I can’t believe Clint Eastwood directed this movie (I was even more surprised that there were supernatural overtones to it). I’ve been avoiding his films for the last while because I always found them too manipulative. It felt like it was obvious how he was going to maneuver the characters’ lives in order to make…
Category: 50 Movies 1 Summer
Movie #7: The Lincoln Lawyer
When The Lincoln Lawyer came out in theatres last year, I was surprised to see another lawyer movie being made. It seemed that good, legal dramas had become the domain of TV. There had definitely been a whole slew of John Grisham movies back in the 90s (in fact, Matthew McConaughey made his first big…
Movie #6: Real Steel
I am no fan of boxing movies, so I was pretty sure that the gimmick of having robots doing the fighting wasn’t going to make me enjoy Real Steel any better. The stories in boxing movies are always predictable: underdog rising-star makes it good, suffers set-back, then comes back for the win; all the while…
Movie #5: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
While I’d played the original 1989 game, I had not seen the 2010 video game on which Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was based. So, I was pretty surprised at the impressive scale of the visual effects that were put into this movie (though less surprised at how they still made the main…
Movie #4: Hanna
Did you ever wonder what amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne would have been like if he’d been a teenage girl instead? Probably not. Who would? But that’s the gist of the movie Hanna. Raised by her father Erik (played by Eric Bana) in the cold, wintery country somewhere isolated from the rest of the world, he…
Movie #3: In Time
Even from the previews, it was obvious that In Time was going to be another one of those movies where a cool, sci-fi premise was going to be stretched over a weak story (cast with some attractive young actors), like The Adjustment Bureau, or Source Code. The idea in this story is that everyone is…
Movie #2: Attack The Block
Were you a fan of 80s “creature features”? Y’know, B-movie horrors like Gremlins, Ghoulies, CHUD, Arachnophobia or even more serious ones like Alien? Well, this movie is a great throwback to those kinds of scary, fun flics. It all takes place on a single night in a south London housing project nicknamed “The Block”. As…
50 Movies, 1 Summer — Movie #1: Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1
Well, I’ve been lax in my movie watching again. Either I just haven’t gotten out to the movies enough or I’ve been kept away by too many mediocre reviews, but I have built up a huge backlog in my movie watch list. So, I figure that I’ll try again (like I did two summers ago)…
Movie #50: Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen
After all the indie, foreign, direct-to-DVD movies that I’ve been watching lately in my 50-movie marathon, I thought I’d end my adventure with a blockbuster bang. After the first Transformers movie blew out my eardrums, I was not eager to watch Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen on the big screen. However, since those robots-in-disguise played…
Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture 