There’s a lot to like about Drive: we have a hero, a villain, and a running time of about an hour and half. That’s about as long as you really want to hang out with the people you meet in Drive-any longer and one of them will turn around and kill you. The previews for Drive made it look like a film about a getaway driver, which is why some nutjob sued because there was not that much on the getaway driver front. The opening scenes follow along as our hero drives a getaway car and does a pretty good…
Category: movie review
Robot & Frank
In the not too distant future a retired second story man is losing his mind. His son is tired of having to spend his day off driving out to check on him, so he buys him a robot companion. The robot soon becomes the most important person in his life. There are a few twists and turns in this fairly slow moving story of a man and his robot. Bit by bit we learn about Frank and get a clearer picture of just how bad his memory has become. Robot helps him by providing structure to his life. Part of…
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
What do you do when find yourself past your prime and your bank account not living up to it’s expectations? Retire to a run down hotel in India, of course. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel shows us a number of older folks, all great British actors with familiar faces, do the best they can in a place that doesn’t live up to their expectations. We watch them go about the business of adjusting and adapting. The film’s catchphrase- Everything will be all right in the end… if it’s not all right then it’s not yet the end –pretty much sums…
The Hobbit: An Unexpect Journey
Peter Jackson lucked into The Lord of the Rings-saving his legacy from being the director of the WORST MOVIE EVER MADE: Peter Jackson’s King Kong. So now Peter has decided to set his entire career in Middle Earth. I fully expect him to crank out The Silmarillion next. So what about The Hobbit Part 1? I liked it. Middle Earth is a wonderful place and I have no problem visiting it for three hours at a time. I like all the familiar faces and I even have a soft spot for the often terrible CGI monster effects. The Hobbit is…
Flight
Denzel Washington plays a not very nice man in Flight. In the opening scene we see him drinking and doing drugs at the same time he is telling his ex-wife he doesn’t have any money for his son’s school. There’s also a nice bit of T&A from the co-worker he spent the night with. Now we get to a fundamental question of right and wrong and does it really matter? Denzel is a great pilot, in addition to be a rotten human being. This comes in handy since he has a job as an airline pilot. His copilot is not…
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
If you knew the world was going to end in a few days, would you keep going to work? This is one of the big questions asked in Seeking A Friend, a film about what would happen if the shuttle mission in Armageddon failed to stop the Meteor. For the most part, life goes on. Our hero goes to work, his maid keeps cleaning his apartment, TV news programs stay on the air, and the power is still on right up until the last minute. Not everyone takes it all as calmly as our hero and his new girlfriend. Some…
Life of Pi
A writer looking for a good story is directed to a man who survived a shipwreck. The man is mild mannered, calm, almost spiritual as he goes about the business of telling the story of his life. We learn about how he came to be called Pi, how his father ran a zoo, how he fell in love, and how he came to be on that ship in the middle of the Pacific. Then we are told a story, about a young man spending two hundred days on a lifeboat with the tiger Richard Parker. Ang Lee did an amazing…
Cloud Atlas
In the future, past, and present four or five actors wear horrible makeup as they go about a number of random and pointless tasks which have occasional overtones of significance. Mixed in with the mundane lives are several brutal and shockingly graphic moments tossed in for shock value. The four or five stories are a bit of a challenge to follow and there is a hint or two that there should be some sort of connection that is never adequately explained. There isn’t even the basic sort of logic that the same actors are playing the same time hopping souls. …
Anonymous
Once upon a time there was a super genius named Shakespeare. Like just about everyone else in history, he had a brilliant output early on and then retired to a quiet life. His writing was so brilliant that people have been pissed off at him ever since. Clearly a lowly actor could never have written something so sublime. The idea that Shakespeare didn’t write any of the stuff which bares his name has a certain appeal to it. Records from the Elizabethan era are not as plentiful as you might think. Somewhere over the past 500 years or so, all…
Abraham Lincoln:Vampire Hunter
Abraham Lincoln is an American icon who has fallen victim to the recent obsession with taking classic books and dropping zombies, werewolves, vampires, and other such silliness into them. And while I like titles like Mr. Darcy, Vampyre and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, I haven’t actually read many books in this sub-genre. So I walked into Abraham Lincoln:Vampire Hunter with very low expectations and a maybe a bit of dread. Turns out that this is a standard issue Hollywood film, lots of special effects, good sets and costumes, a number of familiar faces, and a fairly straightforward story. We…