While this site has grown to traffic several thousand pageviews a month expanding to people far beyond my circle of friends, I've never had in my mind that it would get "noticed."
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Notorious is far from top-notch Alfred Hitchcock, but, as myself and fellow members of the Alphabet Film Club noted: a bad Hitchcock film is still better than 90% of the other movies out there. I think that assurance rings true. Notorious is a tedious and nearly tiresome melodrama anchored by a Cary Grant character that's hard to like and an Ingrid Bergman character that's even worse.
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Premium Rush is a tightly packed and nicely paced little New York thriller. While the story is essentially a simple "beat the clock" scenario that maybe we've seen before, it offers decent twists to keep us guessing and clever plot-essential rewind flashbacks to provide exhale time and "ah-ha" wisdom of our characters' back-stories.
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Gabriel Byrne is in the driver's seat and takes through the many layers that make up this film. Through his crooked ethics (more on that later), we gain crooked ethics to a fun slice of American crime. While Miller's Crossing can't compete with Goodfellas from the same year, the silver medal is not a bad prize to have.
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If this is news to you and you've never seen (or heard of) Manhunter before, make it a point to seek it out. Because of Mann's presence as the director, don't buy the Miami Vice knockoff 80's talk that other folks try shoehorn. Michael Mann's film has far more balls than anything from his TV series and is better than Brett Ratner's Red Dragon remake of the same Thomas Harris novel from 2002.
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I was one of the six people who saw The Lookout back when it hit theaters in 2007. I was kind of "meh" about it then and wasn't a Joseph Gordon-Levitt fan. I haven't seen it since, so I was very happy to revisit it for the Alphabet Movie Club. I wasn't going to vote for it, but I wasn't sad that it won.
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To put my creativity to use and honor both the gods of education and beer, I've arranged three "honor roll six-packs" of the best college movies.
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The Bourne Legacy is more of a new chapter than it is a sequel or reboot. Think of it as if you're watching a new Star Wars movie from the point-of-view of the Storm Troopers in the background at the Death Star, but just really important ones.
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It goes without saying that any movie with Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep is going to be well-acted, but it bears repeating with Hope Springs. I was constantly amazed to watch both of these two perform the hell out of their roles as much when they weren't speaking as when they were.
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Because this entire story has already been told before, there are absolutely zero surprises in Total Recall.
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Let me just say this generality, right up front. I'm a man. I'm genetically programmed to enjoy movies built like The Killer. Guys like me love over-the-top and gaudy action to the point where we find ourselves imitating the action when we think no one is looking. Guys like me are the ones that still make silly pistols with sound effects out of our fingers and do martial arts moves spoken to tough guy movie quotes in the bathroom mirror.
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I’ll say it right now. I’m a big fan of Jackie Brown. It’s arguably Tarantino’s most approachable film and straightest story when compared to the dancing timelines of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and his Kill Bill pair.
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