July 13, 2010: Light of Day OK, I brought this one on myself. I watched the wrong movie. Everyone knows Michael J. Fox from the TV show Family Ties (1982-1989) and from the Back to the Future films (1985, 1989, 1990). I won’t recount his entire career here, but he has sprinkled dramatic roles among […]
July 8, 2010: The Men Who Stare at Goats The Men Who Stare at Goats is a comedy with some serious firepower in its casting, and a clever premise, but it did not do well at all and disappeared from theatres almost instantly. Why? George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey star in […]
July 4, 2010: The Shawshank Redemption When asked what my favourite movie is, like any movie fan I can’t really give an answer without a bunch of clauses narrowing the field and leaving room for other top films which might not happen to be #1. Whenever I am forced to answer with a single title, […]
June 30, 2010: Toy Story 3 It’s unusual for 11 years to pass before a sequel to a film is made, much less between the second and third entries. It’s unclear to me, even after viewing Toy Story 3, whether this sequel was driven by a good story idea or the desire for easy box […]
June 30, 2010: Day & Night Day and Night (not to be confused with the recent terrible action picture Knight and Day) is a Pixar short film which ran in theatres ahead of Toy Story 3. I saw it in 3D, not that it would have been necessary. Two big lumbering animated guys, more or […]
June 28, 2010: Capitalism: A Love Story The latest from documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is another look at the current state of American society, but this one is not quite as timely has his other films from the past decade or so. Capitalism: A Love Story looks at the American Dream and the American lifestyle […]
June 27, 2010: Surrogates I watched Surrogates because I wanted to sit down and watch a movie but only pay about 60-65% attention to it while I did some dull tasks for work one evening, so I needed to make an appropriate selection. I understood this to be a middling sci-fi concept flick, with some […]
June 15, 2010: Toy Story 2 It’s a rare occasion when a sequel equals its predecessor, and rarer still when it exceeds it. It’s my thinking, after back-to-back re-watchings of the first two Toy Story films, that this may be one of those rarest occasions. Toy Story 2 is absolutely a worthy sequel, and with […]
June 11, 2010: Toy Story With the imminent release of Toy Story 3, I decided as I typically do to revisit the earlier entries in the franchise. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve seen either of the first two Toy Story films. I always liked them, because it’s pretty hard not to, but […]
June 1, 2010: Rancho Deluxe Can you believe that there’s a movie that Jimmy Buffett wrote all the music for, and I haven’t ever seen it? Mind you, I know this DVD has run in my presence at least once before, but this is the first time I’ve ever sat down to actually watch Rancho […]