I’ll start by saying that I have read the book, but I read it quite a long time ago. So I didn’t get bogged down in the bits that were missing (at first).  The movie was visually stunning, opening with scenes of wizarding evil literally shaking up the non-wizarding world. The movie jumps right in, as it has more ground to cover than it possibly can.  Dumbledore arrives, grabs Harry up, and spirits him away.  Yep, we’re denied our traditional run in with the Dursleys.  We’ll frown for a few seconds and move on.

Dumbledore uses Harry as a bargaining chip to entice a very important Potions teacher back to Hogwarts, Professor Slughorn.  In order to complete the maneuver, Snape finally gets his wish to teach Defense of the Dark Arts, but also enters into an Unbreakable Vow with Mama Malfoy to help Dracoy complete his mystery mission. Harry, Ron, and Hermione jump right  back into their classes, and due to a last minute change, Harry has to borrow a Potions text book which claims to be the property of the Half Blood Prince. Interesting little mystery right? Well, it gets completely pushed to the back burner so we can watch Harry follow Draco around the castle. Dumbledore breaks out the pensieve and we get to see the great wizard’s first meeting with Tom Riddle. Dumbledore then charges Harry with recovering a vital memory from Professor Slughorn.

It ends up that a lot of story was left on the cutting room floor.  The identity of the Half Blood Prince was such a huge let-down.  For it to be the title of the movie I think more attention should have been paid to the book, the owner, and set up how the Half Blood Prince’s motivations will play out in the remaining story. There’s a lot of talk about the kids becoming adolescents and exploring romance, but Harry is practically ignored while Ron gets the lion’s share of the attention (I was really looking forward to Harry’s story line).  I have to say in the end that with all the trimming done, the movie still came in at a healthy 153 minutes (that felt like no time at all). A lot happened, the pacing was great,  and overall it was just a fantastic  movie.  I can’t wait for the last installments that are currently set for release in 2010.

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What can I say? It was good. Just not that good.

The movie was based on the life of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), and follows him as he breaks people out of jail, robs banks, and evades the (soon to be) FBI. Christian Bale plays Melvin Pervis, the top agent for the Bureau, who is sent to bring in Dillinger. The movie follows Dillinger’s relationship with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) from beginning to end, when they met until the time he died (1933 – 1934).

I already knew the Dillinger story when I went to see this, so there was nothing too overly interesting about the movie. They don’t really show too much of what Dillinger actually did. You see about three very short bank robberies, a shoot out at the Little Bohemia Lodge, and the rest is talk. The movie was more focused on him as a person than him as a bank robber. I really wasn’t expecting the movie to be so mellow. I think they could have done better.  Give it about five years and there will be a remake.

I hated the way they shot this movie. It looked like someone grabbed up a Sony Handycam and followed around a bunch of guys dressed up as gangsters. It was shot with the exact same camera that they used for Benjamin Button (I thought it was interesting that someone actually kept up with that information). It had this weird look to it when there was a lot of motion. Like the made for TV movies that you see with the bad camera panning. The shoot-out at the Little Bohemia was the worst. All that was missing was the director strapping a camera to the top of the gun while they were running through the woods.

Christian Bale and Johnny Depp did good work with the characters. Usually Christian Bale over acts, but he did well as Melvin Pervis. There were some lines that Depp had where I was waiting for Ricki Lake to jump out and start singing a song from Cry Baby. I think they picked the right guy to play Dillinger. Depp really played the Dillinger character how I thought it should have been done.

Overall the movie was good, just not what I was looking for. Transformers was better in my opinion. I say, wait for this to come to DVD or catch it on HBO. Not worth the price of a ticket these days, so I feel ripped off that I actually bought popcorn and a drink for this one. I needed the popcorn though; I needed something to keep me occupied since the movie felt like it would never end.

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The first Transformers movie was great, so I had high hopes for the sequel. I was let down a bit. The commercials and publicity of this second movie had me very excited and I may have set my expectations a little too high. I was expecting one of the best movies of the year from Transformers but this just wasn’t it.

The movie follows up with Sam (Shia LaBeouf) going away to college and trying out a long distance relationship with Mikaela (Megan Fox). The Autobots have stayed on Earth and are working with the U.S. military to remove the remaining Decepticons from the planet. Sam finds a piece of the Alspark in his jacket and it embeds some ancient language into his brain. The Decepticons want the information in his mind, and Sam has to decipher the language before the Decepticons kill him for it. I think the problem with the Autobots is that when they need something done, they give it to the smallest guy on the team. “We have to get this to the other side of the desert”. “Give it to Sam, he’s fast”. Yes, give it to the guy who can’t defend himself against huge robots and probably should have died running around in the desert with a leather jacket on.

The first fifteen to thirty minutes of this movie is crap. I went to see this movie for the action, not the humor. You can barely make it a few minutes without something funny being said or done. Once again, a movie that tries too hard to be funny. After about thirty minutes of never ending comedy it actually gets back to what it was supposed to be, action packed. They throw in the normal one liners you would expect and the rest of the movie is pretty good. The action is pretty steady throughout the movie and they don’t overdo the humor much in the rest of the movie. The storyline is pretty weak and it just feels like they came up with the plot by drawing it out of a hat. They might as well have had a meteor hurling towards Earth and the Autobots had to drill to 8,000 feet to blow it up with a nuke. I guess they wouldn’t have needed Shia LaBeouf or Megan Fox for that though.

I think you have to see this movie in theaters, if the movie is average on the big screen it will be close to poor on your mediocre sound system and 52″ LCD.

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