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.