[7] [SPOILER REVIEW] Sue me, but I like both the Peckinpah original and this remake. Straw Dogs is a home invasion thriller that is either a tragedy about a pacifist man (James Marsden) who must turn violent to survive, or a celebration of the vicious animal in us all. I’m not sure which, but I enjoy the thematic exploration either way. Marsden, Kate Bosworth, and …
[5] I loathe Michael Bay, but to be fair, this movie wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The script pays little attention to logic and prays that you forget about certain plot elements until its convenient to resolve them, but the entire siege of Chicago sequence (really more of an entire act) is pretty nifty. Shia LaBeouf gives a bewildering, manic …
[4] Ewan McGregor plays a man falling in love with a woman after his father has passed away. His father, played by Christopher Plummer, was married to Ewan’s mom for decades before coming out as gay and enthusiastically embracing a new outlook on life. Ewan’s character recalls his relationship with his father and tries applying lessons learned to his new relationship (Melanie Laurent). Now, I …
[6] Steven Soderbergh directs what is probably the most believable, realistic approach to a deadly epidemic movie that I’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the best movie. The building action is the film’s strong point, and primarily because you can easily imagine these things happening — runs on grocery stores and banks, looting, people boarding up in their homes, states closing their …
[4] Vin Diesel and Paul Walker star as hot dudes who drive fast cars, apparently for the third or fourth time. I would never have given this kind of movie a look if it weren’t for the unusually good notices it received, but the critics really led me astray on this one. Granted, I’ve never seen a Fast & Furious movie before this, so maybe …
[7] Chappie starts out rough, juggling multiple storylines and shifting our character identification many times throughout the first 30 minutes, but once the title character is ‘born,’ the film gets more and more thematically compelling. Chappie is a robot designed to be a police officer (shades of RoboCop permeate in more ways than one), but just as he’s damaged and marked for destruction, his inventor (Slumdog …
[6] Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum go undercover at college to bust another drug lord in a sequel that is admittedly and unabashedly more of the same. But the sequel is even more bromantic than the first, playing the relationship so serious at times, it’s not even comedy anymore. I gotta give these 21 Jump Street movies credit for helping remove the stick from straight …
[6] Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill star in this big-screen adaptation of the Fox TV show, about two young cops who go undercover at a high school to help find the supplier for a new, deadly drug. Young directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie) do well with Michael Bacall’s (Manic, Scott Pilgrim vs the World) screenplay, keeping things light, irreverent, and even …
[7] Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg co-wrote and co-produced this R-rated animated satire about a grocery store hot dog (voiced by Rogen) that discovers the truth about life outside the store’s sliding glass doors. But it’s an uphill battle to convince the rest of the grocery denizens that their idea of ‘heaven’ is actually the gnashing teeth of human beings! Sausage Party delivers all the naughty sexual …
[7] If you’re a fan of the ill-mannered British TV show, you’ll probably enjoy Eddy and Patsy’s first big bloody screen adventure. Me? I think it’s one of the funniest TV shows EVER made, so I drove two hours to the nearest theater playing the AbFab movie. As soon as Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley pop on-screen as their boozy, sycophantic characters, I settled in and …
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