Just when you think that animated holiday films had run out of ideas, turning childhood imaginary icons like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, and Jack Frost into magical super-heroes is kind of a surprisingly imaginative twist. That’s not to say that Rise of the Guardians doesn’t have its share of…
Category: (4 out of 5)
Movie #49: Contagion
Contagion was not an easy movie to watch (and probably the scariest of my summer 50). Director Steven Soderbergh once again uses the technique he mastered in Traffic, the sober series of interconnected stories featuring a huge ensemble cast, to tell the larger tale of a global viral outbreak. While it’s a bit of a…
Movie #42: We Bought A Zoo
I figured that this movie would be sweet and sentimental, but I did not expect how adorable it would be. Based on a true story, We Bought A Zoo is about a journalist-adventurer named Benjamin Mee (played by Matt Damon) who wants to make a fresh start with his two kids, after the death of…
Movie #41: The Debt
I set myself up for a Helen Mirren double-bill by watching this movie and The Tempest back to back. I had heard good things about The Debt but was hesitant to watch it in the theatres because it seemed to have that retro Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy vibe (and I hated that movie). Who knew…
Movie #40: The Tempest
I’ve been fascinated by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest ever since I first learned that this “olde tyme” playwright (that our teacher was making us read) had written a tale featuring spirits, spells and sorcery rather than his usual cast of English kings and queens. When director Julie Taymor’s version came to the screen featuring actress…
Movie #36: Burlesque
I was a fan of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, so I was excited that maybe this was another movie like that. Moulin Rouge fans might appreciate the musical numbers, but Burlesque is not nearly as imaginative or interesting as the Nicole Kidman classic. This is largely a vanity project for Christina Aguilera (with a little…
Movie #32: Catfish
While it was definitely not the movie that I had expected, Catfish was also much more engrossing than I expected. I didn’t know much about the movie going in, but I thought that it was a mockumentary. Actually (despite some controversy around the question), it’s a straight documentary. Nev Schulman, a New York photographer, receives…
Movie #29: Unknown
Unknown is the kind of plot-twisting action thriller that I used to love watching (still do, but good ones are not as common these days). Liam Neeson stars as Dr. Martin Harris, a scientist visiting Berlin with his wife (played, quite poorly I might add, by Mad Men‘s January Jones) for a biotech conference. He…
The Bourne Legacy – Movie Review
From the opening scene of a silhouetted man floating in the water, The Bourne Legacy begs for comparisons to the first movie, The Bourne Identity (as well as its two sequels). Similarly, Jeremy Renner’s Aaron Cross fights to live up to Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne as the rogue government-programmed assassin du jour. Renner did a…
