What was the last movie you saw at the theaters?

I saw Alice in Wonderland today



I quite enjoyed it except for Anne Hathaway as the White Queen she was sooooo bad and annoying

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OOOO!!! been meaning to watch that since I saw the trailers on you tube!!!

and the last movie I watched (if memory serves me right..) was UP.

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Maxine Taurus

Cop Out - vry funny movie.

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Comedy Movies - 2010

Going to see The wolfman next week, last i saw was avatar because i mainly spend my spare money on DVD's.

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The Professional.

The last movie I saw at the theaters was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It was long time ago... That's because my family and I are really enjoy watching movies at home. When you want to go somewhere, you just click the "pause" and then you can resume it.

Micmacs

Lavished with a glossy-bespoke look, stuffed with eccentric characters, problems and solutions, and directed by Jeunet, this should be a treat. In reality it's a bit of an over-boiled sweet, and one that's got woolly from rolling around in the director's pocket for too long.

It's still fun, don't get me wrong. I laughed at many of the set ups and deliveries, but it doesn't congeal into a whole. There are too many moments when the humour doesn't translate (the rhyming anthropologist), too many strands that flail in space, or seem out of place. Too many scattered kooky aspects. Is it a revenge comedy, an agit-prop flick about the arms trade, an ensemble piece glamorising artistic recycling and homelessness? It could easily be all of these, and more, but for whatever reason it lacked cohesion, and left me enjoying little sparkles and tastes of what it could of been, but a little disappointed by the full meal.

(+)

EDIT: In retrospect, I think it's the involvement of both fantasy realm & serious global issue that bugged me the most. I was happy for it to be an attack on cartoon bad guys, and the explosive pay-offs are fun, but having an 'agitprop' theme seemed out of place. Of necessity, it's handled in a cartoony-ish way. Not entirely fitting. You come away with the reinforced notion that 'landmines are bad', sure, but you also feel the film's just had a rather childish dig.

To sweeten some of my sourpussness, I will add that Jeunet and team have reproduced their concoction of beguiling visual tones and sashaying storytelling. It has that honey-warm texture and dexterous use of technique that we know and love about the guy. I hear that Debbouze dropped out of the main role, causing a major re-write. Maybe that explains some of the ungainly bespokeness that i felt failed to shine?

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Green Zone
Paul Greengrass

A conspiracy thriller meets war movie using a funhouse mirror of current events is the recipe for a watchable cinematic ride with more serious implications than a simple genre exercise. Set in May of 2003, the opening month or so of the current Iraq military action, Matt Damon stars as Roy Miller, an Army Warrant Officer in charge of a small unit dedicated to finding and securing suspected areas containing weapons of mass destruction. But every single time they follow their intelligence reports they come up worse than empty, leading Miller to question the validity of the reports and who is giving the information. After meeting a Wall Street Journal reporter (Amy Ryan) he learns that all of this supposed intelligence is coming from a single source, code-named "Magellan", an Iraqi nobody has ever really seen but the official line is that he is being debriefed and detained in an undisclosed location. Miller's questioning puts him in league with a CIA officer (Brendan Gleeson) stationed in country who has his own suspicions. Eventually all trails lead to an upper-level Pentagon employee (Greg Kinnear), and when Damon's character realizes the dangerous game being played it becomes a race to get a hold of this supposed source before he can be eliminated and stopped from telling his side of the story.

Greengrass, who directed a couple of real-life dramas in Bloody Sunday (2002) and Flight 93 (2006) that were effectively serious and somber in tone, also directed Damon in the second and third installments of the Bourne franchise action spectacles. Green Zone is a sort of combination of the two styles, and it works pretty well. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River) and Greengrass have Rajiv Chandrasekaran's acclaimed non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City as the underlying template of truth when it comes to the details of the U.S. occupied Baghdad of that period, and that work coupled with Veterans as technical advisers means that in its look and the minutiae of what we see on the screen it seems very authentic. The fictional story that is working in that authentic soup is of course only a thinly-veiled and slight variation on the real misinformation and flat-out lies about WMD specifically that were used as the primary rallying cry in the run up to war. While the trailers might have you believe you're in for some Jason Bourne style action, that is a bit misleading. There are military action sequences, and the finale is a bit convoluted and does finally have some of the door-kicking, machine-gun ripping action a genre fan may crave, but it's much more of a conspiracy thriller than an action movie in the final analysis, and with its use of and slight tweaking of events that actually transpired it plays like a less over-the-top and showy rewriting of history than Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, but with a similar cathartic outcome.

GRADE: B



The Ghost Writer
Roman Polanski

Like Green Zone, Polanski's newest, adapted by Robert Harris (The Silence of the Lambs) from his own novel with an assist from Roman, uses some recent history as a leaping off point for a conspiracy thriller, though this one goes further off the reservation from "reality" and is a much more stylized genre exercise, ultimately owing more to 1970s paranoid classics and Hitchcokian rhythms than James Bond or even John le Carré. Ewan McGregor stars as a freelance writer who specializes in ghosting memoirs. His prose are elegant, his narrative constructions sing, and he works very fast. His agent calls him into a meeting with a publisher with a plum new assignment: help in finishing the autobiography of the recently retired British Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). But there are more problems attached to the job than just a fast-approaching deadline. A current news story has the Prime Minister as a possible target of war crimes tribunals at The Hague, for recently uncovered information that he may be tied to several rendition flights the Americans used to disappear four suspected terrorists, one of whom apparently died in captivity. Sequestered at a private estate on the coast of Massachusettes, he and his wife (Olivia Williams) and personal secretary (Kim Cattrall) are trying to handle the sh!tstorm of publicity. Maybe even more crucial to McGregor's character, he only has the job because his predecessor, a longtime aide to the PM, has recently turned up dead, either suicide or an accident while crossing to the island in a ferry. Or was it something more sinister?

It's a terrific set-up as McGregor's ghost writer must navigate the different personalities as he uncovers information about Lang's past while his suspicions grow over the other writer's death. Polanski plays it expertly, a slick and sly puzzle, with a palpable sense of dread and foreboding, but also with his trademark pitch-black but subtle humor. The cast is perfect, not only those names already mentioned but plum supporting parts for Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Hutton, Eli Wallach and even James Belushi (yes, THAT Jim Belushi). Of course Brosnan's Lang and his close involvement with U.S. interests is to put you in mind of Tony Blair type, but other than some surface basics this is a fresh character, and Brosnan gives one of his very best performances as the charming and secretive man. Olivia Williams too gets maybe her best assignment ever, and McGregor is well cast as the smart hero who finds himself in too deep. The payoffs in the narrative are effective and not cheats, and it all adds up to Polanski's best thriller since, well, Chinatown. It's not in the class of that peerless mystery (but then, nothing is), but 21st century cinematic thrillers have rarely been as smart or satisfying.

GRADE: A-

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I'm seeing Ghost Writer this weekend, but I'm not so sure about Green Zone. I'm sure I'll end up seeing it at some point.....

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The last 2 movies I saw are:




Brooklyn's Finest



Shutter Island

Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 2D

This past weekend, my wife and I took my 10-year-old daughter to see Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 2D (the granddaughter doesn't like 3D). Fortunately my wife picked the Showtime Grill Theater for the outting, where we are served dinner during the screening, so it wasn't a complete waste. I was tempted to order a pitcher of margaritas to see if that would help the film, but I was designated driver since my wife has a broken arm.

Double Take (2009)

Melding archive footage with an extant Hitchcock double, cold war conflicts, and a slather of ominous music, this art house project never becomes more than the sum of its parts. In fact, it mainly rides on the shoulders of giants, reworking a Borges story and interspersing some of Hitch's finer TV outings. The laughs are mainly Hitchcock's, and the unsettling conceits and turns of phrase too. What really lets it down though is the apparent allusion to Cold War fear being a McGuffin, and the suggestion that the real drama could have been negated by complete disarmament. It's a fairly fatuous stance.

There are some nice touches never-the-less, with the fuzz of found material deliberately accentuated to create a digital fog for the intrigues to take place in. Kids fear the Cuban Crisis will cancel Halloween, coffee adverts attempt to petrify dutiful wives into brand loyalty, and Hitch marches through it all, having conversations with himself.

(-)

Alice in wonderland.
My daughter and I enjoyed it so much.

clash of the titans
i thought it was a good film

for me it was shutter island and it was great

Four Lions

Drawing on realities like the UK's homegrown bombers, the haphazard attempts that followed, the shooting of an innocent in London, and countless other genuine horrors and twisted tautologies of 'anti terror' irony, this ladies and gents, is a comedy. And it's ****ing funny at times. Whether communicating grievances via the children's website 'Club Pelican', or lacerating each other with insults fitting of In The Loop (by ex-collaborator Ianucci), this bumbling boys-own terrorist group are a sight to behold. And crucially, the actors are strong enough to make it more than just an exercise in shooting lame ducks.

A man who thinks chickens are foolish rabbits without ears is clearly a fool. He's also a tragi-comic creation, who becomes more than just a cartoon character juggling comedy bombs, and joins the film in balancing on a razor's edge. That he goes on in the same scene to bond with his friend over their dedication to killing each other, should it be demanded, adds the emotional kick that frequently surfaces amongst this caustic froth. That he then gets helped to see heaven's reward as his favourite fun ride suitably combines the jibes at plastic society, outlandish religious interpretations, and other memes of happy meal 'banality of evil' that course irrepressibly throughout the film.

Morris manages to bring all his TV strengths to this feature-length directorial debut, just not perhaps the directorial panache to match his other talents. The guerilla style of some of the handheld moments robs both ad libs and set pieces of some of their punch, 'directing' the deliveries off into odd corners and muffling what is often inspired and funny stuff. There's all the discomfort of mores and morays (and yes 'Moors') being punctured, but vitally the humour doesn't just springboard us out of this world in cathartic escapism, it's there as an equal partner.

It's easy for a white Westerner to push through the nerves and join in the laughs, because the biggest bigot of the lot is a white rebel Islamic convert. But that's just the first invitation to take the rise out of a seemingly easy target, only for us to be reminded that serious veins of thought are being parodied. It's a classic switch-back display by trickster Morris. I'm not normally a fan of 'dumb funny', but by making this partially about unrestrained anger, paranoia, mental illness, and flat out passionate human tragedy, he's somehow made this hugely ambitious project work. It's a slightly flawed, but explosive treat. (Some might argue that Riz Ahmed is too human as the cell's leader, but there is some factual precedent, and the tragic bite of his story arc shows more than any how warm blood can't stop revenge being inherently cold to the bone).

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