How to Train Your Dragon (2010) **

Directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois

"How to Train Your Dragon" looks pleasant enough, in a middle-of-the-road Pixar-y kind of way, but the story is so by-the-numbers that stretches of it feel like a chore.  Within the first couple of minutes, the teenage Viking hero says he wants to kill a dragon so he ( Read more... )

I watched 42 of 2010's theatrical releases.  As much as I'd like to write a thoughtful dissertation on each of them, I'm too busy with my own stories (I'm revising "Every Airship Needs a Wizard" and "Painter" (aka "Black Mist," aka "In Its Place") and mailing "The Dream").  So I gave myself 10-20 minutes per movie to crank out a couple paragraphs ( Read more... )

There are a ton of movies from 2000 - 2009 that I've missed (consult this list and this list), but I have to put this up eventually.  Picks and rankings are based on nothing deeper than how I feel right now.  Don't be surprised if tomorrow I redo the ranking completely.
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With "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," I finally call myself done with the films of 2009.  Here's my Top Ten…or Top Eleven.

EDITED 5-10-2010:  Actually, why don't I just rank every movie I saw last year.

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JULIE AND JULIA (**1/2) - Dir. Nora Ephron
I’d love to see a stronger movie about an aimless woman in her 20s who seeks direction through the worship of a celebrity.  But “Julie and Julia” is so relentlessly upbeat that it glosses over all the creepy stuff that might make it interesting.  Aspiring author Julie (Amy Adams) starts reading ( Read more... )

THE INFORMANT! (***1/2) - Dir. Stephen Soderbergh

Soderbergh does two movies a year, it seems, one serious and one silly.  More often than not I prefer the silly one.  In “The Informant!” Matt Damon is mesmerizing as a fascinating, real-life goofball:  a corporate whistleblower who is himself crooked.  The mental gymnastics he plays to justify ( Read more... )

( 3:10 to Yuma (**1/2 out of ****) )

The protagonists in most of Michael Mann's films live by codes, codes which, with the exception of "Heat," are always unspoken.  His films are often driven by the breaking, repairing, or inherent flaws of his codes.  The protagonists long for domesticity and think their codes can achieve it, when, in fact, it is the code itself that prevents ( Read more... )

2009 thoughts:  LOVE "Heat."  Love love love love love.  What boy wouldn't?  Doomed romanticism, "I love you but I must kill you," characters photographed as inferior to their vast uncaring surroundings.  And guns.  Guns like you wouldn't believe, given glorious vent in the best gunfight of the 1990s.  First viewing was a two-taper rental from " ( Read more... )

Air Force One (1997)
Eraser (1996)
The Firm (1993)
The Hurricane (1999)
Internal Affairs (1990)
Leon / The Professional (1994)
Medicine Man (1992)
The Pelican Brief (1993)
Rising Sun (1993)
Two Days in the Valley (1996)

2009 Thoughts: Because, for the most part, these are middling middlebrow mid-90s action mysteries, I think the reviews are ( Read more... )