When Jennifer Lawrence was first selected to play Katniss in The Hunger Games, I hadn’t seen her in anything. I wanted to avoid seeing her in anything AFTER as well, but the nerd in me couldn’t avoid X-Men: First Class (nor could the Michael Fassbender addict). I thought she was pretty “meh” in First Class, […]
Dig, if you will, a picture of a mincing Mark Hamill, looking like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights, hammering chopsticks into someone’s leg. Hold that image in your mind and continue reading when you’re ready. Now let’s sit down and talk a little about Sushi Girl, a Dark Crime…Drama? Comedy? Thriller? It’s hard to […]
There’s an easy way and a hard to explain Cloud Atlas. The easy way: it simultaneously tells six linked stories taking place over the span of five hundred years. Individually these stories are (generally) easy to understand, and, just as importantly, easy to follow, as they weave in and out of one another. However, to […]
Here’s the thing, I like Pitch Perfect. I’ve seen it twice now and enjoyed it both times, because it’s exactly the movie I’m supposed to like. I mean, university a capella? Hilarious, and also ripe for all sorts of character fun and honest-to-god stories about competition and friendship and belonging (there are people whose job […]
While I’ll be the first to admit that both Casino Royal and its ugly stepsister Quantum of Solace were not what I would consider the crème de la crème of the Bond franchise, I still found both films to be very enjoyable for one simple reason: Daniel Craig does good Bond. With his third swing […]
Before the release of Ben Affleck’s surefire hit Argo, the film garnered a ton of positive press from movie people and really pissed-off chatter from, specifically, grumpy Canadians. The film is a topical period piece in the same way that Charlie Wilson’s War used a story from the 1980s to say something current about the […]
When you walk into any movie based on the infamous comic known as Judge Dredd, most movie goers are well aware that they are not going to see academy award winning material here. What you can expect and get plenty of- and then some- is hard hitting action that takes no prisoners, oodles of blood […]
Here’s the analogy I like more than I should: For a Good Time, Call… has great bones, terrible muscle, and combination skin. The bones of the movie- its premise and its characters, the things that make it stand up and exist at all- are fantastic. The idea- a pair of female roommates start a […]