November 18, 2008: What Just Happened What Just Happened is a satire of the filmmaking industry directed by Barry Levinson, not unlike 1995’s Get Shorty, a satire of the filmmaking industry directed by Barry Sonnenberg. Where these movies differ, however, is in how funny they are. Get Shorty is great. This one, not so much. […]
November 18, 2008: Outsourced I had heard about this movie for quite some time, and was never able to quite figure out the theatrical release schedule, since it seemed to be available on video in some places and not yet in theatres where I was. Ultimately I sidestepped the confusion by simply waiting for a […]
November 16, 2008: Saw V OK, I admit it – I’m a sucker for this stuff. I first encountered Saw at the Toronto International Film Festival just as “torture porn” was getting off the ground in its early 2000s go-around, and I’ve stuck with the franchise because I think the basic concept is very compelling. […]
November 12, 2008: Rachel Getting Married The buzz about this film is all about former Disney princess Anne Hathaway turned gritty “real actress”. She plays a recovering addict (Kym) on leave from a treatment centre for a few days to attend the New England backyard wedding of her sister. Of course, all is not smooth […]
November 12, 2008: Slumdog Millionaire At this point, lots of people are familiar with Slumdog Millionaire and a large percentage of those people have heard that this movie is very good. Many are not familiar with the plot, and they want to know whether or not to see it. The movie is about an unlikely […]
November 11, 2008: Leatherheads I bring this review to my faithful readers to illustrate how I struggle with the notion of writing about every movie I see. This movie played in its entirety on a screen in front of me, yet I don’t recall a single scene or line, and certainly couldn’t tell you what […]
November 11, 2008: The Terminator In late 1997, during the lead-up to the release of Titanic, and through the subsequent shattering of box office records over the space of several months, I don’t think I ever really thought about James Cameron having been a well-established, A-list Hollywood director. I can be pretty dim sometimes. Sure, […]
November 11, 2008: Clerks 2 I like the work of Kevin Smith, as I’ve previously noted. I happen to even like his sophomoric New Jersey slacker stuff, so when I heard that Clerks 2 was coming out, I was excited. We hadn’t seen the character of Randal Graves since the Flying Car short which ran […]
November 10, 2008: Synecdoche, New York I seem to start many of these Half-Assed Movie Reviews by saying how much I love the writer, actor or director responsible for the film about to be reviewed, and then I spend three paragraphs appearing to show off by name-dropping obscure movies that I’ve seen, when really what […]
November 5, 2008: Zack and Miri Make a Porno I’ve been a Kevin Smith fan for a long time. Not from right in the beginning, mind you – I didn’t see Clerks in the theatre. But I did discover it by accident on pay-per-view in the summer of 1995, back in the days when there […]