Film Club Review – In the Loop

In the Loop Although a movie has many aspects, each individual film usually has one of these aspects which the rest are centered around. Some times they are centered around characters, sometimes around plot, other times around setting…. and sometimes they are centered around dialogue. In the Loop is one of the latter. This movie […]

Brothers

Spiderman and Donnie Darko are brothers in a film titled Brothers. One is in the army, the other is an ex-con. The army brother (Tobey McGuire), is sent off to war and is captured though believed to be killed. Meanwhile, the other brother (Jake Gyllenhall), takes over his role as the father figure for his […]

A Christmas Carol

This is a hard movie to review. I watched it with a group of kids from grade 1 to grade 12 and doing so I can’t help but think that this movie didn’t really know what audience it wanted to go for. It seems like it was made for little kids, but then it gets […]

Moon

I love smart sci-fi. Moon is a really cool movie which is able to do something which sets it apart. It takes the revealing surprise behind its story and, instead of waiting to show it until the end for the shocking, twist ending like it could have, it reveals it in the middle. This way […]

Fantastic Mr. Fox

So is Fantastic Mr. Fox fantastic? More the most part, yeah. I would probably describe it as enjoyable more than anything else. It was just really enjoyable. There’s quite a lot of comedy; not the laugh out loud kind, but the put a smile on your face the whole way through kind. The voice acting […]

Funny People

Funny people really isn’t all that funny, at least not in the knee-slapping joke-a-minute way. That’s not to say it isn’t enjoyable though. The first hour of this movie is really entertaining and you will chuckle through some of the dryer humour which creeps up occasionally. And the stand-up comedy they show will definitely make […]

2012

By this point Roland Emmerich has the End of the World disaster movie down to a formula. Mind you, that also means he knows what he’s doing. In 2012, he plays on peoples fears that the Mayans have predicted the end of the world in 2012 as the earth’s crust destabilizes. The plot runs like […]

Up in the Air

I really enjoyed this movie. The three main cast members are a delight to watch, especially Anna Kendrick as the up-tight, ambition-driven business grad. She hit that character just right. Clooney and Farmiga are also great in their roles. I cared about these characters and relished watching them on screen. I really enjoy learning about […]

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Wow. Wow wow. Oh wow. This was beyond awful. This movie is an absolute mess. The acting is terrible. Every line of dialogue is awkward. The story elements make no sense, and many are just downright stupid. How can they possibly have covered up the robots from the first movie?? They were fighting right in […]

Couples Retreat

Couple’s Retreat is an excellent example of a mismanaged comedy.  With the cast they have put together for this (Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell, etc.) this should have been a lot better.  And the strange thing is that all of the leads were all very good.  They fit their characters well and […]

Sherlock Holmes

While waiting for this movie to be released, I thought that one of two things would happen: either Ritchie and Downey Jr. would come together and make one fantastic movie based on one of the greatest fictional characters of all time, or that it I would hate it as it would be a ridiculous action […]

Invictus

For the most part, I don’t really like biographies. They are usually far too formulaic, long, and dull. However they can work when the filmmakers decide to choose a specific moment of the person’s life and focus on that. This is the technique used in The Queen a few years ago, and its what Eastwood […]

Public Enemies

I’m not sure what it is about ganster films that seem to excite people so much that boat loads of them get made, yet which also has a tendancy to bore me to tears. Public Enemies is no exception. It was a pretty boring, by-the-numbers ganster film with some, but not a lot, going for […]

500 Days of Summer

500 Days of Summer is a story about a guy named Tom and his first real relationship, a girl named Summer. The story does jump around the timeline of the relationship a bit, but in a way that you get a very clear picture of how their relationship grew and declined. This was a nice, […]

Inglourious Basterds

Tarantino’s latest all-out adventure is Inglourious Basterds, the story of a special unit sent into France to kill as many Nazi’s as possible. Yet there are more layers to this story than that; we also get stories involving two very interesting female leads, and one outstanding villain in Hans Landa. This is not a fast-paced […]