Recently fired and divorced Stephanie Plum (Katherine Heigl) gets desperate and takes a job as a recover agent. The big ticket happens to be an old flame from high school which she is still out to get back for his previous misdeeds. As their chemistry heats up, so does the story involving her ex who looks like he’s been set up.
As much as this movie looked like a chick flick, and it kind of was, there was no romance or steamy anything. It was modern day hard-boiled detective fictions meet the chick lit leading lady. This is a 16 part book series by Janet Evanovich. I'm hoping there is a second one. I don't think there would ever be 16 movies, but there could be a couple more. It was a fun movie and I liked Heigl in this. Not so much with the brown hair, but that was most likely for the character. She had all these great lines. The more I think about it, the naration was definitely hard-boiled fiction. There just aren't enough hard-boiled fiction movies out there. This was one a of a kind, fun and enjoyable. I think this movie is more for the female persuasion.
Based on the life of Kathryn Bolkovac, Rachel Weisz plays a cop from the US who takes a peace keeping job for the UN in post-war Bosnia 1999 only to find that women’s rights are abused.
This was a hard movie for me to watch. I couldn’t stop yelling at the TV at all the despicable people in this movie. This was a good movie to watch. It was a movie about international groups taking advantage of their power in places where the rights of individuals have been diminished where religious groups and individuals from other countries who speak another language or subject to prejudice and racism. How a woman comes to help and makes changes for the good of the people. I’m surprised that more didn’t happen to her considering what she was exposing.
Russian roulette gets taken underground to a high-stakes betting arena as men take their lives into their own hands in a game of complete chance. A young man who’s family is in financial distress which leads him to thinking outside the box for making money and takes something he has no idea what it is, but he knows will make big bucks. Somehow the young man finds himself getting himself into more than he bargained for and has no way out of.
13 was a different movie with an interesting and refreshing story. The actors participating in the life or death game were so believable. The built anxiety and tension in this made this film as good as it was. It has a decent cast of Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, Michael Shannon and Alexander Skarsgaard. The actor who stole the show was new comer Sam Riley who doesn’t have much to his resume, but I’m sure will be in a lot more movies. This was what I would consider a guys movie. Not much dialogue, man-favourite actors, guns and gambling. I’m sure it’s comparable to something, but it’s not my kind of movie to review.
Three women’s lives change as what they think is an easy job after the last one they mucked up, only to find that the situation has changed and it’s starting to look like a set-up.
This movie casts Bruce Willis, Forest Whitaker and Malin Akerman. This was an interesting movie. It had some repeat back and forth of events that already happened. Majority of the events occur in a diner on a stretch of highway somewhere in the South. I heart Bruce Willis, but I don’t think he was that great in this. Forest Whitaker as usual plays a great psychopath; I think it has something to do with his appearance. I’m sure in real life he’s a normal individual. Or maybe it’s just because he plays a psycho so well that it seems normal for him to play the role. The movie focuses on Malin Akerman’s character as the story unravels and she tries to figure out what’s really going on. This is the kind of movie you have to be in the mood for. It has a C movie charm about it. I’m surprised that this got an all-star cast, and maybe that’s why it had C movie quality, because they were paying more for the stars and not some unknown cast. I liked the movie. I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. It had some Quentin Tarantino flair in its aesthetics, dialogue and character development. Had the movie been more serious and the lighting different and muted lighting, it may have taken on a less serious tone. This movie felt comical in a strange way and I don’t know if it was needed. Maybe the story would have been highly unlikely otherwise without the charisma it held. As much as I enjoyed the movie, I’m on the fence of whether it was a good movie or not. It’s leaning closer to the latter.
Mallory Kane is an ex-marine turned operative who comes back from a mission in Barcelona saving a journalist. When she gets back home from the mission her boss sends her on a short mission in Dublin, only to find out that she is double crossed by someone in her agency and she is on the hunt to find the truth to stay alive and turn the tables on the ones double crossing her.
This movie has an all-star cast. The trailer for this movie was misleading. On our way out of the movie theatre, presumably a married couple asked us what we saw and if we liked it. We all watched the same movie. 1 in 4 of us liked the movie, I being the one person who liked the movie. It needed more plot or more story. It was like the Bourne series minus the memory loss and government assassin but completely missing the mark. It should have been longer and instead of relaying the story of what happened in Barcelona and Dublin to some guy in a car, they could have shown it. There was a lot of non-talking in this movie and thankfully too. Gina Carano is not an actress and never will be. It was the kind of movie where someone wanted a woman with insane fighting skills to kick men’s asses and win. It has some edgy shots, but the running scene in Barcelona, with the various street angles, was a bit much. It was neat, but after a few of those shots it was exhausting and the editor should have cut the shots and used normal shots. After that scene, the interesting shots disappear. This movie needed more and it explains the all around low ratings people are giving it. After the gentleman said he would never recommend this movie, I think I should not recommend it either. It could have been an Angelina Jolie movie, but with more plot, car chases and weapon firing besides the mixed martial arts fighting which dominated all the action scenes. The script was tailored specifically for hand to hand combat and nothing else. We all have our impressions of assassins and I think we all have the same idea that they know how to drive a car, they know mixed martial arts, they know how to wield a gun and a long range rifle and are rather stoic in personality. Either way I think it’s one of those not so good movies that I watch more than once. As opposed to movies I thought were fantastic and have only seen once.
I Don't Know How She Does It is about Kate (Sarah Jessica Parker) who is a financial executive balancing her blooming career, a husband (Greg Kinear) and two small children. Kate gets her big break and has to travel to New York to work on a project with Jack Abelhammer (Pierce Brosnan) to pitch an idea on a multi-million dollar deal. Her career becomes demanding and she starts spending more time with Jack instead of her husband and family. Tensions start bubbling in her home life and she starts finding it hard to balance a high demanding career and a family that needs her just as much.
There are a lot of reasons why this movie didn't do well. For one it's Sarah Jessica Parker. She's a hit or miss for me, but it doesn't stop me from watching her movies and not because she played Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. She has a charming quality about her that is hard to ignore. Her problem is is that she seems to have poor chemistry between her leading men in her movies. Or at least that's how I feel about it. She had better chemistry with Pierce Brosnan than her onscreen husband Greg Kinear. Second, I think I remember her saying her husband was 35 years old in the movie. If that's the case, SJP was too old to play this character and so was everyone else.
The trailer didn't sell it enough. I liked the interview scenes of the other characters talking about Kate and what it's like to be a mother and have a family and a working life. They didn't included it in the trailer and I thought it made this movie that much more charming for me. I liked this movie because I am biased. I like chick flicks and chick lit and chick lit turned into chick flicks. Chick lit has a unique style of wit, charm, sarcasm and toe curling conflict that makes you not want to put the book down. It is its own genre and there isn't another style like it that is another genre. Even Jane Austen fits in this category. We all know that Elizabeth Bennet would have been a career woman if she were allowed to be one. The movie juggled stigmas about gender roles and that career women have to be just as much as the perfect mother role and at work be everything but a mother so that it looks like you're pulling your weight. It always seems that the home life always suffers for the career to fit the requirements of such a demanding career. I wonder if actual career women who are mothers actually watched this, or if it was all those housewives or working women who juggle everything. I wouldn't drag any guy to see this. This is a straight up women's only kind of movie. If this genre is your thing and you're looking for a light-hearted, funny and smart movie, this would be one to watch. I warn you now there is no sexual chemistry or any real romance. This is the movie about what happens after you fall in love, marry the guy and start living your happily ever after.
It's been two years since my last post on here. I remember quitting this because I was too busy working two jobs and watching crap movies and having no one reading my posts and being ludicrously angry about the kinds of movie reviewers on rottentomatoes with their awful contrite opinions. What I'm really scratching at is that the people who go to rottentomatoes aren't people who care about how well written a movie is, but if it's good. Enough about that.
The reason I decided to come back was that I was looking for a project to do. I've been thinking of things and my mind has been wandering and no definitive choice of what to take on. I really need to be in the habit of writing and not writing emails. Those don't require opinion and if they do, very minimal.
My annual formal at work is coming up, and I'm on the crew for arranging it. I've done about 20% contribution. The theme of the event is the 1920's (and the 1930's and 1940's). We had decided that we should have old movie clips playing on some banners. The banner idea didn't work, but we're using projector screens. So for the last few working days I've been working on this video. Mostly yesterday and today. The person who was supposed to download movies for me didn't download what I gave her and what she did download was movies from the 50's and onwards. Which lead to zero movie clips and not enough time to get any. I had to make do. I also decided to incorporate photos of classic movies and actors. I searched top movies of the 1920's and so on. Today I just didn't have enough volume of photos, so I tried a more comprehensive search. I stumbled up a site that had the top 100 movies of the 1930's. Voila! Inspiration happened. I am going to do the 1930's first and make my way towards the 2000's. That's 8 decades of top 100 movies to watch. Which rounds out to 800 movies. I know I watch at least 200 new movies a year, so this isn't terribly ambitious, other than I know I won't complete this in one year which is completely fine. I had read on someone else's blog that they did AFI's top 100 movie list. Anything that doesn't make the decade lists that wasn't on AFI's list, I will watch too.
How do I get my hands on these movies? Movie stores have gone the way of the Do-Do bird and are going extinct. Now I had time to grieve this. Back in November when I went to do my usual Tuesday night date with myself, ordered a pizza, went to the movie store, grabbed the new releases I was hankering to see and I made a comment at the front counter that there was nothing in the store. Then I was told that they were closing. It lead to a discussion about the awesome 90's and 2000's pre-Netflix destroying my life. We talked about my old corner movie store Captain Video, then it was Family Video, then it was Movie Gallery (which was an awful business) and then the store closed. By the time Family Video switched to Gallery, which I hated, I started going to Rogers. At this point I had a car, so the obvious choice was Rogers. I also used to go to Blockbuster, because they were open late, but after some awful customer service I never went again and I lost all love for Blockbuster. Rogers was my go to store for 8 years. It's a long time to being going to one store regularly. You know the staff. You talk to people. I left, picked up my pizza and cried all the way home. And then I called my mother crying. And I texted my BFF and cried more. I cried probably two hours. It was a sad realization of where the world is going. When I have children, I'm going to be telling stories about renting movies from a store and they're going to have no idea what I'm talking about. This event has already given me age at my whole 25 soon to be 26 year old life. I am starting to become a dinosaur and it's kind of scary.
They left one store open, but it's really horrible. I have no intention of ever renting another movie after what location they left. It's in a poorly laid out parking lot mall, next to Tim Horton's and a strange 3-way. It's a car accident waiting to happen and there are zero mall entrances. Once you pass it, it's impossible to turn around and go back. Super headache. By the time you park, you're already enraged and impatient and you go into the barely stocked store only to find no movie rentals. Thanks for wasting my time. Especially since the store is out of my way. I have no reason to ever go over there. I know I moved to the other side of the city, but it was close to work and right by my Mom's house. It was still relatively convenient. I have to come up with new ways to rent movies. Shaw on Demand has a poor movie selection. I would rather spontaneously combust before ever using Netflix, which isn't anywhere near as good as the American version of it. So I'm left with illegally downloading, streaming, renting off of one of the movie cinema stores or Apple. I want to watch it on my TV and I certainly don't want to keep anything on a computer and run it through my TV, so I am going to be relenting to Apple TV and purchasing it next month, where I can still rent movies, still get my indie and foreign films, and some obscure gallery movie and play it on my TV.
When it comes to my new project I fear the worst and will have to stream or see if the local library has any of these movies. Otherwise I think maybe TCM has something. I could be wrong. I haven't looked yet. I will be starting this project quite soon. I just need to figure out if I start at 100 and work my way to 1 or start at 1 and work my way down.
I Christen the new year and my 2 year hiatus with a movie reviw after a very long post.
Abduction 2011
I watched Abduction this evening. Not terribly awesome, but not terrible either. Sorry Taylor, but you're not a good actor. There was this scene where he's having a short monologue to his new girlfriend and I laughed. The acting was bad. What director didn't correct this? Or was this the best take they had and were getting exhausted by his lack of genuineness? The lines weren't bad, but not good, and the delivery was the only thing saving it from not being cheesy, hands on hips, pouting about lifes new turn in situation. The mild parkour by Taylor Lautner was unexpected, not necessary and entertaining. This movie could have been better. I blame that on plot and writing. They made it camp where it could have been serious and plausible. Super excited that Michael Nyqvist was in this. Wish he would stop playing a bad guy and be like a leading man in a chick flick, because damn he's sexy. I'd say it would have to be an indie chick flick. I just don't think he has the charisma to lead a blockbuster movie that has Katherine Heigl or Kate Hudson in it. This movie was entertaining and I may have nodded off for about 5 minutes, but I still rewound it, because I cared about what I was missing. I give this a 6/10. But if I were giving it an imdb rating, it would be more like 4.54 out of 10. Now lets see what imdb actually rated this movie. Imdb gave a rating of 4.4. I'm kind of good at this. I may have to start seeing how close I am at giving it an imdb rating, because this was fun.
I'm not sure what movies I'll be watching this week that are new to me, but I do know this Saturday I'm going to see Haywire. I just saw that Coriolanus is also coming out this week, I want to see two movies, but only to see the Gerry Butler. Who's curly hair looked ridiculous at the Golden Globes, but was still cute. Despite the story my sister told me about him, I am not turned off to him as an actor. I probably won't be. I just will make sure that if I ever meet him, not to have sex with him. Alright said it.
I'm back and I'm excited and invigorated to review movies again, even if only for myself.
Ps. You really need to check out the trailer for Friends With Kids. It has a phenomenally funny cast. After seeing Adam Scott in numerous movies, he really made a way into my heart after seeing Our Idiot Brother. Enjoy!
