Review: “Inception”

So this weekend we went to see “Inception”, the new trippy mind-bender from trippy-mind-bender-specializing director Christopher Nolan. If you think “Dark City” meets “Matrix” meets “What Dreams May Come” meets “The Spy Who Loved Me”, you won’t be far off. (But don’t think “Dreamscape”. Aside from involving dreams, the films are nothing alike.)

Review: “Cold Souls”

So this weekend we watched Cold Souls, a film about a company that specializes in removing and storing souls for people who find them burdensome. We picked this one because:

1. It features one of my wife’s favorite actors, Paul Giamatti, playing one of my wife’s favorite actors, Paul Giamatti (see The Illusionist).
2. It features my favorite magazine, The New Yorker.

Review: “Sunshine”

A few weeks ago we rented the movie “Sunshine“, in which a group of astronauts embark on a mission to fire a gigantic bomb into the sun (which is suffering from diminished output) to reignite it, and thus rescue Earth from the grip of an endless winter. (Sounds like one of Dennis‘s missions, doesn’t it?) There seems to be a lot of carping about the physics of this, as the sun isn’t scheduled to start dying for quite some time; in the back-story, which is not explained in the film, it is revealed that this is because the sun has captured a Q-Ball which is acting as a damper. I read the explanation and still don’t understand exactly what a Q-Ball is, so I’ve decided it’s something that Q uses when he’s shooting pool. But I digress.

Twoview: “Avatar” and “Food Inc.”

So in the last week we saw two movies, “Avatar” and “Food Inc.“. I decided to do capsule reviews of them together because they turn out to have a philosophy in common.

Review: “District 9″

So over the holiday last week, we watched the movie District 9. Originally my wife had declined to screen this film, but after hearing from several friends about how good it was, she agreed to go see it. I had also told her it was supposed to be good, but apparently, after suggesting she might like Hellboy because it was made by Guillermo del Toro (she is a huge fan of his Spanish-language movies like The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth), suggesting she might like Kung Fu Hustle because because it was “probably like a Jackie Chan movie”, and trying to convince her that Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a classic of 80s filmmaking, I lack credibility. Go figure.

Not A Review Of “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”

From the “I Don’t Think That’s How They Described It In The Pitch Meeting” department:

Review: “Resident Evil: Extinction”

So I finally got around to watching Resident Evil: Extinction on one of the free movie channels … and wow, I’m sure glad I didn’t pay any money to see it.  I thought the first Resident Evil was mediocre but watchable, and actually rather liked the second one.  The third one?  Not so much.

Rather than use my usual rating system of how soon it would put my wife to sleep (which would be:  Immediately if not sooner), I’m going to revert to the “Things I Learned From This Movie” format that I stole from badmovies.org and that I use occasionally.  Ready?  Let’s begin.

Video Game Preview Review: “Shadow Hearts: Covenant”

A few weeks ago, I posted a capsule review of the PS2 game “Shadow Hearts” and mentioned that I had the sequel queued up for my next game. I’ve got a few hours into the sequel now and while it’s too soon for an actual review, I would like to make a few comments about it:

The Early Years: “The Alien from the Planet Zorno”

Thanks to my parents’ ongoing efforts to clean junk out of their basement, I have been getting a steady stream of antediluvian scribblings (and typings). Here is a rather lengthy opus, most likely from when I was about ten, involving an alien saddled with a rather poor grasp of his own technology, not to mention a ridiculously hard to pronounce name.