From the opening credits, where the Universal Studios logo and theme are rendered in 8-bit graphics and sound, I knew that Edgar Wright (director of other geek-friendly satires such as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) was going to do a great job with this movie. The premise was totally fun and drool-worthy on…
Category: (4 out of 5)
Movie #32: Ponyo
One of the qualities you can find abundant in films by Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki is imagination, not just in story-telling, but visually as well. While Ponyo is clearly inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”, it is still full of fresh wonder and enchantment. Sosuke is a 5-year-old boy living in a…
Movie #30: Pirate Radio
Originally titled “The Boat That Rocked” in the UK, Pirate Radio was a very surprising movie. For one, it has a cast populated with many of the biggest names in recent British comedy — you may not recognize them, but you should. The list includes: non-Brits Philip Seymour Hoffman (not always a funny guy, but…
Movie #23: Vantage Point
What if 24 took place not over 24 hours, but 24 minutes? And what if instead of a single viewpoint at a time, we got multiple perspectives on the same event. That’s the central premise behind Vantage Point. When the President of the United States (a.k.a. the POTUS) is shot by a sniper’s bullet during…
Movie #21: The Time Traveler’s Wife
Whoever thought that romance and science fiction could be blended so well together? Even though nobody’s trying to prevent robots from taking over the world or stop a global calamity, I think it’s genius that The Time Traveler’s Wife takes a classic sci-fi device such as people traveling in time and uses it to tell…
Salt – Movie Review
From the first moment you see Angelina Jolie in her blonde hair and office clothes she already looks like someone in disguise. That kicks off the central mystery of this movie and its main character. Of course, I have no idea why director Phillip Noyce preferred instead to start with scenes of Evelyn Salt being…
Movie #18: My Sister’s Keeper
I have mixed feelings about My Sister’s Keeper. It’s a very absorbing story about a sister living with leukemia (played by Sofia Vassilieva from Medium), another sister (played by Abigail Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine) who was conceived as a donor match for her, and their family, including a mother obsessed with fighting to save…
Movie #17: Last Chance Harvey
Did people actually watch Last Chance Harvey in the theatres? I remember being interested in it because of Emma Thompson (I’ve been in love with her ever since Henry V where she played opposite her then-husband Kenneth Branagh — to me they were the true cinema power couple; but I digress…). Despite the fact that…
Movie #16: Traitor
Maybe it’s too much 24 (and other movies and shows like it), but I was very tired of watching stories about Muslim terrorists by the time I came to watch Traitor. Actually, I had no idea that in this movie, Don Cheadle plays Samir Horn, an American Muslim born in Sudan, whose faith and discontent…
Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture 