The advertisments all highlight the fact that this is a film from the director of Die Hard 2 (which to me is the more lackluster of the quadrilogy) and the producer of Speed (eh), but it’s basically the plot of Die Hard 3. Not to say this is a bad movie…it’s very exciting and terse and enjoyable. John Cena gives a very enjoyable performance (in my opinion not as good as Dwayne Johnson, but not bad for his second tour of the leading man position…The Rock was a little stiff in The Scorpion King) as Officer Danny Shaw, a beat cop in New Orleans who gets dragged into a sadistic terrorist’s 12 round game where the rules are solve the puzzle or people die.

Can you judge a franchise film without being familiar with it’s predecessors? Can a film stand on it’s own regardless of it’s origins? Who am I to judge…I enjoyed this movie very much, despite (or thanks to) having never seen the original Witch Mountain movies (released in the late 70’s by the Walt Disney Company). Dwayne Johnson is a very capable action comedy hero (don’t go in the pimped out fridge Jack…), and I very much enjoy his acting. Carla Gugina once again gets to have fun in a supporting actress role (from Spy Kids to Watchmen, she just keeps working it on screen…). Anna SophiaRobb (Bridge To Terabithia, Because Of Winn-Dixie) is joined by newcomer Alexander Ludwig as insensitive-but-loveable aliens on a mission.

Things I Missed From The Book Death of Hollis Mason (what, Stephen McHattie is too cool to kill?) Doctor Manhattan’s line on Mars: in a minute you’re going to tell me you’re sleeping with Daniel Lori and Comedian flashback “only once” Despite those missed moments, I didn’t have as many mixed feelings against this movie as I did Harry Potter 3 (which I guess is a good thing…I got pretty upset with Potter 3 more on adaptation issues than anything else). I didn’t mind the changed ending: unless you’re going to make a four hour epic instead of a three hour epic, there’s no way you could actually do the book’s ending…they did what they had to in order to make the movie work and I accept that. What they were able to accomplish with the movie was quite spectacular. Tim over at CAD.com said it best when he calls … Continue reading →

Phenomenal! Liam Neeson stars as Brian, a former spy, whose daughter gets kidnapped on a trip to Europe (I mean she’s not too incredibly dumb, but her slutty friend is an absolute idiot). As I was watching the film and considering what fictional characters I had seen similar to Brian, Laura pointed out that he’s basically a film noir anti-hero…someone whose methods you don’t fully support but whom you still root for…that allowed me to connect Brian with Jack Bauer (24) and John Clark (Tom Clancy)…but it wasn’t until after the movie that I started connecting the role with Jason Statham (Transporter, Crank)…and it just intrigued me because it must have been the large amount of dramatic elements to the story that made me lose sight of Statham’s movies…maybe because I believed Neeson’s drama more than Statham’s… There are several incredible moments in this high octane drama that just had … Continue reading →

A delightful (if fractured) romantic comedy. I found myself frequently dwelling on romantic comedies I’ve seen recently (primarily the DVD’s of Zach Braff in The Last Kiss and Ryan Reynolds in Definitely Maybe). I call the movie fractured because while the movie did a fairly decent job of making me care about the characters, there were almost too many relationship threads to keep track of. On top of that, there were these almost random “chapter” breaks were the screen went black, they displayed some white text and them had some “real people tell a somewhat amusing anecdode about the text…it was kind of funny, but it disjointed the movie. There was a part in the movie (one of the “chapters”) where these two women were talking about break-up lines an it suddenly occurrd to me that I had actually heard some of those lines when being broken up with (although … Continue reading →

Absolutely beautiful!!! A scintillating and supple combination of traditional stop motion and digital animation. Adapted AND directed by Henry Selick (the visionary director of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas) from acclaimed British author Neil Gaiman’s novella. Dakota Fanning stars as our hero Coraline (not Caroline) who with her new friend Wybie and The Cat that isn’t exactly his (playfully voiced by Keith David whose voice is indelible to me as clan leader Goliath from Disney’s Gargoyles) adventure around The Pink House (Coraline’s new home owned by Wybie grandmother) and meet it’s eccentric occupants: retired theatrical sisters (Jennifer Saunders as Miss Spink and Dawn French as Miss Forcible) and their yapping terriers in the basement and Mr. Bubinski (voiced by Ian McShane) and his circus mice who go tweedle-dee-dee instead of oom-pah-pah in the attic; and explore behind the little door in the wall into an other world…an exciting and … Continue reading →

OM freaking G! This film is even more hysterical than the trailer suggests. It’s absolutely brilliant. Made me think of Firewall (in a good waywith a crazy heist scheme plot thing), but is otherwise incomporable to the film (comedy versus drama). Kevin James is fantastic. I’m most delighted by Kevin James writing the script and Adam Sandler executive producing. Ever since Sandler worked with James on 50 First Dates, he’s enjoyed it and given him more opportunity and money to tell delightful stories and roll around a mall looking ridiculous and heroic at the same time. Head-butt…[wince]…nobody wins. I probably should have capitalized on that…

Dustin Hoffman is so incredibly versatile it’s ridiculous, Emma Thompson is amazing, and hey! It’s the grandmother from What A Girl Wants! Yay paranoid, cancer-surviving busybodies thinking their neighbor is Poland’s answer to Jack the Ripper. And hooray for directed-and-written-by productions! Joel Hopkins did a fantastic job here. The delighful story of Harvey, who has tried all his life to get by but seems to miss every opportunity, who gets one last chance to make things right in his broken family and Kate, whose forementioned mother keeps her hen-pecked and isolated, and their chance encounter that lends them the courage to stand up for themselves and fall in love again. A short analysis of Hoffman’s character: Harvey’s life passed him by without giving him a real chance to stay attached…he studied piano and wanted to be a jazz pianist, but never got the chance so he started writing jingles for … Continue reading →

Fun! Not at all like Bedtime Stories (although there was a trailer for a Nickelodeon movie with Eddie Murphy that’s suspiciously similar…but it looks like fun). Inkheart deals with “Silvertongues” that have the ability to bring fiction to life simply by reading aloud.

Absolutely delightful! Adult Samir looks like Michael Jackson….creepy cool… Chai-walla Who wants to be a mill-o-naire! Jamal (a young man who grew up in the slums of Bombay) gets a chance to be on the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”, but is arrested for cheating halfway through (runs out of game time). After being tortured by the police (they take their game shows very seriously over there), a friendlier interrogation reveals that Jamal didn’t cheat, he just “knew the answers.” Further probing forces flashbacks where every question is indirectly related to one of Jamal’s memories from surviving the slums of India with his brother Samir and childhood sweetheart Latika. Fantastic music by A. R. Rahman (I’ve ranted about him before Bombay Dreams). Really nice credit sequence featuring the entire cast dancing (a Bollywood tradition Laura says). Intersperced with the dancing was the requisite “above the title” … Continue reading →