The Men Who Stare At Goats

Apparently "more of this than you might expect" is based on a true story. It didn't seem to be sure what it wanted to be -- quirkily sincere but off-centre? Tongue-in-cheek wink to the audience? And did they write all the jedi master references before or after they cast Ewan MacGregor to say the lines, and once he was cast did they not care that stretching out such dialogue would pull the audience out of the story every time? Verdict: Movie Rental if You Must

The Fourth Kind

Spooooky ... there was much apres-show discussion regarding the veracity of claims surrounding this movie. My decidely jaded companions were unmoved by any suggestion of sincerity within its running time. True? Hoax? I enjoyed the scare. Verdict: Movie Rental

Paranormal Activity

This is either the worst acted, the worst improvised, or the worst written movie I have ever seen -- I'm not sure which, and ultimately don't care. The night-time spooky bits are spooky ... the rest is so painful to experience I don't even have the words. Rating: Run! Run Like The Wind!

Brothers

I had high hopes for a real moving and emotional story here. I felt like they approached all the right notes, but didn't really throw caution to the wind to actually touch them. Left with a sense of being shown potential emotion without being allowed to experience any of it. Rating: Movie Rental if You Must

Surrogates

I don't really care. I didn't care while I was watching it. I didn't care when I was walking out the theatre. The only thing I really cared about was when Bruce Willis' character wanted to talk to his wife, but instead of crossing his apartment's hallway to his wife's room to speak to her in person, he went downtown to speak to her through her surrogate. Not wanting to speak to him, his wife shut down her surrogate. You know how he could have avoided being cut off like that? Crossing the hallway rather than going downtown. Verdict: Rental if You Must

Gamer

Watching this movie -- and even seeing the previews and anticipating its release date -- I wondered what is wrong with me? How did I become a person who wants to see people run around shooting and exploding each other? Even being that person, though, I am far and away not as warped as the audience they were expecting. It kind of sickened me, the disgusting amoral vile persons who supposedly inhabit the world of gaming. Obviously the societal ills that are nurtured through online gaming is a greater epidemic than I even suspected I should worry about.

Oh, how was the movie? Pretty good, action-wise. On that level, I enjoyed it. Share my aversion to depravity? There are a lot of other good action choices that don't require an airsickness bag within striking distance. Verdict: ... I don't even know.

Sunshine Cleaning

Lately I have been so enjoying Amy Adams in movies. Which is a change because I thought her accolades for Junebug were so completely overblown. But this is a nice movie. Quirky-ish. But not full blown quirk. Enjoyable, if not overly dynamic. Verdict: Movie Rental

The Hurt Locker

(This is what I thought/hoped District 9 would be. Namely, as remarkable as the effusive critics were claiming. )

From the start, this movie wholly engaged my attention. I feared every bystander, worried about what was behind every corner, who was just out of frame and what were they going to do. I was struck by how intentional this had to have been -- that the audience was supposed to experience the uncertainity that the soldiers did. Is this the moment where they die? You won't know until it happens. There is no swelling soundtrack, no solitary one-dimensional bad guy against which to rail and no doe-eyed rookie who bites it thus sending our hero into an adversary-murdering fury that buoys our own blood-thirsty revenge fantasies and upon reflection should shame us for wishing other human beings were lying in a pool of their own spilled blood. Characters, who you as a movie-goer assume are now going to become part of the story, die in an instant with no fanfare, no melodramatic angst and no particular spotlight shone on what just happened. The absence of scripted response to the death leaves us as the audience to more fully engage in our own response -- whatever that may be -- for ourselves.

The movie was clear its message was that war can be a drug, and it showed soldiers' perspectives without forcing a traditional story structure onto their experiences. When they clashed, it was organic and raw. When they connected, it was just as raw and natural. Which is how the whole movie seemed to be. This is what happens. That's just the way it's going to be. This made it compelling, distressing and indescribably poignant. Verdict: First Run Theatre - Go Now

District 9

I don't think I got this movie. I had heard it was supposed to be an analogy of apartheid. I don't know that I followed that train of thought. Maybe because I was never sold on the idea that apartheid needed an analogy. I think we're all kind of aware of what had gone on, and I think we're all kind of in agreement that it was horrific. Analogies are usually used to open our eyes to situations that we're blind to, by twisting it in a new direction that makes us see the truth. But does apartheid need to be twisted? Or is it pretty clearly reprehensible staring at it straight on? That aside: the movie almost had me. I was appreciating the mock-documentary style of much of it, and that it was changing my idea of the meaning of what I was seeing up to a point in time. But then I realized that there was just no sympathetic character on the screen except the aliens -- which could be appreciated if that was the intent, but I think instead I was supposed to be rooting for the bureaucrat by the end ... but I wasn't. He'd been self-serving in too many critical moments throughout the movie that when he did appear to be acting in a self-sacrificing manner, I just assumed he had determined that there was something in it for him. (And really, there was. Revenge. Hope of being able to reverse his physical predicament. I guess.) Not to give it away, but I tried to let the ending make up for the rest of it. The lack of clear-cut-good-overcomes-bad-and-the-world-is-safe-again usually impresses me. In this case though, it just clarified for me that: I don't think I got this movie. Verdict: Movie Rental If You Must

Julie & Julia

This was a rather endearing movie -- although the Julia part of it was far more interesting than Julie's bit. Actually, I'm not quite clear on the point of Julie's bit in this otherwise entertaining movie. Did I care if she succeeded? Not all that much. But did I count the minutes until the movie returned to Julia? No. Not really. So I guess just not adding to the movie is at least not as bad as Julie actually brought it down. Verdict: Movie Rental