I am a recent fan of The League on FX. I heard about because season one was on Netflix, so I decided to check it out. It was only 6 episodes, but it was great. I loved the style of humor and the interaction between characters.
I Love You Phillip Morris is a couple years old but I sure of heck had never heard of it before a few months ago when a couple critics I respect were singing its praises. It is a pretty small film but it stars Jim Carey and Ewan McGregor as gay lovers. Sound like a laugh a minute right?
Every now and then a movie comes along and totally surprises you with its awesomeness. Rango was one of those movies for me. I expected a run of the mill Pixar wannabe animated film. It turned out to be so much more than that. I liked Rango better than most of the Pixar fare from the last few years. It is filled with amazing visuals, interesting looking characters, and plenty of solid action. It was very pleasant surprise that I can't wait to watch again.
It seem like I always have a backlog of movies to write about and no time to do it. It has been over 2 weeks since I saw The Fighter, and it is actually tough for me to remember my initial reaction. I definitely liked it a lot more than I thought I would, but I had really low expectations.
I finally got around to seeing Black Swan. It seems like an entire year has passed since this was initially getting hyped. Amazingly I went in completely unspoiled. I knew nothing about the film other than the actors' names and the subject matter. Overall I was really impressed with it. It lived up to most of the praise I'd heard over the past several months.
I really haven't been watching many movies this year. I've had a new baby, a new job, and little interest in the movies that have come out over the last few months. There were some leftovers from last year that I still hadn't gotten around to. I decided to change that. I started the weekend off with Black Swan on Friday night. I watched Trouble the Water and The Fighter on Saturday. Then on Sunday I saw Rango. I wasn't too impressed with Trouble the Water, but the rest were great. 
The Sixth Sense blew my mind. Unbreakable wowed me. Signs disappointed, and The Village down right pissed me off. I skipped Lady in the Water. I laughed at the scathing reviews of The Happening and frowned when everybody hated The Last Airbender so much. I had no intention of watching Devil, even though it got middling reviews when it came out last year. By some miracle we got free HBO and Cinemax for a weekend and Devil was on, so I DVRed it. 
I have been on the fence about watching Transformers 3. I didn't particularly like the first film. It was okay, but just kind of meh. The second one had a few cool moments, but overall was horrible. The last half hour seemed to drag on for an eternity. I have never been so excited to get out of the theater. Now the 3rd one comes along, and to make matters worse it is in 3D. I am not a fan of 3D. 
Maybe I pay too much attention to film news, but I feel like I heard about Super 8 coming out a full year ago, and it was one of the most anticipated movies for me this summer. I didn't know anything about it, and I had no reason to be excited about it. I suppose I bought into the hype. Now I have seen it, and the result has been to plunge me deeper into my abyss of film despair. I wanted so badly to be blown away by this film. I was too young to experience the magic of the Amblin films back in the 80's. Super 8 was my chance to have a little piece of that. 
I watched this movie on Netflix instant in broad daylight about as far away from Halloween as you can get. I'm guessing that was not the intended setting, but it might have been the only way for me to partake. I've never been a fan of scary/horror/blood/guts... though I do I love an intense thriller. I guess there is a fine line, which makes it difficult to know which movies are suitable for watching with the lights out. As a child the supernatural always scared me more. If we found out the murderer was a mere mortal I was mostly okay with it because he/she/it could be killed. If it were a phantom/ghost/Freddy Krueger I was freaked-the-shit-out.
Yep. I'm once again writing about how I haven't been keeping up with this blog like I wanted to. Interesting reading ehh? I honestly haven't been watching many movies at all. What I have been watching hasn't gotten me excited. It seems like more often than not I hit a slump and I need something to break me out of it. Bridesmaids was good, but I liked it in spite of a lot of things. The more I thought about it the more criticisms I came up with. 
I don't like to read reviews before I write my own, but this time I did. After seeing Bridesmaids I wasn't blown away by it... at least not as much as all the hype that I'd heard about it from the public and critics alike. I had to check them out and see what everybody liked so much about it. I started with the staples... Ebert and Armond White. Everybody should read Ebert's review just to enjoy the awkwardness (fyi I am reviewing reviews right now... meta!). I read a few other reviews and I came up with a consensus of why everybody liked it... because it proves women actually can be funny and that is such a refreshing surprise from their usual bitching and moaning.
Back in high school, especially the last couple years of it, I didn't watch all that many movies. I felt like I did, but other than going out on dates from time to time I really didn't. Even in college I didn't see that many. Later on I started watching more, but for the first couple years I watched almost nothing. This means I have a gap from 1998 to 2003 where I saw very few movies (by comparison to what I see these days anyway). I missed out on a lot. I've been trying to go back and fill in the gaps. The good part is that I can pretty easily filter out all the crap movies that came out during that time and focus on the good ones. One that I'd been meaning to catch up with forever finally came to Netflix instant... Wet Hot American Summer. 
Last week I treated myself to a couple of talkies... ones about love you see. You should have already read my thoughts on Before Sunrise. I couldn't wait to sit down to see what became of my two favorite jabber mouths. Most people who watched the original film in 1995 had to wait 9 whole years to know if they met in December on that train platform. I cheated the system and only waited mere hours before learning what happened to the young lovers. I'm not sure if Before Sunset was better or worse because of that. 
I'm still way behind on my movie watching, but I did manage to catch up with a 1995 Richard Linklater film known as Before Sunrise. I'd really never hear of it back in the day, but I was pretty young when it came out. The film was referenced a couple times on the Filmspotting podcast, so when I saw it on Netflix instant I decided to check it out. I had no clue what it was going to be like, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. 
Sorry for the lack of posts, but I really haven't been watching many movies lately. The problem with Netflix instant is that I start watching lots of movies, but if I'm not interested I can easily turn it off and never finish it. I've been doing that quite a bit lately, and I just haven't had much time to watch movies. Maybe I should start posting about TV. 
I have become fairly pretentious about the films I watch, and Burlesque wasn't even considered to be worth my time. I am almost ashamed to admit I watched it. Even more so, I didn't hate it. Don't get me wrong, it is corny beyond belief, and cannot be taken seriously. Still... it has some entertainment value. It does feature Kristen Bell dancing around in her underwear, so that cannot be all bad... right?
Dogtooth is a film that most casual movie watchers will not be able to stand. Even though I really enjoyed it, it is almost impossible to recommend. It is probably the first Greek film I've ever seen. It is shot in an art-house style reminiscent of Michael Haneke. There is lot of odd focusing and framing that will likely turn people off. It is slow paced with almost no plot. The characters speak with an unemotional, almost robotic style. It is entirely in a foreign language making it even more difficult to connect with the film. It would seem to have a lot working against it, but it still resonated with me. More than any other film I have watched in the last several months, Dogtooth prompted me to seek out reviews, and demanded that I think about it further. While it might not be the easiest film to watch, Dogtooth is one that will probably stick with you for a while.
Let The Right One In is a 2008 Swedish film that I quite liked. You can read my post here. Let Me In is the American remake. They both have the exact same plot... a girl befriends an outcast young boy... she is actually a vampire... young love blossoms. Both films have a fairly deliberate pace and a distinct tone, which is also very similar between the two. This is basically a straight-up exact remake, but I didn't have a problem with that. It is a very good story that I was looking forward to seeing retold. 
I re-read my post on The Social Network and I realize that I didn't say a whole lot about the actual movie. Here are a few thoughts....
In the spring of 2004 I sat in a Purdue University computer lab and set up a Facebook account. I had no clue at the time I was getting in on somewhat of the ground floor of a site that would change how we interact on the internet for years to come. I had no idea about the who, how, or why this site was created. I remained willingly ignorant of those facts right up to the time I started The Social Network. Sure I knew the name of Mark Zuckerberg, but I had no clue who he really was or what part he played in the creation of the site. Now I've watched The Social Network twice. I'm still not sure how much I really know about the facts behind the creation of Facebook, but damn, what a story.
I'm finally able to get things back on track with posting to this blog. I've been watching a lot of really good movies lately, and I am way behind on writing about any of them. That is what happens when you have a baby I guess. We've been snowed in around here all week, so I will try to take advantage of that by catching up on a few posts. 
It's been a couple weeks since I posted anything. I took some "time off" as we welcomed our baby girl. I had planned to write a few posts ahead of time and space them out, but that didn't happen, mostly because I hadn't seen enough movies lately that I wanted to write about. Even though I haven't been writing the last couple weeks, I have taken the time to see a few films. I decided to try Redbox for the first time so that I could see The Social Network. Alas, they didn't have it on bluray, so I went with another one I really wanted to check out... Winter's Bone. 
What happens when a video game and a film love each other very much? They make a baby, and that baby is Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. This movie is visually interesting and the detail of the auditory queues are impressive. There is a lot to love about it, as long as you are up to speed on all your geek culture references. I found it humorous, but down the stretch my interest started to wane. The movie's driving force is a romance, but it lacked emotional stakes. Director Edgar Wright succeeded at keeping my eyeballs happy, but left my heart out in the cold Toronto winter. 
2010 was a year where movies blurred the line between fact and fiction. There were films like Shutter Island and Inception where the difference between the real and the contrived was very difficult to identify.There was The Social Network, that presented a highly fictionalized version of a true story. 2010 also had three psuedo-documentaries that presented themselves as 100% fact. One has come out definitely as a ruse, the other two still claim to be real, but there is a lot of debate as to whether that is the case. These three films are of course; I'm Still Here, Exit Through The Gift Shop, and Catfish. I'm Still Here is the only one that is admittedly a fake. Strangely it felt the most real of the three as I was watching it. I expected a tongue-in-cheek look at an actor's life spiraling out of control. Instead I got a very somber tale of depression and loss of identity. 
Sometimes you just watch a movie and there isn't anything in particular you like about it other than the fact that it is a damn good film. True Grit is all that and a bag of cornbread. As I sat there watching young Mattie force her horse into the river to catch up with Cogburn I could just feel it. This is a great movie. I don't care what happens from here until the end, my eye balls are going to love every minute of it. 
Back in 2005 I did a summer semester in college. Nobody was around and I had the Blockbuster pass to watch as many movies as I wanted. I was burning through dvds like you wouldn't believe. I decided to start keeping track. Since then I have documented the title, date, and some other random info for each and every movie I watch. Here are my stats for 2010.