So my husband, who is pretty tough when it comes to scary movies (we’ve watched many together, we both love them, we’re suckers for horror), jumped big time at one of the first “scary” scenes in the movie Paranormal Activity 3. That’s when I knew we were in for a rough ride on this third part of a inexpensively filmed movie franchise.

In my opinion, this one is the best of the three and by far the creepiest and scariest. Perhaps it’s because it has to do with children, and because the cast are better actors and are a little more endearing than the casts for the other movies.  This one is a prequel, showing how the hauntings began for the family.

In it, we see sisters Katie and Kristie (Katie is the grown woman in the first movie, and also makes an appearance in the second movie) as children. They live with their mother and her boyfriend. There is no explanation of what happened with their father, but I suspect we may see something about him in the 4th movie, which as I understand is being made now.

There are several very scary things about this movie. The movie gives a vibe of the early eighties horror movies where there was a lot of suspense and of course  some fake outs where you literally almost pee your pants.  The creepiest parts are when they set up an oscillating fan with a camera. The suspense of the scene of the camera catching bits and pieces of activity is enough to make you wanna scream.

The movie basically tells the story about how the hauntings, or the invisible entity that apparently does not mean well, starts to haunt the lives of this family. Of course, the mother’s boyfriend happens to film everything (hokie I know), but the aura of the movie, the set, the timing and the sequences are really ingenious.

I was so tense during this movie that I almost felt like I was living it.  Then at the end, it does take a somewhat hokie turn, but it got a free pass from me because it had some of the most original horror scares up til that point.

If you want to be scared again like you were when you were a kid watching a horror or suspense movie, then rent Paranormal Activity 3.

But HBO is known for giving actors a big break, and maybe this could be it for a lot of these actors who haven’t made it big yet.  Of course, Hoffman is already in that arena, but some of the others aren’t.

The show starts off VERY SLOWLY.  In fact, I heard that its viewers dropped by half or more after the first episode aired, which doesn’t bode well. However, the series has already been renewed by HBO for a second season.

I gotta admit, if you like action right away and a clear story line off the bat, then you probably won’t like this show to begin .But this is how the awesome show “The Wire” started off too, and look how great it was after you learned the characters, the story lines and the random jargon they used.

The story centers around Dustin Hoffman’s character “Ace” who has just served a prison term for taking the fall for a friend and preventing his own grandson from going to jail.  He has it out for a character named “Mike” who we don’t meet until episode 4.

There are side stories as well, and a lot of the stories center around a horse racing track that’s almost out of business, where big gamblers go and great horses race.  There is a side story with a motley foursome of gamblers who happen to hit it big pooling their money and using the handicapping talents of Jerry, Gedrick’s character.

Another side story involves Nick Nolte, who is an old timer horse trainer. You don’t really understand what’s going on with his story for a while. Partly because he mumbles his lines and partly because the story line is definitely hard to articulate for a while.

The acting is superb, which is what you expect form HBO series.  However, the story lines are very slow. I have a feeling that watching the show will pay off, it’s just a matter of fleshing out the characters and slow burning to a season ending payoff.  I’ll keep watching.

The movie is about a ship yard that was started by friends Tommy Lee Jones and Craig T Nelson decades ago. They rose up through the ranks. It made them both very rich. But when the economy takes a nosedive, and cuts must be made, we see the true colors of people.

Also, it paints a good picture of what it’s like to have it all, the big house, the fancy cars, and the like and to then suddenly not be able to afford it any more. It really made me want to scale back on our own lifestyle, even though we don’t live a really lavish life.

Ben Affleck plays the lead character. He’s a bit arrogant at first, and we immediately see him get fired in the first ten minutes of the movie. It would have been nice to se him a little more in his work environment, then maybe we may have felt more of the sense of loss he felt along in the movie.

He ends up having to move his family in with his parents and work on a construction crew for his wife’s brother. In short, he trades his white collar life in for a blue collar one that he used to consider beneath him. This is another unfortunate truth about today’s economy .Many people who were making big bucks are having to work for pennies on the dollar compared to what they used to.

This movie shows how the big corporations and their upper management are reaping the rewards of their multimillion dollar companies even in bad times while the very people who built the company from ground up are being laid off and forgotten, left to fend for themselves.

Chris Cooper plays a great supporting role (love that guy).  Tommy Lee Jones and Ben Affleck are great – Affleck’s a little stiff, but that’s his character.

It is well written, superbly acted and sucks you in to these characters from the get go.  Albeit, the only part that may be a bit unrealistic if you’re a football fan is all the last minute nail biting wins the Panthers tend to experience.

I surprised myself with liking this show because I’m really not a football fan myself. My husband is a huge football fan though, and he likes the series too. It’s not just about football of course, so even the casual fan like myself can get in to the stories of these kids and the adults that mold and teach them, and all the teen and adult drama that goes with it.

We’re about nine episodes in, and there hasn’t been one bad episode yet, although I’m sure there will be one since they put a whopping 22 episodes in their first season, a bold move for what could have been a short lived series if it wasn’t picked up.

Kyle Chandler is great as the young Eric Taylor who coaches the small town Texas football team who is on their way up. The sport means everything to the people in the town of Dillon, including the boosters that support the team and the football fanatical mayor of the city.

The kids are under immense pressure to perform for college and pro scouts, and most of them are just small town kids that are looking to make something of themselves.  The first episode has the star quarterback getting hurt badly. You think he may be off the show, but in fact his rehabilitation ends up being one of the more gripping story lines of the series.

The actor who plays the first quarterback Jason Street is a pretty amazing actor. He makes you feel for him and how drastically his life has changed from being a top tier prospect for the pros to being in a wheelchair.

We also have Connie Britton, who plays Coach Taylor’s wife.  She’s an excellent actress as well, and for me it’s quite a departure watching her in a happy marriage, which is a huge departure from her unhappy tortured marriage in the more recent “American Horror Story”.

Friday Night Lights is immensely enjoyable, and it captures the spirit of a small town well, the good and the bad.

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.

The first season followed the story of Ben and Vivienne Harmon, a pshychiatrist and his wife who are recovering from Ben’s infidelity earlier on, where she caught him in bed with one of his students (he also taught at a local university).

Their rebellious teenaged daugher Violet was a main part of the haunted house story as well.  All are very talented and pretty looking actors that made the story more compelling.

However, perhaps the most compelling characters were the next door neighbors, the ghost teen Tate, played by a masterful young actor Evan Peters who is bound to become a teen heart throb after playing the tortured, dark soul Tate who’s done some very disturbing and evil things and still manages to find his way into the audience’s forgiveness.

You find yourself sort of rooting for this guy for no apparent reason.  The first season follows this dysfunctional family through their trials and tribulations that the house puts them through, including an impregnation by the ghost Tate, a gay couple who still haunts the house, an ex mistress who haunts Ben and too many other ghosts to keep track of.

My husband and I thought they could have scaled back on the ghosts a bit, and thought the series always seemed to “blow its wad” in one episode and drop multiple story lines, almost too many to keep track of instead of building a slow horror.

However, now knowing that the series intends to put a new family in a new situation every year, it now makes sense on why the first season seemed to move at lightning speed in the story lines and character development.

Jessica Lange also adds to the talented cast. Nominated for multiple acting awards over her career, you can see why in this show.  Lange always tends to add a very dramatic flair to her roles, almost too dramatic at times, but those are the characters she plays, and this one is supposed to be over the top.

The first season was pretty solid. It’s edgy, and that’s why it’s on so late at night on the FX channel, plus it shows partial nudity and some very adult situations.  Looking forward to the next story in season II!!!

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.

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!!!!

The first season had me doubting whether it was ever going to get good with ridiculous dialogue, plot lines and dismal acting. This season it’s almost as if someone has taken over the bodies of the actors in the show and the writing and breathed new life in to it.

I think the location change from the city to a beautiful country scape in the south has really helped the story as well. There is something that is inifintely more disquieting about zombies inhabiting such a peaceful landscape as opposed to inhabiting a city.  As my husband says, the country bumpkin zombies just seem so much more menacing as well. Not sure why that is, but it is so!

They are taking lots of chances with this season as well, going off in to the edgy darkness with their story lines. The big reveal at the end of the first part of season II was (SPOILER ALERT) that Sophia, the little girl they had been searching for so long, ends up being in the barn that housed all of farmer Herschel’s family member zombies.

This show did a great job of really making us care for these characters this season. Before, I felt like I hadn’t invested in any of them whereas now, if any of them dies or becomes zombies, I’m actually going ot have a problem with it.

They’ve successfully built up the characters, and the special effects are just off the hook. Complete with the well walker and the neighbor walkers found in the woods, which Herschel makes Rick help round up with head-loop things, there are some great edge of your seat moments and some excellent special effects.

Now we’ve gotta wait until February to see the conclusion to this awesome second season!

It’s a very subtle comedy that stars Jason Schwartzman as Johnathan Ames, who writes a lot of the episodes and has written stories about himself and his days as a private detective for hire (with  no real accreditation, assumingly he did it because he was just bored and needed the excitement!)

But Schwartzman isn’t the richest part of this little half hour escape from reality.  Ted Danson plays his wealthy pothead friend who still has money enough to spend and open a restaurant, although it seems he’s never really worked a day in his life and is well past his prime.

Then we have Zack Galifanakis, who plays his other friend, equally as much of a slacker. He’s an unemployed cartoonist who’s got some really quirky habits.  He’s also part self-loathing, part self absorbed and a great part of the ridiculous story lines they find themselves in.

Usually they’re just following Johnathan around on his various private dick assignments and getting themselves into a lot more trouble than is necessary.  The show, mind you, is far fetched, but it’s just pure quirky fun with some of the most unique characters I’ve seen on a television show since Seinfeld.