Limitless

Bradley Cooper is the new Matthew McConaughey. You heard it here first. Limitless was more or less Two For the Money with DeNiro and instead of Pacino. The predictability made me cringe - I had to stop watching because I already figured everything out. I realized this was only 45 minutes in and there might be more plot twists. There were. There were worse than I envisioned. Who gives movies like this and ending like that?

Knowing ( Movie, 2009 )

What a TERRIBLE movie. It was just such a giant let down. Cage goes through this whole predeterminaism vs randomness spiel, figures out all this stuff, and still the world explodes. It looks like his only purpose in the movie is to get his kid to the Pebble Meadow where the Noah's Ark aliens are hanging out. Except that the aliens kidnap the kids and bring them to the Pebble Meadow anyway. What was the whole point of Cage even being in the movie ?

What was the point of the movie ? There's no plot ark, there's no real tension or resolution. We could have just watched 3 days of Nick Cage's boring astrophysicist's life and then everyone get set on fire in the last 3 minutes of the film

At least The Day The Earth Stood Still had a point - stop polluting. Or maybe the point was that if we destroy New Jersey ( at least everything around the Meadowlands ), we'll be ok. What was the point here? Beware of solar flares ? Don't let creepy kids make time capsules ? Maybe this was just a massive sunscreen ad.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

The whole point of this movie was to wipe out New Jersey. That apparently made everything better.

It seems that this movie suggests that the 'drastic change' to our existing is going to be the lack of electricity / electronics. This will cause food shortages, starvation, riots, etc. How is that any better ?

RockNRolla

This movie made no sense. And not because it's a Guy Ritche british talking film. It just made no sense.

Street Kings

It's kind of like Training Day except it's not. I thought Training Day was a much better movie. However, the Hugh Laurie plot twist at the very end is a nice touch. It serves as sort of retribution for the predictability of the entire film.

The plot seems fairly typical of the cop movies, and very in line with what David Ayer has been writing for Dark Blue and S.W.A.T

Death Race

This movie was terrible.  Even as a senseless action movie it was still terrible.

I should reconsider my Netflix queue.

booooo.

Strange Wilderness

Grandma's Boy was hilarious. This was not.
Memorable quote:

[sic] "Here are the sea lions. They're getting out the water because of the sharks. Good thing there are no tigers on the rocks. Otherwise they wouldn't know what the f*ck to do"

Peter Dante was funny in this film. I liked him in Grandma's Boy more. Justin Long sucked as a stoner. Or as an actor. He should go back to Mac commericals.

5ive shows to watch on Netflix/Hulu

• Weeds Season 1&2
• Dexter
• Arrested Development
• Burn Notice
• Highlander
  

Gone Baby Gone

I'm a movie critic by no means but I felt this movies to be a little drawn out and little 'scattered' towards the end.

Some bad books and movies as of recent

Rant was just too boring and confusing for me to 'get into'. Maybe I'm just Palahniuk oversaturated. This lived under my bed for a month and went straight back to the NYPL. Some books just don't catch on.

Vanilla Sky was one of those movies that fell through the cracks and I never got a chance to see. Seems like I should have left it there.
In retrospect, the movie is split into real and imaginary halves by the events following the nightclub scene. Every 'present time' scene in the movie, as well as some flashbacks during the 'jail time' scenes occurs in a dream.
There are some enjoyable cinematic effects, such as the use of sets and color to distinguish between real flashbacks, real dreams, and the surrealistic dream reality of the present. The blurring of these events is also very enjoyable.
However, the great disappointment here is twofold: a shitty deus ex machina and a missed opportunity for a decent movie.

What seems to be strange surrealism turns into uncalled for science fiction. It felt like the writers couldn't come up with an explanation for what's going on so they thought up some corporation that would freeze people and let them dream whatever they wanted. There are subtle hints of this during the film (appearance of tech support, few anachronistic scenes) but overall I would have preferred a more plausible ending.
There was a great opportunity for a 'Fight Club' like jamais vu that would make the viewer reexamine every scene with a completely different idea of who is who, when and what. Instead, we're quickly clued into the fact that David is having what surmounts to a bad trip.

Other bad movies I will breifly mention:

My expectation for Dan In Real Life were pretty low, but this movie managed to outdo itself in the crap department. The only thing this movie was missing is a holiday theme to serve as a pivot point for the plot. Then I could have made my girlfriend watch Rambo: First Blood Part II instead.

The Reaping spiraled from interesting, to creepy, to scary, to creepy and scary and suddenly collapsed to ridiculous. Somewhere between the little girl jumping out of tree bark, scary houses and creepy southern towns this movie aquired a Satan worshiping death cult and a 12year old that wields lightning bolts. How and why did H.Swank decide to act in this ?