I LOVE HARRY POTTER!!! I HATE TEENAGED TWILIGHT FANS!!! Yay for Luna’s lion hat! Yay for Quiditch (we haven’t actually seen a game since the thrd movie)! Yay for Jim Broadbent (Merlin’s beard!)! Yay for Tom Felton getting a lot of emotional spectrum and screentime instead of just being a wanker and a git! Yay for Ginny Weasely! Boo for Fawkes removed disappearance! Boo for Harry not being magically frozen by Dumbledore during the finale! Boo for Horcrux scene (well acted, but not at all what I expected visually – they made it crystally and more naturally occuring which is silly because it’s magic)!

The best praise I can give this movie is that I liked it better than the first one. Not to say that I didn’t enjoy or like this movie (which I did), but I wasn’t on fire to see it in the first place and basically I was pleasantly surprised. My problems with the first movie are pretty well described by VG Cats: “You have one token human, then make way for the f*#$ing robots”. Sure I laughed at the parents and at Shia LeBouf and Megan Fox…but I REALLY hated John Tuturro and Anthony Anderson…they were very annoying. I mean I even got annoyed at Jon Voight whom I love (not only is he a proud conservative in Hollywood he is an enjoyable actor), which just isn’t fair. The whole subplot with the government trying to decode the alien language was garbage as well. This movie starts off better … Continue reading →

Absolutely BRILIANT sequel. The plot isn’t hackneyed and the adventure is out of this world! Not too fond of Bill Hader’s portrayal of General George Custer. Although Hader is funny (see SNL and Hot Rod), I didn’t quite appreciate his humor and bravado as Custer. Then again, they were just using Custer in the same way they used Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams) in the last film (as a cowardly, waxy version of the heroic person they’re molded after)…but they did it weird! Oh well. I was happy to recognize Bill Hader though (I couldn’t tell it was him on the cardboard cutout/poster). Were there a lot of American “The Office” cameos (Andy, Kelli, and Cal) at Ricky Gervais’ request (he the star actor, writer, director of the British “The Office” and executive producer of the American “The Office”)? Or was it merely happy coincidence? I always wonder in these cases … Continue reading →

Laura says they changed the book, but to hear her tell it, it sounds like the smaller semantical changes that I hated with the adaptation of Harry Potter and Azkaban. Sorry lover! A delightfully talented cast including Ewan McGregor and Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd, I enjoyed this film almost as much as Da Vinci Code (I’ve long since gotten over my piety concerning THAT piece of fiction), but not as much as I’ve enjoyed the National Treasure movies. As I cracked midway through the film, “Can’t we just watch Ewan McGregor solve puzzles and kick ass?” To be fair, my problem isn’t with Tom Hanks as the puzzle solver…or with his character Robert Langdon for that matter…I just prefer American history (and the history of it’s European colonizers) to church/religious history. But I do love all the juicy historical tidbits and the life-threatening scenarios our heroes always get themselves into. Before the … Continue reading →