I love modern takes on old classics (especially dark classics) like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Since the audience is presumably acquainted with the original, there’s usually an interesting spin on the story. While it’s set in modern day rather than Victorian times, this modernization has Jekyll (played by Dougray Scott) as a medical doctor….
Category: Movies
Movie #13: The Book of Eli
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…
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…
Inception – Movie Review
It won’t take a viewer long to notice that Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending movie Inception has a lot in common with the Wachowski Brothers’ reality-questioning Matrix trilogy. In Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio (as Dom Cobb) is our new Morpheus, expertly manipulating the virtual reality, except this time he’s an “extractor” who steals corporate secrets by entering a…
The Sorceror’s Apprentice – Movie Review
I really didn’t expect to enjoy this movie as much as I did. For starters, there’s the Nicolas Cage factor (for me he takes any movie down a notch), but he’s not bad when he’s just having fun (see also National Treasure). This time he plays Balthazar, an apprentice to the original Merlin, who’s been…
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…
Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture 