Noah Movie Review

I guess the hokeyness of the Biblical epic film was just waiting for a rebirth. We could count Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ as the start of a new wave, but it’s more torture porn than uplifting. When Darren Aronofsky decides to tackle a Bible story, even when granted a mega-millions budget by a major studio, you have to expect something a little beyond the ordinary, if not quite extraordinary.

This Is the End Movie Review

In most cases, when young men gather together and hash out (most likely under the influence of varying types of drugs) what would go into their movie if they were given the chance by a Hollywood studio, the pitch never come to fruition. It becomes fodder for the ether, zany and lunatic ideas as easily forgotten as they were imagined. But for Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the writing and directing team behind This Is the End, they actually got the chance and a modest studio budget to make a film that has everything but the kitchen sink thrown into it.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower Movie Review

That feeling of being infinite is one of the amazing things about being a teenager and also the most frustrating thing about dealing with teenagers. I look back on my high school days with fond memories even as I recall that there was a fair amount of trepidation going to school on the first day of freshman year. But through four years of making new friends, drifting apart from old ones, growing up and slowly becoming the person I am today, I don’t have much recollection of ever feeling like it was going to end. Now I look back and wish I’d taken it slower, for those four years are, in fact, finite. These feelings and many more are captured eloquently in Stephen Chbosky’s film version of his own novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

My Week With Marilyn Movie Review

Has there ever been a movie star like Marilyn Monroe? My lifetime doesn’t come anywhere close to any time that she was alive so it’s hard to fully understand the attention that she drew and the madness of her celebrity. All I know is what’s been written about those times and what little I’ve seen of documentary footage of her in crowds. Is it anything like the fervor exhibited over a sighting of Leo, George or Brad? I think there’s a great difference between the way we viewed celebrities then and now. The rarity of bearing witness to something in the private life of a celebrity then is nothing compared to the ubiquity of celebrity gossip, sightings, paparazzi photos and such today. We didn’t know (or feel like we know) celebrities then like we do now. Marilyn’s popularity, however, was about much more than public interest in a movie star. She had qualities most women would have died for: she was beautiful, voluptuous, dazzling, sexy and sultry. She was a true classic star, a fact that Simon Curtis’s debut feature My Week With Marilyn is acutely aware of.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II Movie Review

It was fairly obviously a cynical ploy to maximize profits that led Warner Bros. executives to split Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into two films. One film made from the seventh book in the popular series by J.K. Rowling would have had to top the four hour mark to have even a semblance of coherence, but that hasn’t really stopped the writers and directors of the previous films. Last year we were treated to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I and now this summer the final chapter concluded with Part II.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I Movie Review

Bill Nighy as Minister of Magic presents the items bequeathed by Dumbledore in his will

As the Harry Potter book series progressed, they became denser, packed with more and more material. As such, as the films have trudged onward they’ve had to make various omissions in order to fulfill a kid-friendly movie running time. They’ve also grown to be darker as the full weight of the power of Voldemort and Harry’s predicament comes to bear. The result has been a series of films that I imagine would be virtually incomprehensible to any viewer who hasn’t read the books. I say this because I’ve often had to try to refresh my memory of missing details from the book to aid my comprehension of the story of the screen.

My hope was that the splitting of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into two parts would resolve this problem. Without a doubt, Steve Kloves has done a fine job of drafting a story that makes sense for Part I, but so many of the details the characters use to make connections are given little more than a cursory glance.