I think we can figure it out Grugg.
You like Parrrris Hillllton

Finally got around to seeing Evan Almighty on DVD this weekend (thanks, Netflix!). I was expecting a little light humor, and was prepared for it to be anywhere from lightly to seriously sacreligious.

I was surprised. Yes, there were plenty of little sight gags, but I personally thought most of the humor was pretty smart. As for sacrilegious... well, the only thing that I could find remotely objectionable (and that would only be to someone who is REALLY tightly wound) was in the closing credits, when God (played superbly by Morgan Freeman) declared a new commandment, which tied into a silly little running joke through the movie.

While certainly not an Oscar-worthy film, I thought that Evan Almighty was a really good family comedy - it made you laugh, made you think a bit about family values, and I honestly thought that it portrayed God and relationships with Him in a really neat way.

I highly recommend this film.

If you are a fan of the festival film circuit, you will probably enjoy Wristcutters: a Love Story.

It's a film about a young man who gives up and commits suicide, ending up in a desolate, drab and uneventful afterlife/purgatory where nothing happy ever happens and everyone is dead from "offing" themselves.

Its a slightly predictable tale that, no matter what you might think initially, does not glorify suicide.

I liked it and would recommend it.

Almerin and I will be watching that tonight or tomorrow.

Into The Wild. 2007. Based on a true story. After graduating from Emory University in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters who shape his life. Beautiful, awesome story and film. Took me a while to get used to the main character, but he grows on you and it's lovely. Refreshing!

Awakenings. 1990 film. A new doctor finds himself with a ward full of comatose patients. He is disturbed by them and the fact that they have been comatose for decades with no hope of any cure. When he finds a possible chemical cure, he gets permission to try it on one of them. When the first patient awakes, he is now an adult having gone into a coma in his early teens. The film then delights in the new awareness of the patients and then on the reactions of their relatives to the changes in the newly awakened. Summary written by John Vogel
My 2 cents: lovely, pretty emotional, and at times could be disturbing.

Mozart and the Whale. 2005 with Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell. A love story between two savants with Asperger's syndrome, a kind of autism, whose disabilites sabotage their budding relationship.
I loved this movie. Gave me a lot of smiles and emotions. Josh Hartnett does an amazing job. It really frustrated me in all the right ways.

We (Almerin and I) saw Horton Hears a Who.
It was great! I love the idea behind it. The fact, really. The fact that is so hard for so many of us to comprehend, rightfully so actually. It's that, in this enormous entire world, we aren't the only ones, and who says we are the superior? We are only a spec in an enormous world. And within our world, are billions of other 'specs' and worlds within those specs.

Do YOU hear a Who?? I do!

Don't be the Kangaroo! (You'll know what i mean by that when you see the movie).

---

Oh yes, (edit part): I went to see 10,000 B.C. with a friend. Hmm...i was dissapointed. I had expected it to be a little more rugged, interesting, spontaneous, scary-ish(kinda), but it turned out to be a family film, and very predictable and with its share of cheesiness. *shrugs* I'd recommend Apocalypto in its place.

Speaking of early time cavepeople and such, we recently watched the German caveman/neaderthal movie Am Anfang War Das Feuer (In the Beginning There Was Fire). Don't worry, no spoken words, only caveman talk. No words are needed. The problem these neaderthals face in this movie, is that once they find fire (taken from a volcano), other tribes try to steal it from them. When the fire is stolen, the main tribe of the movie have a serious problem, because they don't know how to recreate it! Good film, really evolutionist, however. Christians beware!

Great film, that one. The english title is The Quest for Fire, for those of you who are interested. You really see the man-apes 'learn' more human behavior, but it's all quite subtile.

Well, I just saw Day of the Dead, the new one that is.

Uh...

Zombies fly through the air, and run, and do flips, and shoot guns.


And they tear people to pieces.


And the dialogue is cheesy.


And theres non-violent vegetarian zombies who fight other super zombies.


Greatest Movie Ever

Almerin and I saw Iron Man a short time ago. It was good. Worth the watch. Had a nice flow, too.

uhh...lemme see....

Elizabeth (with a Z), as in the queen of England. Also a good film. I expected it to be too proper, but it wasn't like that at all. At one or two points you might get lost in the details of their foreign relations (especially if you can't hear or understand some of the words lol), but you'll get the jist (gist? gyst?). There is a part two, which we will rent eventually.

and there are some others, but i can't recall them at the moment.

For a PG 14 movie it had it's share of gore and suspense, but the plot was riveting and considering it was all about muder through people visiting a website, the notion was top notch. Diana Lane as usual gave a decent performance, but the bad guy (won't say who) was what sold it for me, they just 'looked' the part.

Might make you wanna update your firewalls just in case after this one folks

Last night, I sat down to watch a movie with my wife. She had DVRed Wicker Park. And to think, I could have watched four episodes of Golden Girls reruns in the same timespan! Or painted a wall and watched it do a lot of drying!

Yes, folks, it was that bad, and worse. The script was horifically choppy - if you like flashbacks, plot jumps, and scenes in a random, jumbled order (to the point that all sense of time's flow is meaningless), then you'll like this aspect of the movie. If you are sane, it will bother you to no end.

Basic premise of the movie: boy meets girl, falls in love. Girl moves to Europe for a job, but plans to return to her love after the end of the job run (she's a dancer). Girl's best friend falls in love with him, spends the next two years doing everything she can to keep the couple apart and poison all feelings they have for one another, so that she can swoop in and claim boy. Everyone involved in these two people's lives is hurt by this (boy, girl, stalker best friend girl, boy's best friend, boy's future fiancee who he has to drop once he realizes that girl did not abandon him like he thought).

Of course, it is nowhere near as clear as all of this until near the movie's end, since the scenes are, as stated, out of order, and shuffled even more from the varying perspectives of the characters.

I've seen this portrayed as a psycological thriller. Uh, yeah. Whatever. I will grant that it seems everyone in this film is obsessed, and that both boy and girl's best friend are probably mentally ill, but a thriller this is not. I'm angry at this movie. Send it to someone you don't like.

Last night, I sat down and watched Catch and Release with my wife, who had DVRed it. I knew coming in that it was a chick flick (aka romantic comedy?), so I was prepared. To be honest, I actually enjoyed the movie.

The basic premise is that the main's character's fiance dies before the two of them are to be married (I mean, RIGHT before - the movie starts with some nice imagery of the bride-to-be dressed in black at a funeral reception while workers carry out wedding flowers, decorations, etc), and she has to pick up the pieces of her life. Naturally, it would not be a romantic movie if she didn't have a new love interest, but they handle it pretty well. Turns out that the late Mister Right wasn't quite the perfect guy she (and pretty much everyone) thought that he was, which leaves her with some interesting things to deal with.

Good acting, very nice character interplay. A couple of the characters are a good bit over the top in their quirkiness, but it's okay; it helps the movie to really work. I had only two real beefs with the movie.

(1) Apparently, virtually every person in this movie is rich, or well enough off that money (which was a central theme in the movie) really doesn't matter after all... how nice for them. Made it a bit tough for me to identify with them, and took away some of the pressure I would think real people might feel. Of course, I know that there are lots of rich people out there... maybe this was aimed at them?

(2) An otherwise smart, well put together script could not resist from falling into the formulatic romantic comedy trap of inventing a conflict between the main character and the love interest, and as is pretty much always the case, said conflict comes from one person saying something they really didn't mean, and the other person finds out about it and takes it out of context, causing a big rift. Will they patch it up? Of course they will, this is a romantic comedy.

In a movie that dealt with an intense situation - and thus, some deep issues - in what felt like a genuine, fulfilling way, this conflict seemed very high school and shallow in comparison.


Geez, what do I think I am, a movie critic?

This is not my favorite end of the movie spectrum, there's a reason they are called "chick flicks," but all in all, this was a good (if somewhat odd) movie. You could do much worse for a date film.

Iron Man: 4/5 (in my opinion the best of the superhero movies ever to be filmed).

Cloverfield: 3/5

I am Legend: 3/5

28 Dresses: 2/5

P.S. I Love You: 3/5

Tenacious D: -200/5 (One of the worst films ever made. I think all participants in this film ought to be shot).

3:10 To Yuma: 4/5

Harry Potter 5: 3/5

The Seeker: 2/5

Eragon: 2/5

While I am a big fan of the blockbusters, I'm also entirely respectful and appreciative of those hidden gems, the offbeat and the indies.

These are movies that inspire me, or motivate me, and make me want to wite movies that good.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:mind alteration, damaged love, hope
Stranger Than Fiction: human condition and cookies
Being John Malkovitch: Cusak. 'Nuff said.
Crash: more awards than a mountain
Sliding Doors: Funny, witty, good dialogue
Tape: painful, raw, emotional, provocative.

Rent them all.

Took the kids to see Prince Caspian, the new Chronicles of Narnia movie.

Wow.

To be fair, I never read the books, so nothing is "changed" for me. I'm judging the movie on it's own merits, period.

The CGI is a step up from the first movie (which was admittedly very good). This movie is quite a bit darker, with a grittier, more violent feel... this is not the wide-eyed wonderment version of Narnia we saw in the first movie. A *lot* of beings die in this film. This is a fantasy world, no doubt, but not a glittery fairy tale. However, there is no gore whatsoever; I noted that no one's sword ever got bloody, despite the fact that they were used a lot. A tiny nitpick, and one of very few I can come up with.

I won't reveal any spoilers, but let me say that a new character stole the movie, and had me in stitches. The Narnians were great, period... there is one scene where you know that quite a few are going to die, and a great deal of emotion is subtly conveyed... you feel very bad for them. Great job on the filmmaking.

The children are a bit older, and once they return to Narnia, are apparently quite a bit more practiced in the arts of warfare. In the first film, they went from being neophytes to being competant. In this installment, they perform like heroes from Lord of the Rings. Perhaps a bit of a stretch, but it works.

Go see this movie on the big screen, you won't be disappointed.