Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture

Movie #20: Ghost Town

With a name like Ghost Town you probably wouldn’t expect the movie to be a romantic comedy. It doesn’t start out like one. Ricky Gervais stars as Dr. Pincus, a year-round grinch who avoids people as much as he can (which may be a challenge since he’s a dentist). After a near-death experience during surgery,…

Movie #19: The Losers

The Losers, ironically, had a lot going for it. It was adapted from a comic book (which is always a good start these days, since comic movies are so hot); and it featured some big-budget action scenes as well as some geek-friendly marquee up-and-comers such as Jeffrey Dean Morgan (remember him from The Watchmen?), Chris…

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…

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…