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…
Category: (4 out of 5)
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 #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 #5: Ninja Assassin
One of the problems with so many martial arts films like Ninja Assassin is that the characters are often the strong, silent type who don’t go into detail about their motivations or why they’re doing something, so I often get very confused. Add to that the kind of gutteral whispers that they all speak in,…
Despicable Me – Movie Review
As I’ve said before, computer animation has always done its best at making cute things that normally aren’t, including ogres, monsters, fish, rats, robots, and aliens. It wasn’t going to be long before the same cuddlification was applied to the type of character whose entire purpose is not to be loved: the supervillain. Gru…
Twilight: Eclipse – Movie Review
I enjoy vampire stuff, but it’s ironic that the teen romance elements drawing so many fans to the Twilight “saga” is the thing that turns me off the series (I guess it’s not that ironic, since I’m not a tween girl). After watching New Moon, I wasn’t eager to catch up with the human-vampire-werewolf love…
Movie #1: Shutter Island
A lot of movies catch my eye, but with all the mediocre reviews and bad word-of-mouth these days, I don’t end up seeing a lot of them in the theatre. However, they do make it on to my mental list for some future date to screen at home from the comfort of my living room….
Splice – Movie Review
I wonder what Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein would have been like if rewritten as a modern-day bio-sci-fi horror movie. Would Frankenstein fear the monster? adopt the monster? teach it to spell? dress it up? have sex with it? Splice is only a thematic descendant of that Victorian gothic novel, but I guess the issue of science…
Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture 