Review: Johnny English Reborn

My claim to shame is that I am one of the few people to have watched the original "Johnny English" in the cinema though it wasn’t by choice.  Under the duress of direct questioning you might get me to admit that there were a few funny (albeit completely asinine) scenes between Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English and Ben Miller’s Bough.  Fast forward to the present day: when the opportunity to watch "Johnny English Reborn" free...

Read More

Review: Paranormal Activity 3

There are some things that never get old – like pizza and Seinfeld reruns, and then there are some things that just won’t go away – like American Pie sequels and Occupy Wall Street protestors.  Well, despite the hype, I am sad to report that "Paranormal Activity 3" moves the incredibly profitable franchise further from the former and dangerously close to the latter.  This is a no easy fete when you consider that this is the same genre...

Read More

Review: Scream 4

I was walking out of a grocery store the other day when I saw, tucked away in the corner of the parking lot, a hunter green 1993 Mazda MX-6 – the make, model, and color of my youth.  I hadn’t seen one in years so a flood of great memories flooded my mind.  A funny thing happened as I walked across the lot. The longer I looked at the car under the unforgiving midday sunlight, the more I wondered what it was about the car that I thought...

Read More

Review: Bad Teacher

Bad Teacher was a movie set up for me to hate.  I am not a Cameron Diaz fan, and not a fan of Justin Timberlake either.  I am a fan of Jason Segel but he doesn’t play as much of a role in the film as the trailers for its theatrical release would have had you believe.  With all this being said, I actually enjoyed this movie a lot.  It is not because the script was incredibly well written or because the cinematography...

Read More

Review: Moneyball

I had fairly low expectations for Moneyball when the trailer was first released.  The buzz on the film was that the source material – Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis – would not lend itself to compelling theater and that the only reason this film was greenlit was because it became Brad Pitt’s pet project. As an avid baseball fan with a recollection of the season that the film centers on, I found the...

Read More

Review: What's Your Number?

What’s Your Number? is a predictable mix of sarcasm, physical comedy, and awkward nudity that has become the staple of romantic comedies for mature (and immature) audiences.  Yet despite the fact that you know exactly where Anna Faris’ character is going to be when things fade to black and the closing credits start to roll, the movie is an entertaining romp through the personal past of Faris’ Ally Darling.  Faris...

Read More

Review: The Ides of March

With a cast that includes Paul Giamatti, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, George Clooney, and current it-boy Ryan Gosling, it isn’t hard to figure out why the buzz for Clooney’s latest directorial effort was so positive.  But I have to go against the grain here and echo what Shakespeare (or not if you believe the nonsense in Emmerich’s forthcoming film) once wrote in Julius Caesar,  “beware the Ides of March.”  It may...

Read More