Category: Movies

Netflix & Qwikster Explain Themselves …

~ James Viscosi ~ 3 Comments

Review: “Bubba Ho Tep”

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

So a couple weeks ago, while I was laid up with that kidney stone, I spent a lot of time watching movies and trying not to curl up into a fetal position. One of the movies I watched — re-watched, actually — was “Bubba Ho Tep”, an adaptation of a novella by Joe R. Lansdale (which I happen to own) starring Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley and Ossie Davis as John F. Kennedy. Yes, THAT John F. Kennedy. Oh, and there’s also a soul-sucking mummy.

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Review: “A Perfect World”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

Last weekend we finally got around to watching “A Perfect World“, the Clint Eastwood film in which Eastwood plays a Texas Ranger trying to catch Kevin Costner’s escaped convict as he makes a run for freedom. Complicating matters is Costner’s hostage, a young boy he snatched during a home invasion. Lacking a father figure at home, it doesn’t take long before the boy starts going all Patty Hearst on us.

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Review: “Paranormal Activity”

~ James Viscosi ~ 6 Comments

So this weekend we finally got around to watching “Paranormal Activity”, the (in)famous smash hit that was filmed down in San Diego for about $11,000 and went on to make a couple hundred million dollars. My wife wasn’t all that enthusiastic about it, because of the “found footage” nature of the film, which reminded her of “The Blair Witch Project”. We both hated that movie. Maybe we’re jaded from having spent so much time hiking and occasionally getting lost in the woods, but all we both kept thinking during TBWP was, “Just keep walking downstream, you idiots!” Fortunately, that wasn’t an issue with “Paranormal Activity”.

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Review: “Inception”

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

So this weekend we went to see “Inception”, the new trippy mind-bender from trippy-mind-bender-specializing director Christopher Nolan. If you think “Dark City” meets “Matrix” meets “What Dreams May Come” meets “The Spy Who Loved Me”, you won’t be far off. (But don’t think “Dreamscape”. Aside from involving dreams, the films are nothing alike.)

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Review: “Thank You For Smoking”, AKA “The Insider’s Evil Twin, Skippy”

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

So last week I finally got around to watching “Thank You For Smoking“, the satirical 2005 film about the tobacco industry and its efforts to lobby Congress and the public about its products. Not being familiar with the source material, I at first didn’t realize that it was set before the massive settlements between cigarette companies and the government; once that became apparent, I kept waiting for Russell Crowe to appear in the background to leak secret industry documents to intrepid reporters. Instead Aaron Eckhart (in a great performance that manages to make his smooth lobbyist character, Nick Naylor, not come across as smarmy) sleeps with an intrepid reporter, but that’s okay, too.

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Review: “Zombieland”

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

So I finally got around to seeing “Zombieland”, in which Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg do battle with hordes of undead as well as Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin (in a road trip only marginally less strange than the one she took in “Little Miss Sunshine”). As you probably know from the trailers, Woody and Jesse have much more success against the zombies than against the girls.

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Review: (500) Days Of Summer

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

So the other weekend we watched (500) Days Of Summer, a quasi-romantic comedy in which a greeting-card writer named Tom falls in love with an administrative assistant named Summer. Unfortunately Summer doesn’t fall in love with him. (This is not a spoiler.)

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Review: “Cold Souls”

~ James Viscosi ~ 3 Comments

So this weekend we watched Cold Souls, a film about a company that specializes in removing and storing souls for people who find them burdensome. We picked this one because:

  1. It features one of my wife’s favorite actors, Paul Giamatti, playing one of my wife’s favorite actors, Paul Giamatti (see The Illusionist).
  2. It features my favorite magazine, The New Yorker.

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Review: “Sunshine”

~ James Viscosi ~ 10 Comments

A few weeks ago we rented the movie “Sunshine“, in which a group of astronauts embark on a mission to fire a gigantic bomb into the sun (which is suffering from diminished output) to reignite it, and thus rescue Earth from the grip of an endless winter. (Sounds like one of Dennis‘s missions, doesn’t it?) There seems to be a lot of carping about the physics of this, as the sun isn’t scheduled to start dying for quite some time; in the back-story, which is not explained in the film, it is revealed that this is because the sun has captured a Q-Ball which is acting as a damper. I read the explanation and still don’t understand exactly what a Q-Ball is, so I’ve decided it’s something that Q uses when he’s shooting pool. But I digress.

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