nancy, then running through The Shawshank Redemption and cruising through the catalog of the best Cohen brothers movies including The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo and O Brother Where Art Thou?. The movie has a depth and cinematic look to it that I haven't seen since Coraline.

Also interesting is that there was a credit for stunt coordinator. I had heard that the movie was acted out scene by scene to lend the voices some realism and it does show, but stunt coordinator? That's pretty cool for an animated feature.

So, bottom line, visually stunning, worth seeing just for that. But for me, the story, or more accurately the presentation of it, just didn't hold my attention. Other people (judging by the critical consensus) will get different things out of it, and I could see where someone in a certain state of mind might enjoy the simplistic plot. It just didn't quite work for me as a whole.

This one was clearly not aimed at people my age. They're trying hard to set up a movie franchise to fill the vacuum that will be created when Harry Potter and Twilight are done. It'll be interesting to see if that works out.

This isn't something I'd have paid to see but there was a screening at work, and I think my wife and I just wanted to go out on a free date. Ha ha. None the less, it was pretty good. Better than I expected. The direction was a bit 'off' in some respects, and I even mentioned to my wife that it seemed like a lot of the acting was 'TV caliber'. Which is probably not a coincidence because that's where DJ Caruso cut his teeth. It didn't ruin it for me, though.

I think what mostly held it together were the effects, which ILM did a stellar job on, and the story itself. I bet this was an interesting book. There were some aspects of the movie (like the slapsticky nature of the bad aliens) that I felt like probably had some back story in the book, but in the movie it kind of just seemed silly.

Anyway, good story, some pretty good performances by one or two actors, one very well done plotline involving, uh, shit, trying not to ruin anything, let's just say 'another number', and very well staged fight scene toward the end of the movie. So, better than expected, but no reason to rush out and see it if you are over the age of 18 or so. If you have a kid or wife that wants to see it, you could absolutely do much, much worse.

It's no secret I have a hetero man-crush on Jason Statham. I had low expectations for this one, none the less, and I was pretty surprised at how far they were exceeded. The script was smarter than it had any right to be and in my mind worked more like some sort of weird drama than an action thriller. In fact, there isn't a whole lot of thrilling in it. People expecting something like the wall-to-wall adrenaline you get with Crank or The Transporter will be sorely disappointed. From what I recall there were only two explosions in the entire movie, and they happened late in the third act. A lot of the movie centered on Statham and his relationship with his mentor's son. Their dynamic on screen was very well done and as absurd as much of the movie was, their banter and (guh) 'growth' really drove the movie. Of course, there are a few rapid, intense scenes of ultra-violence, but Statham still comes off as the cool, suave uncle you wish you had. In a lot of ways the plot was a little predictable and some critics are mistaking this for a conventional genre picture, but I think it's better than that. The character development and pacing of the story overall were very well done and it deserves more credit for trying a few new things within the constraints of the buddy/action/assassin stories Hollywood usually hits us over the head with. It'll be interesting to see how this one does at the box office. Weird that they released it in January. It feels more like a summer movie and I'd bet if they released it later in the year they'd see more revenue from the box office. It's no surprise (or spoiler) that there is definitely room for a sequel. I'd pay to see that.

I think 'blue' refers to the hue of this film. Not sure if they did that on purpose, but the print looked very blue. And a bit blurred on the edges. Anyway, I can see why this film is getting the praise that it is, but I wouldn't say I 'liked' it, in the same way I didn't 'like' Vera Drake. The acting was top-notch, the realism was there, it felt like I was a fly on the wall of a real life situation, but it's just not a situation that lends itself to any form of enjoyment. I didn't hate it, as my wife did, but I didn't like it either.

I think you just have to consider that not all movies, or art in general, is meant to entertain. Some of it is meant to provoke and this movie certainly provokes. As much as my wife hated it, she talked about it in the car for ten minutes afterward. Which was perhaps the whole point. Blue Valentine is one of those movies that will come out on DVD one day and I'll ask myself 'Why?' Why would anyone want to watch this again?

Anyway, as a piece of art the movie was pretty admirable, but in my mind I'm going to give it a low-ish rating because it's a thoroughly depressing slice of real life that I wouldn't normally want to really watch. If it didn't have Ryan Gossling and/or Michelle Williams in it, or the Oscar buzz it's been getting, I probably wouldn't have seen it. "Hey, everyone! Let's go see that movie about the long, depressing marriage where the two people are falling out of love!' Not something I'd necessarily recommend to someone. But undoubtedly 'art'.

I guess I still like Seth Rogan. This movie wasn't awesome but it was fun. That's a good word for it, fun. Most of the funniness was in the throwaway lines and silly dialog, but it still worked okay with Seth's 'baby huey' type of character, which is the same persona he has in interviews. I think he's just like that. He co-wrote the script so it's only fitting that it really is just him, being silly, with another guy doing all the heavy physical lifting. Dude looks good in a suit, too.