1 April - "That wasn't one of my first instincts "

Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

dir. F. Gary Gray

CAST
Jamie Foxx - Toys (1992)
Garard Butler - The Ugly Truth (2009)
Colm Meaney - The Commitments (1991)
Bruce McGill - Elizabethtown (2005)
Leslie Bibb - Iron Man 2 (2010)
Michael Irby - Flightplan (2005)
Gregory Itzin - Adaptation. (2002)
Regina Hall - Danika (2006)
Christian Stolte - Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Annie Corley - The Cider House Rules (1999)
Richard Portnow - Kindergarten Cop (1990)
Viola Davis - The Help (2011)
Michael Kelly - Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009)
Dan Bittner - Adventureland (2009)
Brooke Stacy Mills - Hairspray (1988)
Brian Anthony Wilson - The Happening (2008)

I didn't like this movie at all. I don't even have anything good to say about it. It's about a guy who's wife and daughter are murdered, but through legal whateverness one of the guys who did it gets a light sentence because he cooperated with the rest of the investigation. The Gerard Butler character is so pissed off that he goes totally batshit crazy and orchestrates a complicated scheme to get back at the justice system. What I particularly dislike about this movie is not even the ambiguous morality, its the lack of a clear division between anti-hero and antagonist. My friend Cora clearly was in the anti-hero camp. She said that the point of the movie was to figure out how Gerard Butler was achieving these heinous murder-plots. I thought that was horrible to watch because most of the people that Butler's character killed were only tangentially related to the incident which pissed him off so much in the first place. He wasn't fighting for anything, and that made him a bad protagonist to root for. On the other hand, he makes a fatal error in the end and blows up, making Jamie Foxx the "winner" of the story and Butler the "loser." But even in that perspective I don't think any clear statement about the evils of either the justice system or the evils of vigilantism was made. And the grrrwehatecorruptlawyers trope induced in my the repulsive horror of what those ideas mean to people who really believe in them. Batman is pretty cool, but in the real world I don't condone vigilantes.You can't just go around killing people. Do I even have to say that?

The absence of a conflict resolution (was there even a conflict to begin with?) made me feel like I had only seen half of a movie. This wasn't a story, it was just a bunch of stuff that happens. I've seen movies about dudes with misdirected anger before, but Gerard Butler lacked the compelling interior logic of a character like Hannibal Lector. I say, if you're going to make an anti-hero, go all the way. It works for Dexter. But if you're going to waffle in-between you aren't going to accomplish anything meaningful.

4 May - "It doesn't hate or even care. It just happens"

Doomsday (2008)

dir. Neil Marshall - The Descent (2005)

CAST
Jason Cope - District 9 (2009)
Jeremy Crutchley - The Poseidon Adventure (TV 2005)
Rhona Mitra - Sweet Home Alabama (2002)
Bob Hoskins - Hook (1991)
Alexander Siddig - Reign of Fire (2002)
David O'Hara - Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
Adrian Lester - Case 39 (2009)
Nora-Jane Noone - Ella Enchanted (2004)
Malcolm McDowell - Easy A (2010)

Doomsday was an odd movie about a quarantined section of Great Britain that had been walled off because of some sort of virus, and then a special-ops team has to go in there to figure out why people are still alive in there after years and years. As is to be expected, without law, order, and electricity, society devolves into a tribal-esque, post-punk, Mad-maxy mess of biker gangs. I watched this back in May and I don't even remember what the essential conflict was, let alone how it was resolved. Verdict= unmemorable.

26 Feb - "When I became a man, I put away childish things"

Hackers (1995)

dir. Iain Softley (K-PAX, 2001)

CAST
Jonny Lee Miller (Mansfield Park, 1999)
Angelina Jolie (Mojave Moon, 1996)
Jesse Bradford (Romeo + Juliet, 1996)
Matthew Lillard (Scream, 1996)
Laurence Mason (True Romance, 1996)
Renoly Santiago (Con Air, 1997)
Fisher Stevens (Short Circuit, 1986)
Alberta Watson (The Prince and Me, 2004)
Peter Y. Kim (Sex and the City, 2008)
Lorraine Bracco (Goodfellas, 1990)
Wendell Pierce (It Could Happen to You, 1994)
Michael Gaston (Double Jeopardy, 1999)

When my brother and I first saw The Matrix, he explained to me it's mass appeal. He said it was about computer nerds who were also super cool and totally badass. They have martial arts skills and guns and somehow all that doesn't interfere with the hours and hours they must spend coding and hacking and whatever. Hackers is the same deal. By any standard of reality, these guys ought to be mega-nerds, but instead thet're all sub-culturey and cool. This is even more obnoxious because while Angelina can pull off a convincing cyber-punk, the male lead looked like a high-school geek, and so I was definitely not buying the sexual tension. In conclusion, Hackers: indicative of the mid-90s decline in the quality of teenager movies.

11 Feb - "as far away from the darkness as we can possibly get"

The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008)

dir. Chris Carter


CAST
David Duchovny (Evolution, 2001)
Gillian Anderson (Princess Mononoke (voice), 1997)
Amanda Peet (The Whole Nine Yards, 2000)
Bill Connolly (Pocahontas (voice), 1995)
Mitch Pileggi (X-Files: Fight the Future, 1998)
Xzibit (Hoodwinked! (voice), 2005)
Adam Godly (Love Actually, 2003)
Callum Kieth Rennie (Case 39, 2009)
Stephen E. Miller (Best in Show, 2000)
Lorena Gale (Snow Day, 2000)
Donavon Stimson (Fantastic Four, 2005)
Dion Johnstone (Dreamcatcher, 2003)
Sarah-Jane Redmond (Case 39, 2009)

Thus ends the era in which I had yet to see all nine seasons of The X-Files plus two feature films. This last movie was released a few years after the series had already ended. At the end of the series, Dana Scully and Fox Mulder left the FBI and fled the UNited States, because they knew too much. An impeding Alien invasion was alluded too, indicating that it would never truly be blue skies for our star-crossed investigators.

X-Files had two basic episode structures. There were episodes that propelled the mythic arc and related to a conspiracy to cover up an colonization program and the creation of human-alien hybrids. There were also monster-of-the-week episodes, in which Mulder and Scully had to discover and defeat some sort of paranormal menace within the confines of a single episode. This movie could only be said to conform to the latter model, and it wasn't particularly interesting at that.

31 Jan - "So you wish to know something of your destiny"

Drag Me to Hell (2009)

dir. Sam Raimi (The Quick and the Dead, 1995)

CAST
Bonnie Aarons (The Princess Diaries, 2001)
Joanne Baron (Valley Girl, 1983)
Adriana Barraza
Tom Carey (Spider-Man 2, 2004)
Molly Cheek (Smoke Signals, 1998)
Alexis Cruz (Stargate, 1994)
Kevin Foster (The Village, 2004)
Reggie Lee (Psycho Beach Party, 2000)
Alison Lohman (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (voice), 1984)
Justin Long (Serious Moonlight, 2009)
Ricardo Molina (Spanglish, 2004)
Bojana Novakovic (Devil, 2010)
David Paymer (Amistad, 1997)
Ted Raimi (Clear and Present Danger, 1994)
Dileep Rao (Avatar, 2009)
Fernanda Romero (The Burning Plain, 2008)
Irene Roseen (Beautiful, 2000)
Chelcie Ross (Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, 1991)
Octavia Spencer (The Help, 2011)
Scott Spiegel (Spider-Man, 2002)
Alex Veadov (Air Force One, 1997)

There were a number of odd themes in this movie. The first one, which my buddy Cora pointed out, is that all of the scary parts featured things going in and out of the protagonists mouth. There was a lot of yucky mouth imagery in this movie. First the old gypsy woman removes and reinserts her teeth on the banker's desk. In two or three scenes the gyspy woman puts her gaping toothless mouth on Christine's mouth or face, and in one of those scenes green gooey vomit was involved. There's another part where the old woman sticks her arm down Christine's throat to the elbow, and a nightmare in which a fly crawls into Christine's mouth only to be coughed out later. Christine gets a projectile nosebleed at the bank and her boss asks, "did I get any in my mouth?" There wasn't any psychological horror in this movie, it was just disturbing gross-out scenes.

The ostensible theme was, I think, "does the punishment fit the crime?" or maybe, "who has the right to judge?" Christine is apparently a sweet and good-natured girl, but at the moment before her demise she admits that she could have gotten an extension for the old woman's loan payment, but it was her decision to decline it. Does that mean she deserves to burn in hell for eternity? More so than the nasty co-worker who tried to sell Christine up the river even when she was nice to him? More so than the cursing gypsy herself? We don't know. For one thing, Christine was never repentant. She did not attempt to apologize to the old woman or to her family. I guess that means something.

I still didn't like the ending. I like my movies to have heroes and I like the heroes to win in the end. This was too in-your-face ironic. Stupid.

16 Dec - "Nobody likes a finger pointed at them"

Middle Men (2009)

dir. George Gallo

CAST
Luke Wilson (Scream 2, 1997)
Giovanni Ribisi (SubUrbia, 1996)
James Caan (Elf, 2003)
Jacinda Barrett (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, 2004)
Kevin Pollak (Wayne's World 2, 1993)
Laura Ramsey (She's the Man, 2006)
Terry Crews (Terminator Salvation, 2009)
Rade Serbedzija (The Saint, 1997)
Kelsey Grammer (Anastasia (voice), 1997)
Robert Forster (Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, 2003)
John Ashton (Beverly Hills Cop, 1984)
Jason Antoon (Minority Report, 2002)
Martin Kove (The Karate Kid, 1984)
Claudia Jordan (S1m0ne, 2002)

I never really like this kind of movie, so I don't know why I keep coming to them. I guess because other folks are into it and I always respect the opinions of others and those of random articles I read on the internet. I'm just not that interested by bureaucratic drama, and that makes the AHA! moment at the end sort of anticlimatic, because I'm not that excited by Luke Wilson writing the wrong date on a document and wheedling his way out of criminal charges. That's not very heroic, in my mind.

Since it's been almost a whole month since I actually watched this movie (sorry about being ridiculously behind on my posting again) I'm gonna leave it at that. Upcoming reviews: Home Alone, War Horse, and the LOTR trilogy!

14 Dec - "I was just hoping for more of an old-fashioned Christmas"

A Christmas Kiss (TV 2011)

dir. John Stimson


CAST
Elisabeth Rohm (Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, 2005)
Brendan Fehr (Final Destination, 2000)

I missed the first few minutes of this Christmas TV movie, and from what I gathered from the subsequent dialogue, they were the most important part of the movie. You see, Wendy is an aspiring interior decorator working with the bitchy socialite Priscilla Hall (as in, 'deck the...' Sometime during the beginning of the movie, Wendy kisses a strange man in the elevator for some reason, but UH OH! It's actually Priscilla's fiance (but he doesn't recognize Wendy later?), but she doesn't really love him, she just thinks they are a good match in social status, and also SHE HATES CHRISTMAS!!!

Because Wendy is in charge of designing the Christmas party at Adam's house, she spends an awful lot of time there with him alone, and eventually they bond over their mutual love of Christmas and holiday spirit. Unfortunately, Adam is the thickest male love interest ever, and he takes forever to figure out that Priscilla had nothing to do with the design plans for the Christmas party, and basically just does whatever she says. Wendy is a worse protagonist than Fanny from Mansfield Park , all she does is whine about how scared she is of losing her job with Priscilla and how she's too scared to tell Adam that she's the one he kissed in the elevator and it's so obvious that they're meant to be together. Ultimately, she takes no assertive action to secure her own happy ending.

11 Dec - "All the way to the top is the safest place"

Skyline (2010)

dir. Cloin Strause, Greg Strause

CAST
Eric Balfour (America's Sweethearts, 2001)
Scottie Thompson (Star Trek, 2009)
Brittany Daniel (Joe Dirt, 2001)
David Zayas (The Interpreter, 2005)
Donald Faison (Uptown Girls, 2003)
Tanya Newbould (Cyrus, 2010)

Unfortunately, this alien invasion movie brought alarmingly little to the genre. In fact, so much money was invested in the special effects in the last 30 minutes, all that could be managed in the previous hour were our five vapid and charmless protagonists hanging out in their penthouse acting scared and fighting about whether they should go outside. Given that so little time was given to the rising action, you'd think we might at least get some character development, but that was unforthcoming as well. The only intriguing part of this movie was the absolutely last scene, in which the male lead becomes some sort of alien-human cyborg monster but, unlike all the other alien-human cyborg monsters, he retains his own mental agency, and so he crouches protectively over his woman and then it's over.

29 Nov - "cookies and wine"

On Strike for Christmas (TV 2010)

dir. Robert Iscove (Cinderlla, TV 1997)

CAST
Daphne Zuniga (Spaceballs, 1987)
David Sutcliffe (Half Baked, 1998)
Chelah Horsdal (X-Men: The Last Stand, 2006)
Julia Duffy (Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, 2003)

Onward with the Christmas specials! On Strike for Christmas is about a housewife who gets sick of all the demanding holiday chores (including throwing separate parties for her husband's office and her son's friends) and goes on strike because boys just don't understand holiday cheer. The moral of the story is that when you're feeling overworked, it's totally okay to call a catering and send e-cards instead of paper cards. The other moral is that it's not a good idea to shape your entire identity contingent on your ability to perform as an ideal homemaker at Christmastime.

25 Sept - It's so important to be popular

The Bling Ring (TV movie) (2011)

dir. Michael Lembeck (The Santa Clause 2, 2002)

CAST
Austin Butler
Yin Chang
Jennifer Grey (Red Dawn, 1984)
Tom Irwin (The Haunting, 1999)
Scott Klace (The Pursuit of Happyness, 2006)
Spencer Locke (Spanglish, 2004)
Wendy Makkena
Renee Olstead (13 Going on 30, 2004)
Blake Robbins
Sebastian Sozzi (Choke, 2008)
Shawn Smith (Down in the Valley, 2005)


It seems like I'm watching all my movies with my buddy Cora these days. On Monday she invited me over for wine and a Lifetime channel movie. This is based on a true story, I guess. It's about some teenagers who go on a crime spree robbing celebrity's houses. There is one guy in the gang, pictured, he has social anxiety and the Asian girl is either in love with him or is crazy. He meets a girl and she totally flips.

So the way they frame it up is that these kids are social outsiders, but by becoming criminals they suddenly feel accepted, popular, important. It's sort of like saying that society is responsible, for idolizing these celebrities to the point where normalcy is insufficient, or worse, extraordinary is the new normal and the whole universe is filled with nobodies.

Aside from that tepid analysis, this was just a hammy Lifetime movie. We've already decided to watch next week's movie, too. It's called Girl Fight.

21 Aug - "I'm not saying Uncle Sam can kick back on a lawn chair, sipping on an iced tea"

Iron Man 2 (2010)

dir. Jon Favreau (Cowboys & Aliens, 2011)

CAST

Robert Downey Jr. (Back to School, 1986)

Gwyneth Paltrow (Hook, 1991)

Don Cheadle (Traffic, 2000)

Scarlett Johansson (Eight Legged Freaks, 2002)

Sam Rockwell (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007)

Mickey Rourke

Samuel L. Jackson (Goodfellas, 1990)

Clark Gregg (Magnolia, 1999)

John Slattery (Traffic, 2000)

Garry Shandling (Doctor Dolittle, 1998)

Paul Bettany (voice) (A Knight's Tale, 2001)

Kate Mara (Brokeback Mountain, 2005)

Leslie Bibb (Private Parts, 1997)

Jon Favreau (PCU, 1994)
Evgeniy Lazarev (The Onion Movie, 2008)

How am I finding time to watch all these movies while simultaneously beginning my second year of grad school, you might be wondering? Well, I'm paralyzed into near inaction on almost everything resembling productivity, therefore I abuse my drug of choice in the pusuit of the sweet release into transcendance: cinema.

I enjoyed Robert Downey Jr.'s performance in Iron Man because I thought he portrayed an asshole billionaire very well. Iron Man 2 was more of the same and a little less exciting for it. As is usual for a superhero sequel, a potentially wonderful supervillain was underdeveloped. Here he is in the opening credits giving vodka to a cockatoo.

That's hilarious! I want more Vanko/Cockatoo relationship development. And more Sam Rockwell! Gwyneth Paltrow spent the whole movie acting like an overwhelmed harridan. I think there was supposed to be something resembling sexual tension between her and Iron Man, but I wasn't feeling it. Scarlett Johannson was an oversexualized agent of SHIELD - I think there needs to be a movie law that a character can't have more KOs than he or she has speaking lines (exceptions for actor/director combinations that are actually talented). I think there was a TV movie called Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D but I don't know anything else about that.

If you haven't figured it out already, I'm not a Jon Favreau fan. All in all, Iron Man 2 was unexceptional; I'll probably forget all about it in a few days.

26 July - "What happened to the rabbit, Valerie?"

Red Riding Hood (2011)
dir. Catherine Hardewick (Twilight, 2008)

CAST

Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls, 2004)

Gary Oldman (True Romance, 1993)

Billy Burke (Eclipse, 2010)

Shiloh Fernandez

Max Irons

Virginia Madsen (Sideways, 2004)

Luke Haas (Witness, 1985)

Julie Christie (Fahrenheit 451, 1966)

Christine Willes (The Wicker Man, 2006)
Michael Adamthwaite (New Moon, 2009)
Dalias Blake

The name of the game, apparently, is fairy tale reinterpretations. I was hoping this movie about Little Red Riding Hood would be like Snow White: A Tale of Terror, but this was so much more like bubblegum pop-drama with pretty teenagers than a Grimm fairy tale horror.

As in Twilight, the heroine's desire to run away with the boy she likes is the primary concern, but she has a few reservations concerning a werewolf. Valerie's life outside of Peter, the bad-boy (he's always wearing black!) orphan woodcutter and Henry, the nice-guy her mother wants her to marry, is virtually nonexistent. She has two friends without personalities, and one of them turns out to be kind of mean. The big mystery is that we (with help from Gary Oldman, who is lovely and hyper-talented as always, injecting some character drama into this shallow movie) have to figure out who the werewolf is, and what its connection to Valerie is (the revelation will shock and surprise you!). What do I think? Swing and a miss.

24 July - "Oh-llo?"

Megamind (2010)

dir. Tom McGrath (Madagascar, 2005)

voices

Will Ferrell (Stranger Than Fiction, 2006)

Brad Pitt (Burn After Reading, 2008)

Tina Fey (Ponyo (voice), 2008)

Jonah Hill (Strange Wilderness, 2008)

David Cross (Small Soldiers, 1998)

Ben Stiller (The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001)

J.K. Simmons (Burn After Reading, 2008)

A couple things come to mind when I'm thinking about how to start this one. The first is that I really just don't care for these chintzy computer-animated movies with the bright colors and the vomitingly (I made that an adverb) predictable ending and the complete and utter lack of charm.

I guess it was like, six or eight months ago when a fella asked me if I wanted to see this with him. I like it when someone asking me out has already picked the movie (or whatever the plan is, since a friend of mine told me that movie as a first date is bullshit because you're supposed to be engaging with each other) - but if we are going to see a movie I like it when the guy has already chosen one because it seems lazy otherwise. As if, hey I want to hang out with you, can you organize an interesting and fun evening? No, I say, if you want my company so bad, you gotta do the legwork.

Anyway, so my normal M.O. is to agree to whatever movie my prospective suitors suggest, because at that point I'm more interested in the person than the movie (a surprising confession, I know. This is why I ended up seeing Superman Returns TWICE in the theaters! But I still think the worst date movie I ever sat through was Enchanted, which ended up being quite pleasant when I watched it later on DVD with some girlfriends, so yeah, I think the company you've got during a movie is important)

I am having a hard time getting to the point. The point is that even though it usually doesn't matter to me what movie a guy picks, and even though I hate picking date movies, and even though I really liked this guy and wanted to go out with him, I was still like, Hells no, I don't wanna see Megamind, I will call you back in 20 minutes with a revised itinerary. We ended up seeing It's Kind of a Funny Story instead; it was a rather arid week for cinema in Athens, but I thought it was a reasonably good choice. It didn't work out, though, c'est la vie.

So I watched it because I wanted to watch something On Demand with my lil bro, we also saw Tangled (upcoming!) and we may resort to Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2. It was fun with him because we laughed at the funny jokes, but, honestly, this movie was artless, it wasn't cute at all, it was pandering and easy and heavy-heavy and clumsy, like someone who's trying too hard to be your new best friend and I just wanted to be alone after the whole confrontation.

My brain is all over the place right now. Still sick in bed, by the by.

15 June - "Back of the car, not a rear-entry situation"

Burn After Reading (2008)
dir. Joel and Ethan Coen (O Brother, Where art Thou?, 2000)

CAST
George Clooney (Fantastic Mr. Fox (voice), 2009)
Brad Pitt (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007)
Tilda Swinton (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 2010)

Frances McDormand (Fargo, 1996)

John Malkovitch (Being John Malkovitch, 1999)

Richard Jenkins (Eat Pray Love, 2010)

Kevin Sussman (Sweet Home Alabama, 2002)

Dermot Mulroney (The Family Stone, 2005)

J.K. Simmons (The Ref, 1994)
Olek Krupa (Behind Enemy Lines, 2001)

If you heard that this movie wasn't very good, you would be justified in believing those rumors. Burn After Reading wasn't very bad, but I certainly wouldn't plan on seeing it again either.

I think the problem is that while it's fairly obvious that it was meant to be funny, it very overtly missed the mark. First of all, we're tricked in the very beginning into thinking that John Malkovitch is the main character, maybe he was supposed be, but George Clooney and Frances McDormand take the lead, plotwise, for the bulk of the remainder. The big joke appears to be that McDormand and Pitt are running around talking to the Russians and pretending to be all conniving but what they've really got is a disgruntled analyst's crappy attempt at a memoir.

That's the joke, everyone dies for no reason at all. Sorry if I spoiled it. There seem to be some allusions to government ineptitude, but I am less clear on those points.

Gosh, I'm nearly ten days behind on my movie reviews. I have a backlog of two movies I watched after this one. Hopefully I have more to say about them more than a week after I watched them. More complaining: Never has a comedy been so boring. Really disappointed, Coens.

13 March - "Maybe we can get a break from Jake's obsessive inner monologue"

Eclipse (2010)
dir. David Slade (Hard Candy, 2005)

CAST

Kristen Stewart (Adventureland, 2009)

Robert Pattinson (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2005)

Taylor Lautner (The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, 2005)

Bryce Dallas Howard (Lady in the Water, 2006)

Dakota Fanning (War of the Worlds, 2005)

Billy Burke (Ladder 49, 2004)

Gil Birmingham (Twilight, 2008)
Jodelle Ferland (Good Luck Chuck, 2007)
Dawn Chubai (Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer, 2007)
Leah Gibson (Watchmen, 2009)

I'm going to pause for a moment so everyone can make fun of me.

Yes, very good.

So I decided to watch the third Twilight movie because I wanted to watch something corny and self-indulgent and eat brownies on the couch with my cat and paint my toenails and girl crap like that. But this shit was just, just terrible. Maybe, MAYBE you could call it delightfully dreadful but mostly I was just confused: how many people gave this movie the thumbs-up before it was released for mass-viewing. Isn't there any honor left in cinema? Why didn't anyone STOP IT FROM HAPPENING?

By "IT" I mean the heinous performance given by Kristen Stewart. I mean that, I've heard about her bad acting and I just say, 'well, as long as she's being an angsty and apathetic teenager she does okay' (which is generous, because 99% of everyone under the age 20 can pretty effectively act like an angsty and apathetic teenager). But here's little Kristen, playing the apotheosis of angsty teenager roles and I'm just not buying it. Audibly, I had to exclaim to the screen, "Okay Kristen, now try it again but pretend like you give a shit." Isn't she dating Robert Pattinson in real life? Can she use that somehow to act like she's in love?

And she's a mouth-breather.

I also didn't really understand the conflict, which I'll attribute to a poor adaptation of the book, which of course I didn't read. So, this vampire Victoria wanted to kill Bella because her BF died in the last movie (but Bella didn't kill him, Edward did), so she raises a modest army (maybe fifteen strong?) of vampires to attack the Cullen family + werewolf allies and then goes after Bella and Edward (her primary targets???) with just herself and one other guy.

That's a stupid plan. Bella acts mildly pleased once all the threats against her life have been eliminated.

5 March - "Are you just saying that because you're taped to a toilet?"

Serious Moonlight (2009)
dir. Cheryl Hines

CAST

Meg Ryan (Kate & Leopold, 2001)

Timothy Hutton (The Last Mimzey, 2007)

Justin Long (Dreamland, 2006)

Kristen Bell (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, 2008)

This movie was awful. I'm sorry to subject you all to even this vicarious cinematic experience. I'm especially sorry since last time I watched a bad movie too. I hate to be a negative Nancy.

Of course, I knew what I was getting into with a Meg Ryan movie, and the synopsis wasn't particularly exciting either just in case you're a Meg Ryan fan (I'll always have a soft spot for Sleepless in Seattle). In this movie she looked different somehow, maybe she got lip injections?

In a nutshell, Meg Ryan, playing the same character that Meg Ryan always plays, comes to home to learn that her husband is in love with another woman and about to jet off to Paris, and then just when you thought you were going to watch the rest of French Kiss, she knocks him unconscious and ties him to a chair. There's a twist ending, but I figured it out well before the end. 'Cause I'm the smartest.

2 March - "What it is. Eternity - how do they know?"

Stone (2010)
dir. John Curran

CAST

Robert De Niro (Great Expectations, 1998)

Edward Norton (Down in the Valley, 2005)

Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element, 1997)

Frances Conroy (Shopgirl, 2005)

Sometimes you see a movie and you think you're only a little disappointed. Like, that movie wasn't awesome, but it was pretty good, but then the more you think about it, the more you realize that you've been had. That movie sucked. That movie sucked two hours of your life away and is totally unapologetic about it. That's what Stone is like.

That's also what happened when Drew Speranza and I went to see Cyrus (2010), starring John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill.

They trick with the understated set design, the A-list actors, and the seemingly poignant dialogue. At first you think you don't understand it, you think it's one of those smart indie films you're going to feel better about yourself for having seen. We go into these movies wanting to be entertained. We give them the benefit of the doubt.

First of all, Edward Norton is awesome, and even here I think he takes what he is given and knocks it out of the park. His character, Stone, is a smarmy convict up for parole that has a spiritual epiphany, of sorts. I think in a later entry I'm going to have to make a list of the actors I have crushes on. In my eyes, Edward Norton can do no wrong.

Milla Jovovich, who is another favorite of mine, plays Stone's wife who might be a nymphomanic but maybe was just playing. Here's the thing, this movie was really played up as a psychological drama, but nobody was really playing mind games with anybody, there was just the sort of implication that everyone was being a bit insincere with everyone else. I mean, the wife seduces Robert De Niro's character, who is in charge of recommending Stone for parole, but she's just doing that to get her hubby out, right? I think that was pretty clear. I guess Milla also did a good job with her material, but I wish they had played her up as either more manipulative or more narcissistic or something. She wasn't fleshed out enough, the poor girl.

The symbolism, as well, was pretty in your face. I remember when I had to read The Scarlet Letter in seventh grade and they got to the part where Hester names her bastard baby Pearl, "because she came with a great price" and I exclaimed that the book was stupid and refused to have no more of it. Well, about thirty minutes into this movie Ed Norton's character says something about hearing God in the background noise and I said out loud, "Oh! I see what they're doing here," and in hindsight we could have stopped watching the movie there, because that was the most interesting point that highlighted the most interesting scene, which was the very first one. It was all downhill after that.