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…
Category: Movies
Movie #12: 50/50
I should probably watch more movies about people with serious illness. Despite my usual resentment of manipulation, I am always moved by these kinds of films. 50/50 is definitely an example of an “illness movie” done right. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a good performance in almost anything (I want to say that playing a ridiculous Cobra…
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….
Movie #10: Morning Glory
What could be better than a romantic comedy from the director (Roger Michell) of my favourite rom-com (Notting Hill), with Rachel McAdams (one of my favourite actresses today), featuring Diane Keaton (who, with Woody Allen, pioneered the rom-com in Annie Hall)? Well, the irony is that Morning Glory isn’t a romantic comedy. Sure, McAdams meets…
Movie #9: Limitless
Why do they have to keep doing this? Limitless starts out with an interesting sci-fi premise, then squanders it as merely a gimmick to lure us into a relatively typical story. Some might argue that that’s a rather harsh critique of this movie which actually has some style and carries the premise consistently through to…
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 #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…
