Z/Web

Director: Atom Egoyan

Strange film. It’s the type of film I want to like and it’s got a film noir vibe I did like, but it loses momentum throughout and the conclusion is terrible, abrupt and pointless and unsatisfying and feels like a Creative Writing 101 student cop out.

The basic concept is neat: an older wife becomes suspicious of her teacher husband and assumes he’s having affairs with his students. She hires a prostitute to test him, and to her horror, the woman tells her in explicit detail all the things her husband does with her. They keep meeting, the wife strangely fascinated, and soon those two are having an affair. There’s a little twist you see coming from page 1 of the script and when it does come, it’s barely dealt with, though it’s very important to the story. After that, things really go downhill and nothing makes much sense. It’s unfortunate, because there were some interesting moments and it’s an impressive cast.

In the end, it’s an interesting thriller, but one with more potential than success. It builds a lot of anticipation but doesn’t deliver. It’s not terrible and I did like much of it, but it’s a shame that the script wasn’t better. It’s apparently based on a French film, Natalie, which I think must be better and I’ll have to see some day.

Interesting documentary based on the popular book (which I have not read). I think I might have to check out the book. I didn’t know what it was about at all, but it’s basically using numbers and economic research to prove how the things we think we know we don’t. Some of the topics include a study on paying ninth graders for better grades, research on if your ordinary or unusual name has any effect on success in life, how seemingly moral sumo wrestlers cheat, why crime is down, and much more.

It’s a surprisingly entertaining and well-paced film, though I found the variety of animation and film-making styles to be a little jarring. Having different directors and animators do different parts is interesting, but is less coherent and some parts I didn’t like as well as others (i.e. the sumo wrestling bit was about four times as long as it needed to be for its point). Other segments — like the bribing of ninth graders — didn’t really seem to have a conclusion.

Ultimately it’s a little light on facts and heavy on frivolous entertainment and graphics, but it still very enjoyable and serves as a good introduction to the book.

A surprisingly good return to the Underworld universe, this time set after humans have discovered the existence of vampires and lycan and have purged them into near extinction. The film’s never-really-explained-or-used McGuffin is a hybrid child sought for by the authorities and lycan, which our heroine (the eternally lovely Kate Beckinsale) tries to protect. The plot is really just an excuse for lots of acrobatic stunts, cheesy CGI effects, and very bloody killing (in 3D the blood splatters come right at you in a make-you-duck and look-at-your-shirt-for-stains kind of manner). Not much brainpower at work here, but who cares — it’s all in fun. I had a great time (though I prefer the more down-to-earth fighting style of Haywire).

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Interesting high-octane actioner with the standout being newcomer Gina Carano who’s apparently a real MMA fighter in her first movie role. She’s not only gorgeous, but does her own fight scenes in a way that is utterly believable. That’s an important aspect, because the plot involves her as a sort of contract spy being blackballed by her own organization and framed for murder. She’s on the lam and must outrun all the bad guys and cops searching for her.

Unfortunately, that plot, while it sounds terrific on paper, comes across as muddled and confusing in the film. The first part of the movie involves a lot of flashbacks and you really have no idea what’s going on for the first half hour or so. Once she’s on the run things pick up and get much better, but the unraveling of the “mystery” at the end is worse than anticlimactic: the earlier parts are so dramatic and mysterious that we’re really expecting an awesome twist and there’s nothing unexpected at all. (We already know who the bad guys is, we just don’t know why, and the reasoning, while perfectly plausible and fine, just isn’t interesting or worth all the conspiracy drama.)

But despite the weak plot, this is still an above average action film and well-worth seeing. If nothing else, it’s wonderful to see Gina who is a real star and impressive even in her non-action scenes. The direction is also terrific. I loved how several long scenes with seemingly nothing happening — just the girl walking along a city street, for instance — were shot with few to no cuts, which subtly increase our agitation and expectations that something bad is about to happen. Another thing I liked was that while this girl is obviously a bad-ass, everything is very realistically done: she’s not superhuman and takes hits as well as gives them and the whole story feels plausible.

Definitely a blast to watch. I could watch it again and enjoy it even more, I think. Just ignore the meaningless plot and watch it for the fun stunts and action.

Fascinating premise as an American student goes to Oxford in the hopes of meeting his idol, a famous professor who lectures on how nothing — except for mathematics — can actually be proven. When the two stumble upon a murder, they follow the leads and debate philosophy and math, as the killer seems to be sending them clues that form a mathematical pattern.

I really liked a lot of this, but unfortunately the twist ending — simply by its nature — undoes a lot of the work of the film. It’s really sort of a clever ending, but it’s cumbersome and not satisfying (similar to the conclusion of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, it is realistic but disappointing). There are also a lot of dry points throughout the film, and the murders and clues are not very entertaining (again, a consequence of the chosen plot).

Still, the performances are good (Elijah Wood and John Hurt) and several great moments are worth the price of admission alone. Good if you like your murder mystery mixed with math and philosophical debate.

Hilarious horror movie spoof as the two titular idiots are mistaken as hillbilly serial killers by a bunch of moron college students vacationing in the woods. The movie works this brilliantly, having a series of coincidences and bad timing contributing to the idea that the two are murderers, with several of students accidentally dying and the others thinking they were killed. The students go out for revenge and things really get crazy.

Totally awesome, with a pretty good serial killer plot to boot. Fun on multiple levels, a lot like the original Scream, which broke new ground in simultaneously being a parody and a horror film. A blast from start to finish.

I wasn’t too interested in this as it sounded eerily similar to The Lovely Bones as it’s about a vanished girl who’s already been murdered as her parents struggle to find out what happened to her. I thought I would just watch a few minutes of it to get a feel of it, but I ended up watching the whole thing.

There’s something compelling about this Australian film. It’s based on a true story and it seems more cold-blooded and grim than fiction. The murder is the most vile I have ever seen — and that includes horror and serial killer films. It’s just so bizarre and pointless and subtly weird.

The victim is a sweet, naive 15-year-old dancer. She’s killed by her former babysitter, a 19-year-old girl who thinks she is fat and ugly and is envious of the young dancer’s beauty. She really is crazy and her performance is what makes the film work. The scene where she looks in the mirror after the murder and is horrified to see it’s still her own face staring back at her is chilling. The murder itself is hard to watch: she strangles the unsuspecting and trusting girl and it takes considerable time. It’s really heartless.

I liked that the babysitter isn’t portrayed as sympathetic. She’s somewhat sympathetic, but it’s clear she’s a monster. It’s a performance full of grays and is quite mesmerizing.

Another aspect of the film I liked was the way the police treated the frantic family with such indifference. Because there was no evidence of assault, they assumed the girl simply ran away and wouldn’t do anything. It wasn’t until weeks later, after desperate efforts from the parents brought forth a witness who had seen something, that the cops finally took the matter seriously. For me that was the worst torture of all for the poor parents, who couldn’t even get anyone to believe that their daughter had been abducted and possibly harmed. It’s bad enough to have a child disappear; worse is having no one care!

All that said, the film is not without flaws. The structure of the film is a little like The Lovely Bones with the dead girl narrating and us watching the events from different points of views, but at times this switching feels heavy-handed and awkward.

There were also several scenes where the emotions of the actors felt odd. It isn’t that they were wrong — they could have been correct — but there was something about the way they were presented that made them feel wrong. A classic example is when the parents finally learn that their daughter is dead. They show no reaction at all and seem calm and strangely detached. It is only later than we get the heart-breaking sobs and wild emotion we expected. That probably is an accurate portrayal of emotion. I’ve often thought that the reactions of relatives on crime shows is poorly done as they seem to immediately go into grief when a more accurate reaction would be shock and disbelief. But the problem with this scene of the parents is that even if it is true, it feels false, and we the audience feel puzzled and baffled and distracted instead of emotional. We needed at least some indication that the family felt something: a single tear, a split-second of distressful horror, something. We got that emotional reaction a moment later and it was good, but it was late.

(Another scene that does this is when the father of the babysitter finds her unconscious on the floor. He shows no emotion or concern, calmly telling the police that she has epileptic fits and this is the way she ends up. The scene felt incredibly odd.)

Still, despite a few strange decisions and errors, the film overall holds up and is surprisingly good. Not pleasant, but definitely interesting and emotional.

I’m not a huge fan of the Twilight series and expected this one to be terrible, but it surprised me. It’s actually pretty good and my favorite of the bunch.

The story is very simple, which I liked. Basically someone (the bad vampire girl from a previous film) is out to kill Bella with an army of fresh vampires, so both the vampire and werewolf clans have to cooperate to protect her. This sets up Bella right in the middle of the conflict between the two who love her, giving her an agonizing decision. She wants to marry Edward and become a vampire, but she loves the wolf boy, too, and doesn’t want to hurt him.

Most of the time when I see such “I’m in love with two men” dilemmas they come across as phony and forced, with one man clearly the obvious choice. But here the dilemma is real. With Edward she can have immortality at the cost of living, but with the wolf she would stay human. This choice is combined with her pending high school graduation, which is perfect as everyone is thinking about their wide-open futures and if she becomes a vampire it is permanent, freezing her in time at that age and ending any chance of a normal life.

The solution to this dilemma is also excellent and I really liked the way it was handled. It revealed that Bella is actually growing up and is intelligent, something I hadn’t seen much of before.

Of course the film still has many flaws, including lame special effects and action, overdone vampire drama, lots of “mystery” mood that isn’t very mysterious, and distracting irrelevant plot stuff that should have been cut. The worst was the nitpicking and irritating fighting between the two male leads. Yeah, we get that vampires and wolves don’t like each other. But they are so annoying we don’t want to be in the same room as their bickering!

But despite some problems, the core of the film is quite good and I actually liked it.

Author: Isaac Azimov

This is a classic bit of science fiction that I’d somehow managed to avoid reading until now. A while back I read part of this book but never finished it. This time I bought the audio version and finished it. It’s very good and holds up surprisingly well even after 60 years.

Its major flaw is also its key gimmick, which is that the book takes place over hundreds of years and covers a lot of fictional history quickly. The premise is that a radical scientist has predicted the fall of the galactic empire thousands of years into the future and set plans in motion to prevent catastrophe. He can’t prevent the fall itself — that is inevitable — but he can minimize the darkness that follows, reducing the chaos to a thousand years instead of 30,000. His predictions are eerily accurate, as he re-appears from the dead in video form right on schedule during crises, having recorded speeches prior to his death.

While this is fascinating, the nature of such a spread-out novel can be tedious. We are offered deeper glimpses into various points of history, but this makes the book feel more like a collection of related stories instead of a novel. We don’t get the richness of characterization and plot of novel: everyone feels like mere sketches. Unfortunately, that is simply a drawback of this particular kind of story. To tell the entire galatic history in full novel form would be an encyclopedic venture and would take a lifetime to read!

So I basically get out of this what I can: I enjoy the little stories of conflict and resolution, and I marvel that Hari Seldon’s science can predict human behavior so many centuries in advance.

Director: David Fincher

I liked the book and the Swedish film and I wasn’t sure how I felt about an American remake. I worried it might just be a competent version without adding anything new, but in the end it does enough I think it’s just a little better than than original film.

It’s definitely easier to understand what’s going on (and that nothing to do with the fact that original is subtitled). The book is incredibly complicated and this film does a great job making all that plot understandable. It is loyal to the source material for the most part, though they changed a few things for the better. I’ll spoil things slightly by mentioning two examples I liked.

One was having the girl’s original guardian not die, but have a stroke, so there are a couple of extra scenes with two of them later in the film. I thought the actor who played her guardian, despite not having a single line in the film, had one of the best performances. All we saw was his stiff, stroke-paralyzed body, unable to convey emotion, yet somehow he did. Amazing. Another change for the better was inclusion of a follow-up scene with the scummy lawyer in an elevator where Lisbeth reminds him of his promises and leaves him shuddering in terror. I felt like both the book and the first film dropped the lawyer story a little too easily so this quick follow-up was perfect (especially her final line to “stop looking at tattoo-removal websites”).

The film makes a few other changes that are not so good. I didn’t like that Lisbeth didn’t set fire to the car (it just blows up on its own). It’s a minor detail but key to her character and I don’t know why they changed it. Even more baffling is her asking Mikael for permission to kill the bad guy. That struck me as utterly out of character and I don’t know why that was in there.

Other “improvements” are more murky. I liked that they included some of the ending elements from the book that weren’t in the first movie (the stealing of the money, tracking down what happened to Harriet, etc.), but some aspects of how they accomplished all of that felt awkward and forced. They don’t ruin the movie but are simply different.

One sort of strange decision is that though the film is still set in Sweden (I had thought they were going to change to the U.S.), everyone in the film speaks English but with Swedish accents. This seems unnatural but worse than that, it makes some of the characters difficult to understand. With such an elaborate and complicated plot, understanding dialog is critical, and this works against that. It’s not a problem all the time, but on occasion it’s troublesome.

But overall I was very impressed by the whole production: the direction, sets, and script were all first-rate, and the performances were fantastic (especially Daniel Craig who was a perfect Mikael) and I thought Rooney Mara was great in a tough role (even more so considering how great Noomi Rapace was in the Swedish version). They fixed a few flaws in the original film but added a few others, so in some ways this is a wash (and I’d have no issues with someone preferring the Swedish movie), but overall I enjoyed this one more. It was just clearer and easier to understand. I thought I might be bored having both read the book and seen the other movie, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this. They came very close to making it perfect.

(There still are flaws from the book that made it into the film, in particular the whole mess with the numbers and Bible verses, which still makes no sense. I was especially frustrated by how close they came to fixing the awkward link between the verses and the murders. They set it up perfectly with the cop mentioning the Rebecca murder, but since he didn’t actually reveal the unusual way she was killed, there was no way Mikael could connect the verses with Rebecca’s murder, yet he does so anyway in a skip of logic.)

Director: Brad Bird

Impressive and fun, with a much simpler and more linear plot than previous films. It relies on set pieces for momentum and really isn’t much of a story, but for a big budget action flick like this, that works. I liked the settings (the stuff in the desert and tall building was cool). Not everything made sense, which is typical of this franchise, but Tom Cruise is still awesome and the series is an enjoyable blast.

Director: Steven Spielberg

Growing up in Europe, where Tintin is more popular than Superman and Batman put together, I have loved the books since I was a child. There have been attempts to make the books into movies before. A live action one was tried in the 1980s and flopped, and there was an HBO animated series in the early 1990s that was pretty good and very faithful to the books in both story and animation style. But this one with Spielberg at the helm promised more… and it delivered.

The motion-capture animation is, in a word, stunning. It doesn’t look creepy at all, but fabulous. I saw the 3D version which adds a little but isn’t essential. Everything about this world is done with wonderful attention to detail and though it’s a different and more photo-realistic style than Hergé’s art, it has a similar feel and tone. It’s breathtaking.

As far as the story goes, this film is really a version of The Secret of the Unicorn. It follows a very similar plot, but it’s been expanded a bit — made into more of a globe-trotting adventure. Amazingly, though some of the details have been switched around and there are new events — it still feels like aspects of the original book. The writers did an incredible job of creating new events that fit right in with Tintin (some parts are borrowed from other books). The sight gags, humor, the little dog Snowy, the Thompson Twins, all the wacky characters are included and they all feel just right. The voice performances are pitch-perfect, as is the animation.

I did hear one review that was critical of the plot as being a bit dated, and while I understand that, it is the plot of the original book so that strikes me as a strange criticism. One might as well criticize Emily Bronte’s work for being old! Personally, I prefer the original plot to something new: this has a classic feel to it and really is a wonderful, sweet, wholesome story of adventure and old-fashioned treasure-hunting. If you’ve read the books you’ll love the film, and if you’re discovering the character for the first time, the film’s a great introduction. Go see it and enjoy it and then read all the books. The whole series is timeless.

This weekend I had an interesting adventure as I attempted to create my first fruit bouquet. These are like flower arrangements, but with cut fruit on skewers, ready to eat. I read a tiny bit about these on the web and just went for it without much preparation. I didn’t have all the right equipment, which caused some issues, but the end result wasn’t too bad:

I used floral foam blocks for the base, which wasn’t the best as it was too light and I discovered that the heavier fruit skewers tended to unbalance the thing. It was tricky getting and keeping it balanced and transporting it was a nightmare. (I ended up wrapping it with plastic wrap and placing the two baskets into a large cooler, which worked.) The whole thing was far too fragile for my liking, however. Fruit fell off the skewers or slid down them to the base, the whole thing kept wanting to tip, and I couldn’t fill in all the gaps properly because I couldn’t get in between the existing skewers without damaging the whole structure.

Another issue was I used some fake moss as a sort of stuffing. Theoretically you use that to fill in the cracks between the skewers and cover up the foam block. It really brings the whole thing together and makes it look more like a floral bouquet instead of just a collection of sticks of fruit. Unfortunately, the moss I got was very flaky, like grass clippings, and since it wasn’t edible, I worried about it sticking to the fruit and people eating (it was getting everywhere, like confetti). Therefore I only used a little bit and my bouquet doesn’t look as good as it should. I later saw something about using kale for this filler and that would have been a much better approach, but I found out too late to use it on this project.

Basically, I needed a better plan for the whole thing. But it still worked and everyone at the party seemed to like it and appreciate the effort. I haven’t done any kind of project like this in a long time, so it was good to push myself into trying something new. I definitely like the concept and I’ll try it again in the future, but with better planning and execution. With the right equipment and supplies, I think I could produce some interesting arrangements. It was fun and I recommend everyone try this: you really can’t go too wrong. Even if it ends up a mess, you just have fruit salad!

I loved the book and though this is a well-done film, it left me a bit bereft. I’m not sure why. It could be because I didn’t find the actor who plays the lead compelling at all. He had no chemistry and seemed ill-cast. (The rest of the cast was excellent, especially Colin Firth as Lord Henry.)

The whole story feels awkward and empty. It’s been a while since I read the book so I’m not sure if this aspect is accurate or not, but in this film it felt like Dorian was portrayed as a sweet innocent who’s entirely corrupted by his mentor Lord Henry. It was as though it was trying to remove the blame off of Dorian, which I didn’t like. My vision of him is much more of an arrogant and spoiled man who is easily tempted and swayed, not a good guy who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into sin.

The film is also too on-the-nose too often. For instance, animating the portrait just felt weird and wrong. Yes, the portrait was sinfully ugly and vile and well-done in that regard, but it might have been much better if the audience had never been shown that and we only saw the reactions of people who saw the portrait instead. Making the portrait move and pulse with something like a heartbeat was a serious mistake. It again serves to remove blame from Dorian, as though the portrait is evil and has a mind of its own instead of this all being something he has done to himself.

Overall this is a beautifully shot and acted adaptation of the book, but it just didn’t quite work for me. The flaws are slight but critical. It’s still worth seeing, especially if you don’t plan on reading the book.

I was not the biggest fan of the original, but I liked this one better. The plot’s still far too elaborate, crazy, and involved (basically Holmes’ nemesis, Professor Moriarty, is out to start a world war so he can profit on the chaos), and there are bizarre contradictions. (Particularly the ending, where Moriarty seems unfazed by his defeat as he claims war is inevitable anyway — his plot was just going to speed it up. If that’s the case, why bother with such a complex web of intrigue?)

But the key thing about this one is that it is fun. There’s the delightful Holmes-Watson relationship, a sort of odd couple (Felix and Oscar) thing, the introduction of Holmes’ quirky brother, and of course, the diabolical game with Moriarty. The latter two match wits throughout the film and it culminates in a literal game of chess — with higher ramifications — between them. Much of the time I had no idea what was happening, but in a film like this it hardly matters. It’s just fun. Light entertainment, but definitely amusing.

Oh, and the closing credits are some of the most interesting I’ve ever seen! A really neat blend of live action film and old-fashioned print.

This made-for-Scifi channel miniseries was an interesting take on Peter Pan. It takes place before he meets Wendy and her brothers in the original book and tells his origin story. It’s science-fictiony in the sense that it purports that Neverland is a distant planet and some teleportation widget gets people there. A bit silly at times, but what I liked was the way it integrated all the aspects of the original book into the film. For instance, different groups of people — pirates, American Indians, Hook, Peter and the Lost Boys, were each transported to Neverland from different points in history and they all end up there together. Since there is no aging in Neverland, they all coexist despite coming from different eras. This delightfully explains the origins of such disparate characters.

There’s much here that’s muddled and the plot (about Hook wanting the secret to Fairy flying) is a little forced and not that compelling, but these miniseries do have an interesting premise and I rather like them. This one is better than most, mainly because you’re always watching for little clues and hints at the original story (such as Hook’s watch being swallowed by a crocodile), and I liked that they used authentic British actors instead of miscasting big stars in the roles.

This is a fascinating British film I’d never heard about, but it’s really pretty cool. The premise is deliciously simple. There are just three actors in the whole movie. It takes place almost entirely in a small fortified apartment. It feels a lot like a play (and perhaps could have been).

Basically two criminals kidnap a young woman intending to ransom her for $2 million from her rich father. Out of that simple conflict, all sorts of intriguing possibilities emerge. I don’t want to reveal them as it would spoil the drama, but let’s just say that not everything is as it seems. I loved the way the film kept doing the unexpected. By the end, I really felt I had no idea what was going to happen (that’s a rare thing for me as usually I can predict the ending a mile away).

One of the things I liked about this film is that it deals with the harsh reality of kidnapping a person. For instance, how to handle feeding a bowel movements while still keeping the prisoner secure. It reminded me of aspects of the The Debt in that regard (one of my favorite aspects of that film).

This does mean that this film is not exactly pleasant. There’s a lot of bad language, violence, screaming, and disturbing situations (thankfully the rape I was expecting doesn’t happen). I was originally just going to watch a few minutes just out of curiosity but I became mesmerized and even though it was hard to watch at times, I felt so emotionally connected with the characters (even the bad guys) I couldn’t stop and stayed up half the night watching it. If you’re at all interested in gritty crime drama, give this one a look. You might be as surprised me!

I vaguely remember the Muppets’ TV show, but I’m sure I only watched it a few times. When I first heard about this film I was the opposite of excited, feeling like it was just more retro-retread from unoriginal Hollywood. But it really is fun, feel-good nostalgia.

The film’s humor is very fourth-wall, self-referential type, the kind you either get and love or hate. Characters wink at the camera and talk about being in a movie. Some of the classics include things like “travel by map” (where an animated line on a map shows where the characters go).

Some of this humor takes time to adjust to, so that the first few minutes of the movie are a little flat and odd as you aren’t sure exactly what’s going on. Characters are deliberately stereotypical, people break out into song just like in a musical, and the self-awareness of people can be a little confusing (such as the hilarious bad guy, oil tycoon “Tex Richman,” who just says “Maniacal laugh” instead of doing it). But once you relax and just go with it, everything starts to click.

The plot is absurdly simple: the Muppets old studio is in danger of being torn down for an oil well so they must regroup and put on one last show to raise the $10 million needed. We get to track down all the old Muppets and find out what they’ve been doing (such as Fuzzy being part of a crude Muppets clone act in Las Vegas). The plot’s a little thin at times and I worried they wouldn’t have enough material for a whole movie, but somehow they managed. Things pick up once the telethon starts and that’s definitely the film’s best part. (Once they play that Muppet theme song, you really get into it.)

Speaking of music, there are some new numbers that are pretty good. I liked the “Everything is Perfect” song and “Man or Muppet” was the best filmed. (While I liked Amy Adams’ “Party of One” concept, the whole segment felt too much like filler.)

Overall, this was surprisingly enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of the Brady Bunch movie where the shtick was that the family was still stuck in ’70s mode even though it was the ’90s. In this case, the film acknowledges that the Muppets aren’t popular any more and don’t fit into today’s world… and then proceeds to prove that wrong. Great fun even if you’re the biggest Muppets fan.

Director: Woody Allen Writer: Woody Allen

I was just going to explore a few minutes of this out of mild curiosity, as the meandering plot about psychic predictions didn’t interest me very much, but to my surprise I got hooked early on and watched the whole thing. The story follows the lives of several interconnected people: an elderly couple breaking up, with him off seeking vitality in a younger woman and her going to a psychic for advice; and their daughter, who is married to a failed writer, with both of them being tempted by affairs. Naturally the writer’s story intrigued me the most, with his first novel having modest success but never being able to duplicate that and that failure causing marital problems. There was a degree of angry arguing that I didn’t like, but mostly the film switched stories nicely and kept things at a quirky, intriguing level.

Unfortunately, the film ends abruptly, literally with the narrator saying something like, “Okay, we’ve spent enough time with these people now.” Most of the stories still seemed unfinished and while that was intentional, it left me severely unsatisfied and frustrated. Mostly the whole thing seemed utterly pointless in the end. I believe that was the whole point and that’s clever in a way (pointing out the pointlessness of predicting life), but it doesn’t make the film pleasant or fulfilling. I liked it quite a bit until the end, then it fell off a cliff and I actively disliked it.

A surprisingly decent little crime drama about a former cop who now runs a crime-cleaning service. He gets set up to clean up a crime scene for an unreported murder, not realizing he’s erasing key evidence, and then he’s trying to figure out who did the crime. The pace is slow and the plot too predictable, but what I really liked was the relationship between the cleaner father and his teenage daughter. A more subdued role for the usually action-oriented Samuel L. Jackson and a nice change of pace. Worth a look if you keep your expectations modest.

I avoided this in the theaters because it sounded so bad and I was wise to do so. It’s a punny retelling of Romeo and Juliet with gnomes, and that one-joke premise is worn out in the first ten minutes. The whole movie is awkwardly set to Elton John songs, only one or two which actually fit the story. The rest feel bizarrely out-of-place and shoehorned into place. There are a handful of moments that genuinely work and it struck me that this would have been fine as a half-hour short or perhaps an hour-only TV special, but the much of the story is meaningless filler as the premise is stretched well past breaking. Best skipped.

Like many Adam Sandler movies this one is flawed but with a good heart. This is one of his better ones. Though the plot is obvious from a mile away — a lying plastic surgeon falls for a young woman and gets his assistant and her child to pretend to be his ex-wife and family to explain the fake wedding ring he uses to pick up women — the actual events are interesting and fun. The ending is telegraphed but still feels good. Pleasantly surprising and with an impressive cast.

I knew very little about this going into it as the trailers don’t reveal much. That’s fine, because it’s a hard story to explain without ruining it. All I knew was that it was about an orphan boy in a Paris train station in the 1930s and there something about a robot his father built. Well, it turned out his clockmaker father didn’t build the robot — only found it and repaired it — and it’s not a robot at all, but merely an automaton. Though the trailers made this feel like a story about magic, there is no magic here as everything is very grounded in reality. I liked that. The magic is in the story and the emotions of the characters, not in the events.

That story starts out as a troubled boy’s journey to discover a message from his late father and turns into a quest to help another human being. That, in turn, heals the boy. It is a wonderful, wonderful story.

That quest takes him and his friend back to the dawn of cinema, where we experience the wonder and magic of silent film. This is brilliantly done as we experience both wistful nostalgia and learn to appreciate the true miracle of the first moving pictures.

The ending is truly heartwarming, but the journey to get there is an amazing experience. This is a film and story all about the visuals, from intricate clockworks and the mechanical man to the grand Paris train station filled with dozens of fascinating characters.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the film were all the tiny side stories, the little love story between the fat man whose advanced are continually foiled by his love’s little yappy dog, and the seemingly evil crippled inspector too shy to meet the attractive flower seller. These stories take just seconds here and there throughout the film but they add such heart and context to the story, grounding everything in humanity, and yet enveloping the entire setting in a cloak of magic.

My vote for must-see film of the holidays. If you can only see one film this season, make it this one. A magical film the whole family will enjoy.

I avoided this in the theaters because it seemed so bad, but it wasn’t as terrible as I expected. It’s certainly not a very good movie. It’s strange and poorly done in countless ways, from B-level acting and directing to a silly and incomprehensible plot (something about a guy escaping Hell to come and rescue his kidnapped baby granddaughter before she’ll be murdered by a cult leader), but if you’re in the mood for a “no thinking allowed” movie, this could be your ticket. It’s just fun dumb action with pretty people and there are a few cool scenes that are worth seeing.

Author: Paolo Bacigalupi

This is a strange and fascinating book. While it’s beautifully written, it’s dark and depressing, with bad ends for just about every character. It’s science fiction set in a decrepit Thailand, in a future world devastated by food plagues that mean that calories are scarce. In this violent and unusual world, almost anything goes. There’s bribery and corruption everywhere, with everyone scheming on how to make a buck and get ahead.

Our characters include a Westerner, a “calorie man,” meaning that he works for a giant agrigen company that is seeking out disease-free seeds of fruits and plants that it can genetically modify and reproduce for world-wide distribution. There are also a couple of military people, an old Chinese man who is the foreman of the calorie man’s factory, and a genetically manufactured girl that is the source of the book’s title. She is “New People,” built and trained in Japan where her kind is accepted, but hated in Thailand where she lives in secret and where she’ll be destroyed on sight if anyone realizes she isn’t human.

The book has relatively little plot. While you’re reading it seems like much is happening — there’s political upheaval, a revolution being plotted, money-making and robbery scheme planned, escapes attempted and thwarted, and so on — but in the end nothing much has changed or happens.

I found much of the book confusing. Though I love science fiction and I thought the unusual Thailand setting interesting, the combination often left me baffled as to what was going on. There’s unfamiliar sci-fi technology as well as strange Thai customs and little of it is ever explained. (For instance, I never could figure out what the calorie man’s factory produced. They grew vats of algae but I have no idea what for.)

Some of the confusion happened because I listened to the audio book version: many times the narrator referred to “loading lamps with jewels” (apparently to charge them with power) which I thought was strange, and it was only much later I realized this meant “joules” as in units of energy.

The book is slow and ponderous, and while the writing is gorgeously descriptive, that sluggish pace, combined with baffling events, and the irredeemably depressing nature of the story, turned me off of the book. I did finish it, but man was I happy to be done!

Others may like it better than I did. It’s well-written and innovative, and the atmosphere and setting is certainly interesting. There were many individual scenes I thought were amazing. But endless descriptions of human filth, horrible violence and murders, vivid depictions of a ruthless world utterly without a conscience, and the hellish degradations forced on the titular character were just too depressing for me to enjoy much else about the book. It often left me feeling like I needed a shower or to go and look at something pretty just for the respite.