Well, Mel Gibson surely is making tabloid headlines lately. And not the kind that any Hollywood star likes. His ex girlfriend and the mother of his very young little girl, has (probably) released some very damaging tapes of discussions between the two where Mel appears very agitated, and even makes some racist and questionable comments and uses words that are questionable. 

One would question how fair it is that these tapes were released when obviously someone doesn’t know they’re being recorded. I gotta be honest, I know that he shouldn’t have said a lot of these things, but it’s sort of like the Alec Baldwin tape of a private voicemail he left his daughter Ireland. You almost feel a little sorry for someone who has had tapes released unbeknonwnst to them where they are making comments freely.

He may not be the guy we thought he was, and on top of the arrests and the anti semite language he used when he was arrested for a DUI a couple years ago, this really could damage his reputation.  Oh well, I”m done talking about that, let’s talk about his latest movie out on Blu Ray, Edge of Darkness.

This movie was one that we started watching (my husband and I) with great hopes because it really does start off as an interesting concept.  Mel Gibson’s college age daughter comes home to stay with him a few days in Boston where he lives. It’s obvious that Mel is a cop by the badge and gun he has on the counter under a cake cover, so we get that right away.

What we don’t get is that his daughter has seemingly been poisoned by someone.  She’s eating some dinner, and suddenly begins to violently vomit, and in a frenzied scene that has you on the edge of your seat, I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it’s the most interesting scene in the movie, and you think the rest will follow suit.

Well, it’s not a bad movie overall, but I’ll tell you that it’s unrealistic, and it’s wrapped up too neatly with a “Hollywood ending” that you would hope it wouldn’t have. This movie with it’s concept of corporate greed and the poisoning of citizens in it’s Erin Brockovich sort of way, had great promise as being an original thriller,and even had some solid acting, but somewhere it veers off into the totally ludicrous.  Too bad, because it really was a good story.

Well, I have a different review for the Judd Apatow movie “Funny People” than most people did. I thought it was very funny. Yes, perhaps it was funny in a sort of understated way sometimes, but nonetheless, it was still witty and pretty hilarious in some parts.

The cast includes comedic movie veteran Adam Sandler, who plays a rich, spoiled and lonely comedic actor who’s made a fortune off crappy movies.

He wants to get back to standup, and finds that he has a serious, perhaps deadly disease when he befriends newbie to the business played by the hilarious Seth Rogen.  Seth Rogen by the way, looks a LOT skinnier in this movie. Not sure if he lost weight for another role or what, but he’s looking good!

Plus he’s a naturally funny guy, and you can tell that he’s gotta be down to earth .Someone cannot have that type of presence on film without actually being like that in real life, and his likeability shines through even more in this movie.

I think this movie was marketed all wrong. I remember seeing the previews for it, and it really didnt’ look all that funny.  I know that it didn’t get the greatest reviews either. It may be due to it’s more serious theme, I’m not sure, but I definitely got a few laughs out of this one. Now, it’s not as funny as some of Apatow’s and Rogen’s previous movies, but it’s still pretty darn funny with it’s cast of offbeat characters.

Leslie Mann, who incidentally is also Apatow’s wife in real life, is absolutely crazy funny in her role as a crazy actress that Adam Sandler was in love with a long time ago, and with whom he tries to reconnect after finding out he’s gravely ill. Even though she has a husband and two kids.

By the way,  comedy may be more of Eric Bana’s calling than drama. I’ve never liked his serious roles, but he was pretty damn funny as her Aussie husband.

It’s a long movie, and I do think that it should have been edited down to maybe two hours or just under instead of the 2 1/2 hour mark. That may be part of why it got negative reviews from some people, it just needed to be shorter because there wasn’t enough “funny” in the 2 1/2 hours of film.

One of the best scenes, I think was where they were in the doctor’s office together and making fun of their very tall, very blond, anglo saxon looking german doctor with cracks on how he died in the end of Die Hard and they can’t put his IKEA stuff together.

That was some pretty funny stuff, and you had to be quick to catch some of it. I’d recommend this movie if you are ready to see it and know what to expect from it. There’s not a whole lot of the expected sophomoric humor in former Apatow movies, and maybe that’s what people expected, but there’s a lot of more adult humor, and that’s what I liked about it.

I have always loved Jeff Bridges. Ever since I was a little girl and saw him in the remake (the first remake, not the Peter Jackson version mind you) of King Kong, I pretty much had a crush on him and thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Not only that though, he’s always been an actor that can evoke such a powerful emotional reaction from me, and I’m sure from other viewers, which is why he has been around doing movies for so long and was able to take such a risk as Crazy Heart, a low budget movie with a somewhat formulaic story line but a ton of heart and a lot of acting chops and emotion.

The story is about Bad Blake, played by Bridges, who is a down and out, has been country singer who’s doing the whole bowling alley and bar scene after having his hay day and seemingly blowing it, and several marriages, from being a severe and chronic alcoholic.

We see him having to leave the stage at one show because he had to go throw up in a garbage can, a wretched mess who can’t control himself and seems to have no ambitions to clean up his act or do what he has to do to get back on the road to success and revamp his career.

When he meets a small town reporter, played by Maggie Gyllenhal, who has a little boy,  Bad falls head over heels in love for this down to earth, high quality woman. From what we’ve seen, he’s had bar groupies coming at him his whole life, so Maggie’s grace and humbleness seems to really sweep him off of his feet. It’s really sweet, the love scenes between these two actually. I was a little afraid they might be creepy because of the age difference between the two, fifteen to twenty years give or take a two, but they come off very tender and genuine.

You really want this relationship to last, but of course there is this overriding feeling of dread that Bad is going to do something to screw this good thing up, as he seemingly has with so many other good things in his life.  He’s 57 years old and broke for example.

He then runs into his former protege, turned huge country star, played by Colin Ferrell, who wants him to write songs for him again, and he’s offering to get his career going again. Bridges reluctantly agrees. I won’t tell you any more after this point, but I will tell you that this movie is one that has you routing for him to the end, and saddens you for him when you see him at his lowest, most desperate point.

Jeff Bridges deserved the Oscar for this one. He really made what could have been another story about an alcoholic’s struggles into something really special, really heart felt, and extremely moving.  I loved it and would recommend it to anyone.

So, I finally saw the latest Peter Jackson-directed movie, The Lovely Bones. I was excited to see this movie, because I had heard so much about the book which is it based on, by Alice Sebold.  Several of my friends recommended this book to me, but I hadn’t really heard of anyone who’d seen the movie yet.  The movie stars Mark Whalberg as young Susie Salmon’s (like the fish, as they say in the movie, twice, ick) father.

It also stars another actress that I usually like, Rachel Weisz, as her basket case of a mother who up and leaves the family when they most need her. And yet somehow, throughout this tragic story, I failed to really care about this family or the vicious murderer that took Susie’s life after raping her.  Something about this movie just doesn’t click on an emotional level like it’s supposed to.

It seems like they are all play acting, which of course they are, but there’s just something that’s not real about it. The young girl who plays 14 year old Susie Salmon is pretty good, but the rest of the cast fails to pull through on this supernatural drama.

The story is about a young girl, Susie, who is 14 when she is raped and murdered by one of their very own neighbors. The neighbor is played by Stanley Tucci, who was actually nominated for supporting actor in for this film. Why, I have no idea.  He’s just not convincing or menacing enough for you to loathe and fear him. Maybe it’s the bad wig or the phony looking colored contacts or over the top creep acting, but I just wasn’t buying it.

You never quite see Mark Wahlberg as being a father to a 14 year old girl either, I just couldn’t suspend reality enough to buy that one.  The story seemed to be stuck at several points in a lull, and I found myself waiting for it to be over, rather than riveted to the screen.

You really just wanted the sick neighbor to be nailed, but even the ending wasn’t satisfying that way. The end was actually preposterous if you ask me. I don’t know if that’s how the book ended. Let’s just say that there is a “lost love” idea in the film, but it’s all based on a boy she never even talked to, and never kissed, who just asked her out before she died. It seemed really forced and unbelievable.  I give this movie a bad review, I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

Well, after a long waiting period, we have finally gotten the blu ray for “The Road”, a movie that I had long anticipated, as I’m sure many others had, after reading the novel by Cormac Mcarthy. It’s one of the most moving, simplistic yet powerful books I’ve ever read, and I’d recommend that anyone put it on their “to read” list right now if you haven’t read it yet.  For those that have never heard of Cormac Mcarthy, he also wrote No Country for Old Men, which as you know was turned into a major motion picture success that garnered a lot of critical acclaim and put the talented Josh Brolin on the map as a great actor.

The movie The Road has so many things going for it that it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, it is based on one of the best books of this decades in my opinion. They knew they had a good basis for a movie, and that they couldn’t screw it up, because to screw it up would be a huge disservice to such great writing.  Second, they had two of the most talented, distinguished and wide-ranged actors out there today. I’m talking about Viggo Mortensen, who is spectacular in pretty much everything, and Charlize Theron who is as talented as she is beautiful.

The story is really a post apocalyptic one about a disaster that makes the world a very hostile environment to live in. Everyone that is left, which isn’t many, is left to fend for themselves in a foodless, sunlight-less, cold and grey environment. We don’t know what happened to make the world this way, but that does matter. Because what the story is really about is the love story between a boy and his father.

The boy is played by an Australian actor, of about 9 years old approximately. You’d never know he was Australian by the movie though. He is a talented kid who isn’t over the top or cheesy at any point in the movie. Gazing into his big blue eyes and genuine affectations, you really believe this is a child who is scared and has never known any other world except that dark and hostile one he was born in to.  We feel for this child, as we did in the book, and the kid really does a great job at making us feel those same emotions, being true to his character and conveying that same innocence and good nature that children are apt to have.

It’s a heart breaking story, but so well played and convincingly so by every actor in the movie that you feel their pain. You feel the warmth when they have one moment of relaxation, of lightness and joy and full bellies, and you feel the bleak hopelessness that is their reality when everything seems to be  going wrong and they continuously have to be on the move from gangs of cannibals. This movie conveys what the book did – a story of hope in humanity even when most of the race has gone crazy.  Still, I must say the book is better than the movie.

Ok, finally a movie that we rented on blu ray, that was actually watchable (every blu ray we rent lately from Netflix is somehow not playing on our Sony blu ray player, and sometimes we have to return them twice to get a working copy, not sure if it’s our player or the DVD’s they’re sending us but it’s really frustrating).  Not only did the blu ray of Shutter Island, the latest Scorsese film noir endeavor, play ok on the player, but it also was a really good, really entertaining movie.

Leo DiCaprio did a great job, as did the rest of the supporting cast. Even Mark Ruffalo, who my husband and I were surprised to see in a relatively big name movie, did a really good job as Leo’s partner Chuck.  The movie is based on a book that I had read already as well, and incidentally, I wasn’t all that big of a fan of the book.  Dennis Lehane’s writing style just isn’t my thing.

However, I love almost every film that Scorsese has ever done, and I’m a big fan of Leo’s acting abilities and have enjoyed him in everything he’s done, so I was pretty sure I’d like the film adaptation of the book.  The movie Shutter Island is about two federal marshals, Teddy (DiCaprio) and Chuck (Ruffalo) who set out to investigate the appearance of a Rachel Solando, a patient at a high security mental hospital called Ashcliffe on Shutter Island.

They soon begin to encounter fishy stories and potentially bizarre experiments that they believe may be carried out on the criminally insane patients at the hospital. Ben Kingsley plays the head doctor in charge, Dr. Cawley.  As Teddy investigates, he begins to suspect that a lot more goes on at the facility than meets the eye, and he can’t stop having delusions of his dead wife, played by Michelle Williams.

He also has repeated delusions about his days at a nazi war camp as a soldier, his murder of unarmed German soldiers along with the rest of his camp, and the ghostly images of a little girl that supposedly was Rachel Solando’s little girl that she murdered (one of three children she murdered).  Throughout the complex weave of Teddy’s experiences and run ins at the island, one does begin to wonder how all of this will come together. I did kind of wonder if I hadn’t read the book if I would have figured it out before the end.

The creepiness and eerie feeling of the book is kept in tact in the movie, Scorsese does a great job of getting a passionate performance out of Leonardo, and the whole supporting cast is pretty much top notch. I’d recommend this one, whether you’ve read the book or not – a very entertaining ride!

So we rented the movie with Milla Jovovich, who is a surprisingly good actress for being a model-turned actress I must say, called The Fourth Kind.  The movie professes to be based on a true story, with “real footage” interlaced with dramatized scenes by the actors. Well, I got news for you, the “real footage” or actual footage as I think they may have termed it, is also actors staging a scene, but oh well, this movie was a fun ride.

Although I must admit, I felt a bit misled when I googled a million things on the internet to find out if Dr. Abigail Tyler or her story in Nome, Alaska was true.  Couldn’t find a darn thing, and I’m a pretty creative googler when it comes to finding information I want to know about. It’s all basically the same as the Blair Witch project, a movie that seems fairly real, which contributes to it’s spookiness, but it’s all really a sort of hoax where people are talking for months after about it, trying to argue about whether it’s really based on a true story or not.

One thing that my husband and I learned by watching this movie is how funny it is that humans really want these incredible stories to be true, to believe in something fantastic like this. The truth is, well, a lot less boring and mediocre, and that truth is that this movie is 100% hooey.

Good hooey though. When you take away the fact that this movie was somewhat misleading in it’s premise that it was based on a true story, what you have is a really good, fairly original story that keeps you glued to the tv and wondering if there is any truth to it. Heck, it’ll have a lot of people googling for a while too.

The story goes like this.  Dr. Abigail Tyler is a psychologist in Nome Alaska whose husband was recently murdered in their own bed while she was in it. We see the supposed “real” Dr. Abigail Tyler, a sickly looking, pale thin woman “in real life” talking to the director of the film in interjected scenes throughout.  We also see a lot of “footage” that was filmed of the unexplained events which supposedly plagued Nome Alaska in the nineties.

Sleep studies reveal that a lot of residents of Nome have been experiencing the same thing .They see an owl outside their window, and they can’t sleep, they have this terrible feeling of unease. When the Dr. draws the connections, she puts some of the patients under regressive hypnotherapy where they suddenly go into a trance and speak some unknown Sumerian language and go all devil-voice on us. I’m surprised they weren’t spitting up pea soup too.

The scenes are well done, filming “side by side” with the “real footage”, which happens to go out in the middle of filming.  It’s all very effective at creating that eerie feel.  The story is gripping, and as we get further into it, we see there is more than meets the eye.  I’d recommend this movie if you’re into the other worldly types of stories and the science fiction stuff, it’s definitely worth it. Just don’t get faked into believing it’s based on anything real, it’s not.

So I just saw the James Cameron epic 3-D computer generated wonder that’s gained so much notoriety for being the first of it’s kind, both in CG sophistication and in it’s 3-D splendor.  I didn’t of course get to see it in real digital 3D though because we rented the blu ray DVD, but nonetheless, some of the graphics were quite impressive. I must admit, I still got the feeling that I was watching Shrek once in a while, like I was just watching a cartoon. At no point did I believe that the Navi were a real people or did their plight seem totally real to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I was moved, but not on the level I would have been if the acting weren’t over the top or even high quality in this movie.  I felt like the actors and actresses were mailing it in a bit, like they didn’t even believe in the movie’s message, which seemed forced at times. For example, the precious metal they were after on the planet Pandora was called unobtanium. Now I get that the story is all symbolic, but at times I felt like it relied on a dumbed down approach at getting it’s message across.

The message was actually two fold in my opinion. It was about man’s hell bent nature on self destructing, at his lack of respect for earth or the interconnectedness of all beings, animals and humans, and plant life, in the world. It was also symbolic of the white man’s ruthless taking of the land from the native Americans so many years ago, and of pointless wars that still rage today over things like natural resources like oil and diamonds.

The CG was amazing at times, but at other times, it still felt “drawn”, very computerized. I wasn’t fully immersed in this fantastic planet of Pandora. I think I may have felt differently if I had seen it in 3D, as so many people told me it was really magical to watch it that way.

The script was pretty horrendous, and at times, I thought that even Sygourney Weaver, who is the heroine in one of my favorite movies, Alien and Aliens, laid it on too thick.  The creatures were very imaginative though, with their sleek, snake like skin and multiple working parts. The idea of connecting to the tree of life and the flying creatures (they choose you, you don’t choose them), while admirable as a symbol of the interconnectedness or all beings, was a little cheesy for me too.

All in all, this movie was entertaining, but I found some problems with really getting into it and suspending all reality, and for me that is what makes a fantasy movie great.

So, here’s a movie that I was actually sort of excited to see. When I popped it in, my husband told me within the first five minutes that it was going to suck, but I didn’t think it would, I thought that those first five minutes were interesting enough to create a basis for something that I might actually like.  Let me first start off by saying that the only decent acting in this was by Paul Bettany, who plays the angel Michael. Everyone else pretty much stunk up the screen with their over acting, including and perhaps mostly Dennis Quaid.

I had high hopes for this movie with a theological theme. Here’s the backstory.  A motley crew of “survivors” are stranded at a gas station and diner out in the middle of the desert when the apocolypse strikes.  God has become fed up with the ways of man and decides that mankind is an experiment that has gone awry and needs to be decimated.

He destroys most of the world, and then inhabits the people’s bodies with “angels” who actually look more like demons with jagged teeth when they become inhabited.  Those at the diner don’t know what’s happened except for it seems like they’ve been cut off from the outside world.

One of them is the pregnant Charlie, who happens to be carrying a child that she didn’t want and was going to give up for adoption, but it’s good she didn’t because this child is supposed to be the savior of man.  Michael is an angel who disagreed with God. He thinks that human kind deserves a second chance, and the messiah for mankind should not be killed (the unborn child), which is a task that God has given him and he has disobeyed, allowing the baby to be born.

I won’t even bore you with the ridiculous details of this thin plot line and the ridiculous scripting.  Suffice it to say, you’ll be either bored or laughing at the dialogue and situations and that is why this movie got an overall bad rating from most who watched it. This movie could have been so good, it’s an interesting subject matter, and some of the special effects are actually kind of cool. The execution just sucks.

So, we finally got to see the George Clooney movie “Up in the Air”, which he was nominated for at Oscar time, but did not win for.  Let me tell you, this movie was well worth the wait.  We actually have to re-order it from Netflix three times because each time we got the BluRay disc, for some reason our blu ray player would not take it.  It finally worked on the third try, so I don’t know whether this particular movie was produced on a disc that’s hard to read or what.  I’m glad we didn’t give up on it, because this movie was a pleasure to watch the whole way through.

Contrary to what some may think, it’s a movie for both women and men, my husband enjoyed it thoroughly also.  I of course enjoyed it because two good looking men were in it, George Clooney and Jason Bateman, and guys might enjoy looking at the pretty and talented Vera Farmiga, who is costar to Clooney’s shallow, selfish airline mile collector, Ryan Bingham.

Clooney plays  a self absorbed corporate guy, who works for a company that pays him to fly to different places and fire people professionally.  The situations hit a little too close to home in time of recession in some cases, and you have to wonder if they picked actual situations in some of them.  Ryan loves to fly around the globe, and actually hates when he has to return home to his small efficiency apartment.

He loves everything about his job, the traveling, the hotels, the hotel bars, the corporate events, and the flings with women since he’s also a commitment phobe. When the young Cornell graduate Natalie, played by the awesome actress Anna Kendrick of Twilight fame (something tells me she’ll be getting lots more juicy roles after this movie, she’s great in it), Ryan is thrown off of his usual routine. She has proposed to the head of the company an idea that would keep the corporate firers grounded, where they would be doing their firings from a computer screen.

Ryan gets off on the wrong foot with Natalie, so the head of the company, Bateman, puts them on flights together so Ryan can show here the ropes. Vera Farmiga enters the picture as Ryan, only “with a vagina” as she puts it. They engage in a fling that becomes a little more serious, and Ryan starts to slowly see that he is missing  a lot in his life devoid of human complications and connections.

The ending really surprised me, but in a good way, it wasn’t the rosy Hollywood ending that you’re used to, but that’s what made this movie even better for me.  You see a guy come to terms with his life as a traveler and wandering sould, and start to become more human, only to realize that the world has sort of left him behind. Very excellent movie, I’d highly recommend you rent it.