So, I went in to Skyline having read the reviews, and knowing from the start that it was currently coasting along at a 10% at Rotten Tomatoes. Not a good sign.

Turns out, expecting to see the worst movie of the year is a pretty good setup to seeing Skyline.

It's NOT the worst movie of the year (that's still a dead race between The Lovely Bones and ( Read more... )

Unstoppable is about a train that, in the end, is stoppable. That's not a spoiler, because the movie has to end sometime! It's nowhere near as good as my favorite runaway train movie, which is, of course, "Runnaway Train." Of course, the fact that "Runnaway Train" was based on an Akira Kurosawa script gives it an immediate boost above all other ( Read more... )

I was relatively fortunate to not have a lot of annoying chuckleheads in this audience... there WERE some chuckleheads, but not enough to really distress me.

I went in to this one with pretty low expectations; I really REALLY love the first one, but a lot of its strength lies in the fact that it did a lot of things in a new way. The sequel carries ( Read more... )

Clint Eastwood doesn't do supernatural movies that often, so when I heard about "Hereafter" I was, of course, intrigued. Alas... the movie's not his best. It's still a quite good movie, though, with a REALLY powerful opening scene that is quite incredible and breathtaking; I won't spoil it for you but if you've seen the trailers you know what it is ( Read more... )

Now, I'm not a fan of remakes of foreign movies. That said... when a remake actually equals or improves on the original, I'm delighted. This doesn't happen often, and when it does, it's almost always because the remake has the good fortune to be in the hands of a visionary director.

"Let the Right One In" was the best vampire movie I'd seen in a ( Read more... )

So they say that "Monsters" only cost $15,000 to make, and that it effectively only had a crew of two people during filming, and the director did all the special effects on his laptop computer. If that's true... then this is all the proof I need that making a great movie is now something that ANYONE can do. Sure, we've seen things like Blair Witch ( Read more... )

So the thing about my experience seeing "The Town" was that the movie, as good as it was (and it WAS good!) it was the theater experience that was the best. I went to the "Gold Class " theater here in Redmond, and while the ticket to see the movie cost me $22.00, it was worth it. Because the theater had reclining seats, blankets if you wanted them ( Read more... )

Machete don't text!

Machete: A

Huh. Got the movies a little out of order. I actually saw this one a month ago and just forgot to post a review.

So I watched "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" on DVD and loved it. An EXCELLENT crime drama made even better by two of the most interesting characters I've seen in movies this year. Then I found out that movie was the first in a trilogy ( Read more... )

NEW RULE: Do not go see PG-13 horror movies on opening night.

Just got back from "The Last Exorcisim," which turns out was a very effective, creepy, moody, and quite scary little movie. Plot: A priest who's lost his faith sees one too many reports of exorcisms causing more harm than good, and hires a documentary crew to interview him and follow ( Read more... )