Category: Movies

Short version: The last of an era? Watching True Grit last week put me in a Western mood, and since I had never seen Unforgiven, I queued it up from The Netflix. Great cast (Eastwood, Hackman, Freeman, and Richard Harris). It won Best Picture (and Hackman won for Best Supporting). And I\’d bet it\’s the…

Short version: A simple story, wonderfully told. Highly recommended. Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin. Directed by the Coen Brothers. True Grit is the story of a US Marshall and a Texas Ranger, teamed up to hunt down the killer of a little girl\’s father (at the insistence of the girl). Hailee Steinfeld does wonderfully…

Short version: Really quite enjoyable. Mr. Scott Walters took me up on my big screen offer this week, so TNM hit the Riverview Theater for 2011\’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the sequel to 2009\’s Sherlock Holmes. All the major talent returned for this one: Robert Downey Jr (Sherlock), Jude Law (Watson), Rachel McAdams…

No movie this week. Not because I don\’t love you (I do). It\’s because it\’s my birthday! And I\’m gonna watch the end of the Wild game (because I\’m a glutton for punishment), and then start watching the first season of Community (in an attempt to finally get my sister off my back about it).…

Short version: Donne Wahlberg\’s finest hour. Thank you, thank you, I\’ll be here all ze week. Make no mistake, this isn\’t a particularly good movie. It\’s a paint-by-numbers, ensemble cast, heist/gangster movie that doesn\’t vary from a formulaic script. There\’s some mistaken identity, and a hit gone wrong, and in the end some characters get…

Short version: they took source material that I thought would be completely unwatchable as a movie, and turned it into a movie. Seriously. A movie about how the Oakland A\’s general manager used unconventional thinking and statistics to build a winning baseball team for the 2002 season. \’Statistics\’ and \’Baseball\’ are not words that you…

The short version: numerous good points don\’t overcome a bad ending. (But backing up, a quick intro. We\’re gonna try this thing. I posted this on The Facebook this morning, that I want to make Thursday night \”Movie Night\”. Hopefully I\’m either gonna see something in theater, or start working through my backlog of Netflixes.…

I haven\’t done one of these in a long time, mostly because I stopped going to movies for a while there. I\’m now back on the horse, so let\’s roll through some mini-reviews for a few flicks I\’ve been out to see lately.

It\’s apparently the 30th Anniversary of the release of The Empire Strikes Back, a fact which Spike TV is using to run a Star Wars marathon all weekend. So that\’s cool. But here\’s a fact I wasn\’t aware of: George Lucas didn\’t write the screenplay. He wrote the story, but two other writers did the…

So I watched A Serious Man last night, fully expecting to like it. And I mean obviously it was well done, and clever, and it\’s the Coen Brothers, and I usually like what they do, and you all know I like a good dark comedy. But it was seriously (pun intended) depressing, and the ending…