Movie #13: Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

How capable are you at suspending disbelief? If you plan on enjoying Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (and you’re over 10 years old), you’d better be a disbelief-suspending guru! This movie is clearly a family adventure thrill-ride, but if I started listing all the logical inconsistencies and un-buyable nonsense in it, I might not be…

Movie #11: Dream House

Imagine if The Sixth Sense kept going after the big “I see dead people” reveal and the story kept twisting, getting more complicated and even added a final twist with an over-the-top, action-filled ending. Would that ruin a clever premise and drive it into the ground? Well, that’s kind of what happened to Dream House….

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor – Book Review

It was foolish of me not to have realized (even just from the opening epigram: “Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.”) what this book was going to be like. Daughter of Smoke and Bone is in the same genre as Twilight (and so many…

Movie #8: Hereafter

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…

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…

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – Movie Review

It’s not really until I watched this movie did I consider how ridiculous a premise this was: President Abraham Lincoln as a secret vampire hunter. It sounds like a spoof or something silly for Halloween (maybe a segment from The Simpsons latest “Treehouse of Horror” episode). However, this movie isn’t tongue-in-cheek. Except for some vampire…

Brave – Movie Review

It’s great to see that (7 years after the two studios joined) Brave brings together the computer-generated artistry of Pixar with the fairytale storytelling of Disney. While it’s the first Pixar movie with a strong female lead, Disney has been producing “princess” tales for years.  The story of young Merida, princess to the Scottish kingdom…

Snow White and the Huntsman – Movie Review

I don’t know about “fairest”, but this Snow White was by far the dullest and most disappointing movie I’ve seen all year. It may be difficult to give a new spin to a classic story that everyone already knows, but it’s not enough to simply throw familiar actors, fancy costumes and special effects at it…