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…

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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…

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Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor – Book Review

It was foolish of me not to have realized (even just from the opening epigram: “Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.”) what this book was going to be like. Daughter of Smoke and Bone is in the same genre as Twilight (and so many…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – Movie Review

It’s not really until I watched this movie did I consider how ridiculous a premise this was: President Abraham Lincoln as a secret vampire hunter. It sounds like a spoof or something silly for Halloween (maybe a segment from The Simpsons latest “Treehouse of Horror” episode). However, this movie isn’t tongue-in-cheek. Except for some vampire…

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Movie #4: Hanna

Did you ever wonder what amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne would have been like if he’d been a teenage girl instead? Probably not. Who would? But that’s the gist of the movie Hanna. Raised by her father Erik (played by Eric Bana) in the cold, wintery country somewhere isolated from the rest of the world, he…

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