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.

Ugh, I really hate when I start a movie that I know is going to suck from the first five minutes, but somehow I feel trapped in to finishing it out because I already wasted a half hour or more of my time on it, hoping it would get better (to no avail of course).

That’s precisely what happened with the atrocity that is the “eerie, edgy” making of a fairy tale in to a movie “Red Riding Hood”. The movie is directed by Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke.

She did a decent job on the first twilight movie, but this movie was an abomination of what I’m assuming the makers thought would be an edgy making of the classic fairy tale that appeals to young girls.

There are two hunks in this story, one that Red Riding Hood, played by the beautiful and usually talented Amanda Syfried, has known since childhood named Peter, and one that she has been promised to be betrothed to whom she has no sexual interest in, Henry.

Both are played by cute young actors, one of which is an Edward wannabe (of course, this is the one she wants), but they both are flat in this movie. I felt like the Edward wannabe was trying to hard at being a brooding handsome character, and his hairstyle didn’t exactly fit the period piece feel of this movie.

Well, let me correct myself. This movie didn’t even know what it was as it combined feels from several different generations. The cheap sets and boring story line didn’t make you feel for any of the characters at all. Seyfried, who is usually a great actress, seemed almost bored by the role, mailing in her performance as though she knew the material just wasn’t up to snuff.

The story tried to hard to be romantic, and yet none of the characters had any chemistry with one another, and the romance scenes seemed forced and acted out.

The beast, who we finally see, apparently can speak to Red Riding Hood, so we know that it is connected to her in some way. That’s the big mystery, who is the beast to her?  She begins to suspect her family and most of all the two men who are fighting over her.

The movie tries to trick us into thinking it is various characters at certain points, and the conclusion ends up feeling forced, like they just picked the least obvious character because they didn’t know what else to do at that point.

Skip this movie. Don’t be tempted to think it’s anything as interesting or engrossing as the twilight movies.  It’s boring, the script is ludicrous, and the sets and costumes make you feel like you’re watching some cheap play.  Terrible review, I know, but I was disappointed in this one.

We finally got to watch the sequel to Wall Street, the iconic movie with the great Michael Douglas (who is still great in the sequel, but is given subpar material to work with in my opinion) and Charlie Sheen as his protege.

The movie was made at a great time in the eighties when greed and the “me” generation had taken over. The stock market was booming, and millionaires were being made every day.  It was actually a great decade for the US, and this movie was truly a sign of the times.

It also gave birth to Gordon Gekko, Douglas’ character, whose catch phrase “greed is good” really caught on and stuck in the American psyche still today even.

It was  story about the downfall of a wealthy, fast talking, wheeling and dealing tycoon, Gordon Gekko and the victims he gobbled up in his path, including Charlie Sheen’s character Bud Fox by showing them life in the fast lane.

The sequel is more about his daughter and the love story between her and another Wall Street up and coming hot shot, unconvincingly played by the too-young looking Shia Labouf. I think he did fine in the movie, but I actually think he and Carrie Mulligan, who plays Gekko’s daughter, were miscast in their roles.

Gordon Gekko is out of jail, and has been for some years when the story opens. His life has become lonely, and his reputation ruined. He returns to a world that has forgotten about him essentially, where there are other sharks and tycoons that have taken over in his spot.

He still has that fire and passion for the game, but he doesn’t have the money. He also seems to have learned something while in prison for eight years, but the movie does make us wonder when he’s going to turn on us and the daugher that has been estranged from him too.

He starts a sort of mentorship and dialogue with Lebaouf’s character (which that in itself is a bit unbelievable), without his daughter’s knowledge. His daughter runs a website that is a sort of do gooder site that tells the real news and has a liberal agenda.

He tries to get father and daugher reconciled, as Gekko shares information with him about the guy he thinks sold his beloved boss out. His boss’ life has been ruined, and he was like a father to Shia’s character, so he has a big interest in avenging him.

Through it all, there is a lot of confusing dialogue that someone who doens’t know Wall Street at all would get very confused by. I sort of knew what they were talking about, only because I follow the stock market and financial news a bit, but anyone who doesn’t would have been confounded by some of the dialogue going on in this movie.

Also, there are some cheesy scenes and a bit of stylizing that brought this movie down. It could have been a lot more intelligent than it was. I’m not sure what’s happened to Oliver Stone’s film making abilities, but it’s like he’s almost there, but just can’t quite get back to making fantastic, ground breaking movies.

We sat down to watch the latest Cohen brothers movie “True Grit”, which we’ve been somewhat excited to see for a while, and were anxiously awaiting it to become available in our Blockbuster cue, when it finally came in.  Due to other obligations though, it sat around for a few weeks.

So, we finally got around to watching it last night.  I knew I was in trouble when in the first five minutes, the main star of the movie, the young Hailee Steinfeld, actually annoyed me. I know that her character is supposed to have somewhat of that effect, but it went deeper than that for me.

I felt that this was a forced performance, as were the other performances in the movie. I felt like I was watching a movie, at no moment was I immersed into this story, nor did I care about the characters or what happened to them.

Steinfeld’s character, a young girl who is seeking revenge and justice for the cold blooded murder of her father, never comes off as sympathetic. She actually comes off as cold, and often unlikeable and unrelatable.

Jeff Bridges, who I normally love, I felt sort of phoned this performance in. It’s a character that feels a little like a lot of the other characters he has played. He wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t a stretch for him to play, and I felt like I had seen this movie before.

Matt Damon is another character who seems miscast. He garners no affection from the audience, and actually seems like an unnecessary addition to this story.

The pacing of the story is excruciatingly slow and uninteresting. The only interesting scene we saw before we turned it off and went to bed was one where they had cornered two outlaws in a cabin. A fight between the two outlaws ensues, and this is the only somewhat interesting scene in the whole movie!

Now, we will finish this one today, but it says something that we felt our beds calling an hour in to this drawn out movie. Not sure where this was going, but the Cohen brothers failed to rile up the same interesting feel and look, and great characters that they usually do in their movies.

Maybe I just don’t like westerns, but I thought a lot more could have been done with this.

We just went and saw X-Men First Class, and we didn’t have really high expectations for this movie because the trailers, quite frankly, don’t do this well made movie justice.  When we saw the trailers for the movie, we initially were not going to go to the theater to see the movie, although my husband and I both are X-Men movie franchise fans.

We figured we would wait for it to come out on Blu Ray. However, we saw that it was getting rave reviews, and then a friend of ours who is also a movie enthusiast told us he saw it and it was definitely the best X-Men movie he’s seen to date. So that sealed the deal for us. We were out of town when it hit theaters, but when we got back into town, we hit up the matinee and saw it.

This movie was pretty terrific, I gotta say. I think it was my favorite X-Men movie, aside from X-Men II, which I also thought was really entertaining. This one didn’t have as much action, but the character development and acting was awesome.  Mystique was a nice surprise, with Jennifer Lawrence playing the younger version of the blue shape shifter, and Rebecca Romjin even making a cameo in it as the older version.

Magneto was excellent. He was played by an actor named Michael Fassbender, who was also in the Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds in a memorable role.  He was mesmerizing in the earlier scenes of the movie, building a sympathetic, complicated and angry character and making his “evil” Magneto seem very multi dimensional.

He was much more interesting than the older version as played by Sir Ian Mckellan in the sequels.  James McEvoy was also excellent as a younger Professor Xavier, who is a bit more of a ladies man than I thought (or at least that’s how this direcor interpreted his character).

Some of the characters who fell a little flat for me were the flying girl and Emma Frost. My husband explained to me that is how Emma is supposed to act, cold and calculated, but I guess that January Jones character acting just didn’t do it for me. I kept seeing Betty Draper with every line she murmured, but maybe that’s just because I’m a huge Mad Men fan.

The Beast was great as well, and I didn’t recognize the actor, but he was a pleasant surprise. The story line is also very original, with the X-Men joining forces to defeat the villain in this movie, played awesomely by Kevin Bacon, who seemed to enjoy playing a super powered villain immensely.

He can absorb the energy of anything, including nuclear bombs, and then “throw them back” at you.  He ages slowly, similarly to Mystique.  His henchmen are also intriguing, a devil-like guy who can teleport and has wicked mean knife skills, and a guy who can control the weather, but mostly just throws mini tornadoes at people (kinda lame, but these characters both pulled it off).

Overall, X-Men First Class was an immensely enjoyable movie. I’d recommend it to everyone, even non comic fans!  Great job Matthew Vaughn!

So, after weeks of waiting for it to come, since it was such a popular new release with our mail order DVD service, we finally got the see the much touted Black Swan, with the very lovely and talented Natalie Portman leading the way as the neurotic, repressed ballet dancer Nina Sayers.

This movie is quite different, with the vivid, visually stunning imagery, and scary portrayal of a woman losing her mind.  Natalie Portman is stunning in it, and she deserved winning the Oscar for her performance in this very different movie.  She apparently went through three years of ballet training, and was a dancer as a child, and it does show, with her very thin body (both her and Mila Kunis dropped a lot of weight for the movie to look like authentic ballerinas, and neither had much to shave off in the first place).

There are some pretty spectacular dance scenes and choreography in this movie, and that’s half the fun. Warning, this is a very sexual movie. There’s not even any real nudity in it, but there is a lot of implied sex acts and a lot of sexuality and brutally honest sexual scenes in it.

But that is what makes this film more raw.  Everyone in it is good.  Mila Kunis didn’t have as much screen time as I thought she did, but her character is the antithesis of Nina’s uptight, perfection driven.  Nina begins to think that her rival Lily, played by Kunis is “after her” when she starts to have vivid delusions about her, and even has a vivid sexual fantasy about her after a night of drug induced fun.

Nina also is harassed, but also is falling for and fawning over the head of the ballet Thoma, who is played by the ever spectacular villain, Vincent Cassel.  His over the top sexual predator ways are at times totally disgusting, but Nina finds herself both repelled and drawn to him, her inadequate sexual experience and uptight demeanor clearly clouding her judgement on what a sleazebag he is. 

The movie quickly shows her downward spiral into total paranoia and delusion when she can’t handle the role of the white and black swan and all the pressures that come with having the biggest part in her dedicated career.

The imagery is amazing, and the sometimes ridiculous plot seems downright dreamlike and ok when you realize that you can no longer tell the difference between Nina’s reality and her delusions.

This movie is a pleasure to watch.

I was really excited to see the movie “Kill the Irishman”, about a Cleveland gangster, or gangster wanna be shall I say, that caused quite  ruckus with the Cleveland mafia, which apparently controlled much of Cleveland in the sixties and seventies unbenknownst to me.

I have lived in the greater Cleveland area pretty much my entire life, so naturally I was excited to see a movie that was based on a little piece of our local history.  And of course, gangster movies are always interesting. Being a fan of movies like Casino, Goodfellas and Godfather, I thought this movie would be interesting, and it had great actors in it.

Boy was I wrong. Something went wrong with this movie. It had such great potential to be really interesting and really well done, especially considering some of the talent they enlisted. However, ridiculous scenes and some terrible dialogue and direction really bogged this movie down into something very forgettable.

It had the potential to be a big hit, even an Indie hit or sleeper hit, however it has only grossed $700,000 so far at the box office which is a pretty miserable showing.

Where to start with the problems of this movie?  I think the director was going for a Scorsese type of feel, however, the montages and the musical scores just didn’t mesh with the characters and seemed forced and even over the top.

Christopher Walken phoned in an appearance that was laughable as a Jewish restaurant owner who was involved in organized crime. Ray Stevens, a big lug of a guy who has been great as a supporting actor in some great movies and even the HBO show Rome, just couldn’t pull off the lead in this movie.

He was too wooden, and frankly, too unlikeable. This was only compounded further by the director’s attempt to make him likeable by making it seem like he was some sort of Robin Hood, a thug, with a goden heart.

Some of the scenes that were made to get this point across were downright ridiculous, including one where this Irish elderly neighbor gives him a necklace that belonged to her father another “celtic warrior” (gag), and a little boy riding up to him on his bicycle asking is he was the Irishman as if he were a worship hero. 

Where this movie made attempts for us to feel something for these characters, it just felt forced.  The supporting cast was promising, including Paul Sorvino, Vincent Donofrio, Val Kilmer and others. However, their performances fell flat on a lackluster script and forced direction.

Wish I could say I liked this movie. It wasn’t unwatchable, but there were parts where my husband and I laughed, and we weren’t supposed to.

So, I just got done watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, the first part of the last two-part installment of one of the biggest grossing franchises of all time. I really have enjoyed almost all of the Harry Potter movies. They are of such consistent quality that it’s hard to not look forward to each one with the anticipation of a child.

They are so visually stunning that one almost feels like they’ve taken some sort of hallucinotory drug when they start watching. You really feel the escapism aspect with these movies because they literally transport you to a dimension in which all things, no matter how ridiculous, are possible.

The last few movies in the Harry Potter series have become progressively darker and more adult themed, as Harry and company grows up, right along with the audience that they appeal to. This last one definitely had some more adult themes, and even bordered on a little too creepy (even one slightly, very generically racy scene) for anyone watching that is under say ten years old.

We pick up where the last one left off, where all Muggles are being persecuted and hunted down. It’s very strong in its holocaust parallel undertones, with Muggles being subjected to anti-Muggle propaganda and fear, and the talks of Muggles and the “real magicals” breeding together brings scorn and fear as well.

It’s almost like watching a movie about the persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust, except it’s in this fantastically escapist magical fantasy world. I know that these movies have been criticized for portraying things a certain way, but honestly I just few them as purely enjoyable escapism, and I refuse to read any higher social responsibility into the whole thing.

Harry Potter and his closest friends are being fiercely hunted by Lord Valdemort and his cronies, whom it seems are more fearfully obeying him than ever, rather than feeling any real allegiance to him.  Harry, Hermione and Ron set out to escape by jumping from one location to another constantly, where paranoia, fear and depression set in.

It is the most adult themed and serious of them all so far.  There are even some unfortunate deaths in this one that will surprise everyone, and that make it feel even more real than ever that their world is in jeopardy and that they must all rally to save Harry Potter, their only hope against, ultimately, evil and a sort of dictatorship.

This movie was really enjoyable. Even clocking in at over two hours, it was immensely appealing to me as an adult. The acting, as always is so superb that you really believe this parallel universe of quirky characters actually exists. And as usual, the stunning special effects make you feel like it’s all real.

So my hubby and I went to see the next major Marvel motion picture, which is one of the first few in a string of movies that the now standalone film company has endeavored on its own. And it looks like the decision to split off into its own venture has paid off in spades.  Thor, which is based on the comic book character by the same name, is very watchable and very entertaining.

This is in in large part due to the fantastic, and very charismatic performance by a relative newcomer, and a gamble I might add for the producers to put in the movie. His name is Chris Hemsworth, and he’s a strapping six foot something blonde stud that plays the role exactly how it’s meant to be played.

Hemsworth is excellent, and he largely steals every scene he is in, even with the legendary Anthony Hopkins who plays Thor’s father.  Another pleasant surprise was an actor who I haven’t seen much of anywhere else either. He plays Loki, the brother of Thor, who we soon find out has a jealous envy of his brothers strength and obvious edge over him when it comes to who will succeed his father on the throne.

This movie to me, was a huge gamble to make in the first place. It’s not often that a story about a guy who is a God on some world we’ve never heard of, who weilds a mighty hammer as his weapon of choice, and who travels through wormholes to get to the other worlds he inhabits, would translate well into film.

But they pulled it off pretty well in Thor, without it feeling too hoaky. This is really only because they had a stellar cast. This included Natalie Portman, who is great as Thor’s down the earth love interest. She’s believable, as usual, as the humble human that Thor’s affections have found.

There is a lot of humor and action as well, but the humor is the part that really keeps it interesting and down to earth.  Hemsworth pulls off the humorous scenes flawlessly, and we genuinely believe this guy is cocky and arrogant, which makes it all that much funnier to see him struggle on earth without his usual powers.

The special effects are good, without being too over the top.  Unlike another movie coming out in the summer about a superhero, which I have no faith in being good (Green Lantern), the special effects don’t look like cheesy technicolor.