Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture

Movie #29: Drag Me To Hell

Drag Me To Hell definitely wastes no time living up to its title: in the first ten minutes of prologue, some poor kid, who stole a silver necklace from a gypsy, literally gets dragged kicking and screaming into Hell. So without further ado, the tone is set for this B-movie horror film. This is not…

Movie #28: Stone of Destiny

I can’t remember exactly how I heard about a small film called Stone of Destiny, but I typically enjoy light-hearted British movies like this one. Though there was a bit of a more serious political-historical flavour to it, this story of a group of young Scots, stealing the Stone of Destiny (an ancient symbol of…

Movie #27: The Class

I’m not sure what to say about The Class. It won the Palme d’Or prize for Best Picture at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, but I really didn’t like it — or more accurately, I didn’t enjoy watching it. Francois Begaudeau stars as M. Morin, a French teacher at an ethnically-diverse school in Paris. The…

Movie #26: The Lookout

The Lookout had me fooled to the point that I was losing interest in watching to the end. The movie is about Chris Pratt (played by a typically subdued Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young guy coping with brain damage after a very serious car accident. He has trouble remembering things and keeping events in sequence, so…

Movie #25: Kick-Ass

I’m glad that Kick-Ass marks the halfway point of my movie marathon because it really exceeded my expectations. First, I have to come clean that I am a comic-book-loving geek fanboy who would be the intended target of any movie about a teenager who decides to put on a suit and become a superhero (It’s…

Movie #24: Redbelt

I’m done with David Mamet. I loved Glengarry Glen Ross and The Spanish Prisoner so much that I kept watching his subsequent movies even though I found them boring and pointless. I wanted to give Redbelt a chance because it was a totally different kind of story (at least I thought it was). Chiwetel Ejiofor…

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 #22: Whiteout

I thought the concept for Whiteout seemed pretty cool (no pun intended): have a murder-mystery thriller set on a base station in Antarctica. Kate Beckinsale plays U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko, stationed at the South Pole, who’s just about to retire and go back to the U.S. when the body of a murdered man is discovered…

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…