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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There really wasn’t anything about this preview that set it apart from any other stupid, buddy movie that seem to hit the screens every other month or so. But something made me want to give it a chance.  It’s really 50/50 when you go to one of these that all of the funny moments were already in the preview.  But to me, it seemed charming.  There is no one of great fame in the film, unless you’re a fan of The Office and enjoy Ed Helms’ turn as Andy.

Phil, Stu, Alan, and Doug (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, and Justin Bartha, respectively) hit the road to Las Vegas for a night on the town for Doug’s bachelor party, a night they know they’ll never forget. Which of course, is exactly what they do. They wake up the next morning unable to remember anything about the  night before. There’s a tiger in the bathroom, Stu is missing a tooth, and Doug is nowhere to be found.  So they do the only thing they know to do and begin working backwards to find clues and find their friend.

I laughed constantly throughout this movie. I laughed so much that I am convinced that I missed some of the jokes so I have to see it again. I thought that this movie would be just like every other no-holds-barred buddy comedy and the raunchiness would overpower the plot, but there is a surprising lack of raunchiness.  Please, don’t misunderstand me, there are moments of pure shocking disgust, but they are hysterical. I was impressed by the way the movie flowed, with the pieces of the night revealed in a non-linear way that maximized the humor. Go see this movie.  It’s fantastic. And  can someone tell me where that chicken came from?

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The movie jumps right into some action within the first 10 minutes.  Ryder (John Travolta) and his men hijack a subway train and hold the passenger for ransom.  Walter Garber (Denzel Washington) is a recently demoted city employee who ends up in the middle of the mess when he calls in to find out why the train has stopped.  It just so happens, Walter is in the middle of an investigation for apparently taking a bribe.  This adds another level to the movie where you wonder if he is involved in any way.

There isn’t much to the movie. It is just Denzel Washington and John Travolta talking to each other the whole time, and somehow this is entertaining.  Ryder isn’t the scariest or most convincing bad guy throughout the movie; his choice of phrases is all over the place.  But it all fits the character perfectly once you figure out the back story of Ryder and know what he is all about.

The movie does a good job of keeping you interested and doesn’t have many dull moments.  I would say that this is a rental.  If you have the money then it is worth checking out in theatres.

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I needed a movie that was fun, and this was it.  It did a great job at being just a fun movie.

The movie is about  a group of guys going out to Vegas for a bachelor party.   They mistakenly take the soon-to-be brother-in-law of the groom, Alan.  So they start out the night by taking a shot on the roof of their hotel and the next thing you know, they wake up with the hotel room a wreck.  And there is a tiger in the bathroom.

From where the guys wake up until the end of the movie is hilarious.  To be honest, I went to see it because I wanted to see all this crazy stuff happen with that baby strapped to the guy’s chest.  That didn’t happen – the baby wasn’t in the movie more than fifteen to twenty minutes.  But that didn’t take away from the movie since it was hilarious most of the time. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) made this movie; if it wasn’t for his character it would have been a bust.

I can’t say go see this in theatres, but it is definitely a fun movie to watch.  So if you have nothing better to do, go see it.  It is not the summer’s biggest movie,  but it is exactly what it was meant to be.

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Where should I begin?  Do you already have an expectation of what this movie will be?  I certainly thought that I did.  Sam Raimi returns to horror with his latest film, Drag Me to Hell.  It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?  I did not go into this with high expectations at all.  To be honest, most horror movies are a disappointment, relying far too much on disgusting mutilation and forgetting that building suspense is far scarier.

The  premise of the film is extremely simple.  Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a loan  officer angling for a big promotion in her bank branch, and in order to show her boss that she can make difficult choices that are in the best interest of the bank, she denies a mortgage extension to an old woman.  An old gypsy woman.  Poor Christine just didn’t realize what a bad decision this was, and the gypsy woman curses her, calling a demon to torture Christine for three days.  After the third day, the demon will be back for her soul, which will be taken to Hell for all eternity.  Christine and her boyfriend, Clay (Justin Long), enlist the help of a seer to try and save her soul.

So, I can’t believe it, but I had so much fun watching this movie.  It was terrifying.  I dreaded the next time the demon would show up.  It was disgusting.  I had to look away from some of the creepy, crawly images used to disturb. Finally, it was hysterical.  The biggest surprise to me was that it was so funny, and on so many different levels.  Sometimes I laughed out of shock, sometimes because there was a genuine joke.  The film is so well balanced, that everything flows beautifully, from suspense to terror to absurd and back again.  This movie is definitely worth your time.  Go see it in the theatre and go see it with friends.

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The original Night at the Museum was a fun movie to watch, so I gave this movie a chance.   In this one Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) has moved on to be more like the oxiclean guy, making useless inventions and making tons of money.  He no longer works at the museum and when he comes by to visit he sees that they are moving out a lot of the exhibits for storage at the Smithsonian.

The movie is Larry Daley going to the Smithsonian to rescue his friends and get them back to where they should be.  It is the same old movie as the first with a twist that Larry is not a guard anymore so he has to sneak in.  He meets some new friends, like General Custer and Amelia Earhart who help him out to find and rescue his friends from an evil Egyptian pharaoh and his gang of bad guys from history.

The movie is fun, but it seems all to familiar.  Feels a little lengthy when you’re watching but I left feeling good about the movie in the end.  This is definitely a rent.

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Ok, I will start off by saying that I am a huge fan of the Terminator story line.  I have seen all the movies, so far, and even watched Sarah Connor Chronicles.  See? Devoted.

I had very high hopes for this movie, which may be why I didn’t care for it all that much.  It had good intentions but it could have been a lot better.  Christian Bale played a good John Connor but he couldn’t save the movie.  I don’t think they thought the movie through, I think they just wanted to get something out.

This movie is set in the future, after Judgment Day but before John Connor sent back his father to protect his mother in the past.  If you can think of this as linear then this would be a prequel.  The movie focuses on Marcus Wright, a guy who signed his body over to Cyberdyne for an important project they are working on right before he is executed for whatever it was that he did.  Next time you see him he is in the future covered in mud and yelling like a mad man.  They don’t tell you much about this guy.

The movie seems poorly written and I was not impressed.  I think Rise of the Machines was a better movie, and that is saying something.

I would rent this movie.  You get nothing from seeing it in theatres and unless you really like the Terminator storyline, you could just skip it.

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Terminator Salvation is the attempt of director McG to breathe some new life into an old franchise.  He seemed poised for success (despite a moniker such as his), signing Christian Bale as John Connor and shooting with a script polished by not only Paul Haggis, but Johnathan Nolan as well.  Nolan and Bale were two of the main ingredients in blowing up the latest Batman installments.  So I was very disappointed that it just didn’t quite hit the mark.

The fourth movie in the series opens in 2018, with Judgment Day in the past and SkyNet working to finish extermination of the humans (I’m left with the burning question of what the machines will have to do once they do win the war).  John Connor is grown, a leader in the resistance, married to Kate, and with a baby on the way. Marcus Wright is a product of CyberDyne, a machine with human organs, a melding of the two sides that the machines believe will finally give them the edge. Each man finds that Kyle Reese has become their top priority and both set out to do everything they can to protect him.

If you’ve seen any of the other movies in this franchise, you’ll understand that my synopsis is highly oversimplified.  The ideas of time travel are far too complicated to include in such a short review. I will say that I enjoyed the story, that of John Connor ensuring the safety of the teenager that will one day become his father, but I hoped that there would be more story to  it.  The film relies heavily on battle scenes and visual effects and the more interesting events and ideas of the timeline remain unexplored and unexplained.  It’s not a bad movie, but definitely not a great one.

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