Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture

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…

Movie #15: The Wolfman

By watching The Wolfman right after Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I unwittingly treated myself to a double-bill of gothic horror remakes. In this case, it was the remake of a 1941 black and white movie called “The Wolf Man” (Apparently, after 70 years we’ve learned to live without the space). Though I never saw…

Movie #14: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

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….

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…