At first, The Book of Eli looks like just another post-apocalyptic B-movie. A lone traveller (played by Denzel Washington) hacks and slashes his way through desert biker gangs preying upon innocent passersby. I feel like I’ve seen this movie many times before. Then he arrives at a dust-bowl town in the middle of the endless desert…
Category: 50 Movies 1 Summer
Movie #12: (500) Days of Summer
I guess if (500) Days of Summer is going to be a romantic comedy for the indie-film set, you can’t go wrong by casting Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the leads. They are both good actors with a taste for the off-beat, but both cute enough to make for a likeable couple that you…
Movie #11: Moon
One thing I’ve learned about indie sci-fi is that it’s usually high-concept. Moon is no exception (though I don’t want to reveal how, exactly). Sam Rockwell stars as Sam Bell, a lowly labourer maintaining and monitoring harvester machines as they glean high-energy elements from the moon. He’s all alone and spends the duration of his…
Movie #10: Daybreakers
Wow! Even in our current age of ‘fang-mania’ Daybreakers was actually a fresh take on the vampire movie — kind of a cross between True Blood and Children of Men. A plague of vampirism led to over 90% of the population becoming vampires in 10 years. That allows the filmmakers to come up with all…
Movie #9: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
After all the hype around the novel, I was intrigued by the Swedish film adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I thought I might read the novel, then wait for the Hollywood movie (whenever that’s coming) but the book’s opening chapter was so dense (I am told that it’s a page-turner, but those…
Movie #8: The Lovely Bones
I almost never call any movie “a mess”, but I think that’s the best way to describe The Lovely Bones. I have no idea how much of this film was true to the original Alice Sebold novel and how much of it was artistic license taken by writer/director Peter Jackson, but I hope that the…
Movie #7: A Single Man
A bit of a change of pace, A Single Man is the Oscar-nominated (best actor nod for Colin Firth) drama directed by fashion designer Tom Ford (movie-goers will know him as the Man Who Dressed James Bond). Naturally, I expected something stylish, with everyone impeccably dressed, filmed at interesting camera angles, each shot a potential…
Movie #6: Taken
I put off seeing Taken because I find kidnapping stories a bit too tense with the emotional stakes involved. Plus, there’s always some weepy mother who won’t let the hero take the risks needed to get the victim back. Anyway, that’s what I expected, so I was in no rush to see Liam Neeson play…
Movie #5: Ninja Assassin
One of the problems with so many martial arts films like Ninja Assassin is that the characters are often the strong, silent type who don’t go into detail about their motivations or why they’re doing something, so I often get very confused. Add to that the kind of gutteral whispers that they all speak in,…
Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture 