I had high hopes for the spy thriller “The Debt”. First off, it has some highly regarded actors in it like Helen Mirren and Sam Worthington, and the newcomer Jessica Chastain, who did seem to do a pretty good job in this movie.  Second, it hooked me in with the trailer where it appeared something very sinister happened.

However, the movie just isn’t all the great of a ride. Once you find out the only thing these people are covering for is something that just doesn’t seem all that earth shattering in the grand scheme of things – especially since so much time has passed, something about this movie just loses its importance and urgency.

In short, I lost interest.  It’s not a bad movie by any means, it’s just built up to be something it’s not. Then, toward the end it spirals into the slightly ridiculous and far fetched.  That really disappointed me as I figured since the “secret” wasn’t all that earth shattering, at least they would try to keep the climax fairly believable.

The movie is essentially a two period story, which vascillates between when the characters were younger, agents for the Mossad who were sent on a risky mission to bring a Nazi war criminal to justice.  The war criminal is a doctor who must be taken back to Israel for justice, but must first be extracted by this covert team of three young agents.

There is also a somewhat contrived love story in the mix. Sam Worthington’s character falls in love with the character played by Jessica Chastain (the younger version of Helen Mirren).  However, since he fails to make a move, his swarthy womanizing counterpart swoops in and seals the deal (a little too easily if you ask me, which is why I had a hard time buying this love story).

Their love story seems to endure over the years, even after she becomes pregnant by her later-husband that she ends up divorcing.  And yet, Worthington’s character seems tortured by the truth that haunts them all over the years.  So tortured that he does something drastic when confronted with the possibility.

Another hard part to take seriously – because the truth is not all that bad, and he does it so he won’t betray Mirren’s character, who should have just fessed up before her daughter took to writing a book based on the fiction the three cooked up to cover their tracks.

The acting is good enough, that’s for sure.  I particularly enjoyed the performance of the guy who plays the Doctor who is a fugitive that has changed his identity to protect himself from justice. He has committed unspeakable crimes against humanity. However, you are not sure that this is him until a pivotal point in the movie, which he makes fascinating and hard to look away. He was definitely the bright spot of the movie.

So I finally got to see the Disney racehorse movie “Secretariat”. It’s not bad, especially coming from someone who isn’t accustomed to G movies where there is no swearing and there are not even any hints at inappropriate viewing for children.

Indeed, in a way, I recoil from some of the sanitized versions of how real life is, but this movie brought me back to the joys of simple, fantasy movie watching. It was an uplifting movie for sure, and I had to get over that this was a movie suitable for families to fully immerse myself and enjoy it in all its purity and simplicity.

The movie Secretariat is about the greatest race horse that ever lived. The catch is that Secretariat was owned by a woman who knew little about horse racing. She took over her father’s horse breeding farm when it was in a shambles and desperately in need of financial overhaul.

Out of this came her passion to win, and passion to really do something special with her parent’s horse farm. Diane Lane, whom I love in just about every role she’s ever played, was terrific as Penny Chenery (Tweedy is her married name).

Penny had four children and a husband who was reluctant to let his wife go a couple weeks a month out to the horse trainers to oversee her precious Secretariat’s training and grooming for champion. The horse racing scenes in this movie are terrific, if not a bit sad because you feel bad for the heavy breathing horses, just racing to win.

The supporting cast is also very good with John Malkovich as the eccentric Lucien Laurin, who ends up taking the job reluctantly to train Secretariat, born as “Big Red” to go on to win several big championships, including the unprecedented Triple Crown, which truly boosted the race horse to the history books.

This is really a fun movie to watch. It’s a nice inspirational story about a housewife who defeated the odds and the critics, and seemed to get a life for herself in the process after sacrificing her own personal aspirations to become a wife and mother to four for eighteen years.

Penny also broke some taboos for women in the racing world by being accepted into several jockey clubs that formerly only had men in them.  Great movie – very good family entertainment.  You’ll really like it if you love horses.

Hello everyone, and Merry Christmas! It’s been quite the year in entertainent hasn’t it?  My favorite show by far and best surprise has been Game of Thrones, and I hope you’ll all tune in for the next season which starts in April. Another of my favorites, very much a shocker, has been The Walking Dead show.

This one really started off slow, but season two has me hooked and waiting for more.  Here’s to great Christmas movies – hope you watch at least one of the classics today with your family – Christmas Story, the Grinch, Frosty, Rudolph…..the list goes on and on.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

Have a wonderful, safe and Happy Thanksgiving!

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So we rented the movie “Insidious” without very high expectations. It seems like our movie choices lately have sucked, so we just thought the bad streak would likely continue with this horror movie. I also wasn’t sure about it because it’s only rated PG-13, and usually that’s a sign that I may not like the movie.

Especially since it was of the horror genre, I thought it would have to be rated R. But this movie pulls it off, and pulls it off very well.  Insidious is a unique take on the traditional haunted house and possession story.  It’s a mix of both, and it even adds a little bit of something else we’ve never seen – astral travel, or astral projection.

What this mix makes is a totally unique, well directed and well acted horror movie. You really do root for the characters. I felt like there were touched of a few of my favorite horror movies in this, which I think is also why I liked it. I saw touched of Poltergeist and The Exorcist, and it seemed like the makers of the movie may have loved those movies as well.

Rose Byrne, who is most well know for her lead role in Damages, is one of the lead characters. She plays a devoted stay at home mom to three young kids. One of the kids is the adorable actor Ty Simpkins, who plays their gifted son Dalton. You can tell he’s special from the start, but you’re not sure why.

Patrick Wilson plays her husband, and as is traditional in horror movies, he’s the biggest skeptic of them all when his wife begins to suspect that the house is haunted. The family then moves, but the apparitions follow them. This leads them down another path and they discover something about their son Dalton who has suddenly fallen in to a comatose like state which the doctors cannot explain.

This movie is really exceptional. First of all, they don’t rely on the fake scares that many other horror movies do. When they scare you, you really do jump in your seat. My cat was sitting in my seat during one particularly creepy scene, and I scared the crap out of him by jumping.

We watched the extras on this film, and it’s clear that the cast and crew had a great time filming this movie, which I think lended itself to the movie becoming such a great one.

I’d recommend this movie to anyone who likes genuinely scary, creepy movies where you are invested in the characters.

So, my husband and I watched the horror movie “Wrong Turn” last night. We had it on our DVR for a while, and decided to finally give it a try. This is a horror movie from about eight years ago with Eliza Dushku and the guy that plays good/bad cop on Dexter (don’t remember his name, he’s totally forgettable in this, as is the entire movie).

We thought this might be an interesting horror movie as it is about a group of people that, through strange circumstances, end up out in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of West Virginia – sort of like in Deliverance, still one o fthe best movies made in its generation.

But this is anything but Deliverance. The actors barely have any lines. Thank goodness, because when they say them, they are so ridiculous that you roll your eyes.  There is really no character development at all. You could care less if any one of these morons gets killed off at any point in this dragging movie.

One good point is that it is less than an hour and a half long. Perhaps when they were in the editing room and saw what a piece of junk they made, they decided to at least edit most of it out, sparing the audience of the most ridiculous script, horribly paced acting, and terrible story line.

Basically, all the girls are in skimpy outfits for no apparent reason. The lines delivered are so contrite that they aren’t even campy or funny, so if the director was going for camp, they totally missed the mark on it.

We were kind of hoping it might be campy and fun, like Cabin Fever was, but it wasn’t even close to managing that.  Eliza Dushku is usually decent, but she totally mailed it in too.  The whole movie was a total waste of time and I’d never recommend it to anyone. I can’t even believe we sat through the whole thing!

I haven’t seen Fright Night yet (the remake I mean), but I can tell you one thing, I can’t wait to! My husband will be a hard one to get to the theater to see yet another vampire flick. It’s hard enough to get him to watch the Twilight Blu Rays with me!

But this one should be a little grittier – I hope at least. I LOVED the original movie that was released in 1985. It starred a lot of little known actors, and was largely a lower budget movie that did better on video than it did in the theater.

I had a period of time when I was a younger tween where I went through a fascination with vampires. Much like the tweens are going through today I suppose. There was something so appealing about these beautiful beings that seems to skate above the laws of humanity and live forever as well as have special powers.

It’s very sexy. Let’s face it. That’s why the vampire legend has gone on so long and been such a popular subject for movies, television shows and more.

In the remake, Colin Farrell plays the Jerry Dandridge character that was played by the uber hot (at least I thought back then) Chris Sarandon (yep, he was married to Susan Sarandon for a while a long time ago).

Colin Farrell does look like he’s made quite a sexy vampire from the previews I’ve seen. The casting is also pretty good, except I’m going to have a hard time separating the original movie from the new one because I was such a huge fan of the original campiness.

I also loved the special effects of the original Fright Night, and with all the CG that’s done now, I’m not sure it will still maintain its original appeal. The special effects were actually better back then, in my opinion. I mean sure, you have the occasional mold breakers like Matrix and Lord of the Rings, but largely the special effects in the eighties and nineties just looked much more real.

Anyways, the remake has gotten good reviews so far. One said the movie is a little too long. Another said that some of the interesting characters weren’t utilized enough.  Most of them seemed to agree that the new movie was a very fun ride.

That’s all I’m asking for!

So, hubby and I finally got to go see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part II this afternoon at a cheap matinee.  Neither of us was disappointed.  Following true Harry Potter fashion, this movie was the same high quality caliber of acting, story telling and special effects that all the others were.

I tried to read the books, but the story telling style just wasn’t my right fit. But I absolutely love the movies. They are stylistically superb and amazing to watch on a purely sensory level with the high tech, seamless special effects and CG.

Add to that a stellar cast and an almost uncanny ability for the casting directors to cast perfect fits for every character, and it’s no wonder this is the highest grossing series of movies out there today.

Deathly Hollows is, of course, the second part to the two parter ending of the movies.  In it, we’ve seen all the kids really come of age, and we’ve seen young loves blossom (Ron and Hermione and Harry and Ginny Weasley).  We’ve seen these characters literally grow up before our eyes, and I think that helps it to mold into our minds as one of the most beloved set of misfit heroes and heroines.

They’ve endeared themselves to us over the years, and I think that, even me having not read any of the books, felt a sense of closure and relief when the final installment was told (and it was good).

In it, we see the fruition of the three friends and their cohorts never ending battle between good and evil.  Valdemort, played by Ralph Fiennes, and his minions, including the uber talented Helena Bonham Carter (who barely has any lines in this one) finally comes to get Harry right where he wants him.

Harry is tired of seeing those around him die to protect him, but what he doesn’t realize is that they are protecting an idea, a way of life, not just him. He ends up bringing himself before Valdemort, much to his friends dismay, because as Dumbledor himself told Harry, he has a part of Valdemort in him.

When Valdemort killed Harry’s parents, part of the spell that was cast refracted back onto him, and Harry’s tiny infant body absorbed some of Valdemort’s essence, making them bound together in thought.

Harry realizes that he must himself die in order to kill Valdemort. Of course, we see what happens at the end, and I don’t want to totally spoil it for you, so you must go see it if you’re a Potter fan!  Great movie, and a great ending to this amazing saga.

We recently sat down and watched the movie “The Lincoln Lawyer” with Matthew McConaughey playing the main character, a sleezy lawyer who lawyers out of his car instead of an office.  He’s the typical sleezy lawyer that a lot of movies portray, taking shortcuts, ripping people off and enjoying the thrill of winning and screwing people over.

The movie is based on the book of the same title by an author who I think is hit or miss, Michael Connelly.  It is a legal thriller, the kind that heady people who also enjoy medical thrillers might enjoy.

McConaughey holds his own in this film, but there are some problems with it in that I never really cared too much for any of the characters enough to make me care what ended up happening to them in the film.  Ryan Philippe plays the rich kid accused of trying to rape and murder a girl.

He adamantly denies that he did anything wrong, and insists that it is a setup from the beginning. Of course, as the Lincoln Lawyer digs more, he starts to find a disturbing underlying story.  Drama and twists ensue, and there are some pretty good twists, except I think that they happen a bit too early in the film.

The musical score is also a little bit too light for the subject matter. I felt that if it could have been a little darker, a little slower, I could have taken the movie a little more seriously. However, I can’t refute the fact that the movie is an interesting and attention holding one to watch.

Marisa Tomei is given a thankless role as the ex wife of McConaghey’s character, but she is a pleasure to watch as usual, although her role really isn’t all that meaty and we don’t get enough of a chance to care about her character or why they are divorced at all.

All in all, I would score this movie as a three out of five stars. It was entertaining enough to watch and didn’t have any outstandingly stupid scenes that would make me give it 2 stars. Other than that, I would say it’s not one that I thought about at all the next day, so it didn’t do the job of sticking in your brain like some other thrillers do.  It seemed almost anticlimactic in the end, which was somewhat of a letdown.

But definitely entertaining.

So I finally got to watch a movie that I’d been waiting to watch for a while. I watched it on regular DVD, since my hubby had no interest in watching it. He thought it was a chick flick, but really it was a darker and more gritty drama about a marriage that was crumbling between two people who were previously madly in love with eachother.

In a word, I’d have to say this movie is excellent. It is superbly acted by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, who play the married couple Cindy and Dean. The two are quirky characters in their own right.

They meet at the nursing home where her grandmother stays. Cindy comes from a home where her parents can’t stand eachother, and Dean comes from a home where his mother up and left for a man early on in his life. So neither of them had the best illusions of relationships.

However, when the two meet, they have a sweet chemistry with one another. Cindy is in a relationship that seems mostly physical with a meathead who also has a violent temper, and Dean is a sort of loner, who has a job at a moving company. He’s a highschool dropout, but has plenty of charm and guts to spare.

He sees Cindy and falls in love with her instantly, feeling like he’s known her for years. That’s the real kicker, and the heartbreaking part of the movie. These two characters shared such a tender love when they first met that it’s hard to see the fastforwarding and rewinding scenes from happier times to sad times.

And some of it hits close to home, I think, with any married couple, as you can see how if you let your qualms about one another’s short comings get to you too bad, then you lose sight of why you fell in love with them in the first place.

It seems that Cindy is more the one who wants out of the marriage, while Dean, even though he has a violent temper, seems to want to save it and genuinely still loves his wife.  Cindy doesn’t want to have sex any more, and when Dean tries a desperate attempt to mend the marriage in a cheesy sex motel, a fight breaks out and the end of the marriage is seen in heartbreaking pictures.

I’ll be honest. I had to turn this movie off before it ended. I saw enough to know that it wasn’t going to be a Hollywood ending, but also saw enough to know that this film deserved every award and award nomination it got.  Great movie, just not the most uplifting.