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You know why all the critics are raving about this new horror flick from the wonderful Sam Raimi? Because they’ve been subjected to a decade of horror movies that are nothing more than torture porn or pointlessly grim adaptations of Japanese ghost stories. So imagine their relief when Sam takes a step back from his polished, blockbuster, big-budget Spider Man movies and returns to his clever, cult-horror roots and delivers a good, old-fashioned, creepy drive-in movie like the ones you used to take a girlfriend to so you could chuckle as she jumped, shrieked and clawed your arm!  (Not that you won’t be jumping too!)

And what could be more horrific than today’s banking and mortgage crisis?  Try — foreclosing on a crazy gypsy woman, who puts a curse on you and sends demonic powers to drag you to hell! Talk about an economic stimulus!

There is even a bit of heart and morality in the story reminding me of classic short stories like The Monkey’s Paw and other campfire scares.  You know bad things are going to happen. And that makes the quiet moments the scariest. And Allison Lohman does a great job of making you sympathize with her, understand her, and root for her as she desperately seeks to fight back.

While this lacked the gonzo craziness of Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy (and I kept waiting for Bruce Campbell to make a cameo), there is still enough fun and excess to elicits shrieks, giggles, goosebumps, and make you jump clear out of your seat.

So am I giving this the many thumbs up all the other critics are?  Naw…. I think my expectations ran a bit too high.  But this was still a fun time in the movies — the first horror film I’ve seen in ages that filled me with the glee I remember from films like ReAnimator, Private Parts, Dawn of the Dead, and others from the heydey of American horror.   So I’ll withhold my thumbs for something a little more groundbreaking, but happily give this a juicy jar of eyeballs and a big, “you got me” grin like the one I was wearing when the credits rolled.

Just last week I was opining at the death of exposition and the general sorry state of what passes for a screenplay these days (see my less than thrilled reviews of Terminator Salvation and the hugely disappointing Monsters vs Aliens).  And then along comes Pixar to restore my faith in craft, character, storytelling, and well — filmmaking in general — talk about Salvation!

Up is everything one could want in a movie. It is charming, surprising, touching, and often stunningly beautiful to look at (with the most subtle and integrated use of 3-D yet in a movie).  It’s also laugh out loud funny –  with laughs genuinely earned through character and situation — not Dreamworks-style wise-cracking wink-wink in-jokes. And the movie is often thrilling!  Did I mention it was thrilling?

God bless whoever marketed this film for not showing us almost any of the plot and thereby allowing the film to reveal its surprises in real time (instead of wringing the movie dry for the sake of the trailer.) And it IS surprising. The ‘concept’ made me think we were going to see sort of an Around the World in 80 days style adventure. But the writers actually have a theme they are invested in. This is not a film built around its spectacle — it has a warm, beating heart. The spectacle (of which there is plenty) is gravy! You’ll get no spoilers from me here.

And by the way — how often do you get to see a ‘blockbuster” these days about aging, longing, and lost dreams? Did it really take a “kid’s movie” to have the courage to focus a film around the regrets and loneliness of a 78-year-old man? I can imagine the studios tearing out their hair at a pitch meeting for this if Pixar wasn’t considered bullet-proof.   And guess what? Despite its central theme, the kids in the theatre loved this film. This IS a film for ALL ages.

A success by any measure – Up is one of the best films of this year – and perhaps the finest film yet by the amazing folks at Pixar.

Mike Leigh is not so-much interested in plot (he doesn’t actually use a script in the traditional sense) as he is in character — so it’s no surprise that Poppy, (played with wonderful charm and depth by Sally Hawkins), is a character quite unlike what we’re used to seeing in movies. Open, accessible, vulnerable, prankish, impish and yet filled with compassion, she’s the “Happy Go Lucky” of the film’s title — and yet the film raises the bigger question of why there is so much anger and unhappiness in the world. This is not a film for the impatient — but its one with indelible moments that make it quite worthwhile. Don’t let the struggle to get used to the British dialects in the first 20 minutes or so put you off — this is a lovely little film.

Liam Neeson eschews art and goes for the throat in this formulaic, efficient Luc Besson thriller and surprise box office smash that’s taken in $144k domestic and 220k worldwide. This is not a moody kidnapping film — this is daddy’s coming to save you Bourne style!

Retired government agent Bryan Mills gets motivated real quickly when his beloved daughter is abducted in Paris.  Not even taking the time to give a much-needed “I told you so” to his bitch-of-an-ex-wife, he moves quickly (the whole movie is 92 waste-not-a-moment minutes) and begins kicking serious Albanian, Arab and French ass! This is an American who hasn’t got time for the subtleties of water-boarding! He gets the job done with fast and furious Nagasu Do fighting, outruns cars and boats, and takes no prisoners!  Charles Bronson lives again!  Don’t mess with America you euro-arabic trash!

Full Disclosure: I have in fact seen Terminator, Terminator 2, and Terminator 3. I did not however, realize I needed to bone up on terminator history before going to see Terminator 4 (excuse me, Terminator Salvation). My memory not being what it used to be, here’s what I was able to figure out while watching this latest Terminator Movie. (Warning: Spoilers galore… not that it necessarily matters).

In the not-so-distant future — a scant 8 years from now, so folks, be careful! — computers will have become self-aware, and movies will no longer have exposition.  I did remembered John Connor was an important freedom fighter in the resistance against the machines in 2018, but I did not quite recall how Kyle Reese, who appeared to be about 20 years younger than John Conner, became John’s father. I seem to recall vaguely this has to do with time travel in some way because I DO remember that Arnold the Terminator was an evil machine from the future in the first movie, and a good machine in the second movie, and I think the third, so I’m sure this is kind of like Lost and your father can come from the future as a young man and all that. Different actors have played all these characters so please cut me some slack for losing track.

This movie also has Markus, a convicted murderer from 2003 (so of course, he’s the noble good guy in the film), who was rebuilt into a cyborg by Helen Bonham Carter who may have been a human, or might have been a manifestation of Skynet, the self-aware computer, except she was dying of cancer in 2003 so why would she be building infiltrator cyborgs?  And what was Markus doing between his execution in 2003 and 2018? Maybe this is like Wolverine, and the answer will be a future story line, where we get to find out the past he never knew.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m not sure where Sarah Connor was or remember whatever happened to her (I assume she died in one of the earlier films? — but I also recall she was on a TV show on Fox for a while, wasn’t she?)  Bottom line: you need to get the Terminator chronology and points down before seeing this flick because you’re not going to get any answers here.

But let’s take the movie’s tack. forget backstory and cut to the chase. This movie has robots.  LOTs of robots. There are humanoid robots that with steel faces and muscles.  There are robots that have flesh and look human.  There’s a robot that looks like Arnold from the first three movies, except this is a bad Arnold, not a good Arnold and he doesn’t speak with an Austrian accent.  I’m not sure if he was the original Arnold robot or a clone of the model but he’s naked like in the first movie – cause they can afford flesh but not clothes, right? There are also giant robots that snatch up humans like steam shovels and shoot death rays and missiles. There are robots that look like motorcycles and drive fast. There are robots that look like jet planes and hovering spacecrafts. For a while I thought I had mistakenly wandered into a preview of the Transformers sequel coming later this summer. In fact, it was as loud as any Michael Bay movie and had a competitive arsenal of explosions, fireballs, and bullets.  Was this a McBay movie? And why, with all this technology and flying robots — are they still using bullets?  But I digress.

Is it possible that there can be too many robots in one movie? I adore robots, but I was at a loss as to why Skynet was making so many brands and sizes. I also had no idea why sometimes the robots killed people outright and sometimes they rounded them up and imprisoned them like in the holocaust. Surely an intelligence like Skynet had some good rationale, but perhaps that is being kept secret for a future film.  Or maybe its just cooler to have variety in robots.  I DID wonder at the absence of the ultra-cool robot from T2 that could turn to liquid and had spears for arms when it wanted to, but maybe that’s a more future robot than the machines in this movie, and hasn’t been invented yet and couldn’t be in this movie unless it could come from the future, which come to think of it, it could have, right?  And wouldn’t that have helped the evil robots win here? Hey!  Maybe I’m smarter than Skynet!

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that in the future anyone with a sense of humor has been killed, leaving only grim, warrior-types. And, was judgment day an earlier event (and how long ago?) or did it have something to do with the mushroom cloud Connor sees in the opening sequence which mostly had the effect of removing the color palette from film stock leaving the world kind of sepia-brownish, except for occasional cool flashes of red robot eyes.  This latter mushroom cloud seems to have  killed everyone in the area except John Connor who survived, I guess, because he was in a helicopter. What was skynet’s plan here again? What happened on judgment day?  Was that the day when the world starting looking like Mad Max? It’s possible someone explained some of this, but both John Connor and Marcus spoke in low growls the whole time – so I had a hard time understanding what they were saying.

I should mention I was also confused by a little, scared, mute girl character with big hair and a sweet smile who I seem to recall was with Sigourney Weaver in one of the alien movies… one of which was by James Cameron who did some of these Terminator movies — so I’m sure there is some sort of connection here, right? OK… just kidding… but it did seem very similar!

Don’t get me wrong – I greatly enjoyed all these other films, and especially love movies with robots and self-aware, sinister computers like Hal in 2001 and that wonderful little 1970 sci-fi pic, Colossus: The Forbin Project, which has far less bullets and explosions — but I’m digressing again.

I guess I’m just an old fuddy-duddy who didn’t realize he needed to take a remedial course in terminator history before going to this movie, expecting to have plot points like in the old days when story and character development were at least part of what a movie was about. And perhaps we might be let in on exactly what Skynet was intending to do and why – would that be asking too much?

By the way, I have no idea what Salvation the title was referring to. Was “salvation” in the form of the cyborg from the past that appears in the future since he kind of saved the day?  Was he a terminator too?  I don’t think so — Skynet specifically said he was an infiltrator.  Ok — then was salvation referring to John Conner?  But he’s not a terminator either, right?  Maybe this and other issues will become clearer in Terminator Five, Salvation strikes back or whatever they call that one.

Oh well:  cool robots, big explosions, awesome fireballs, fast editing (is there any other kind these days?) — Pass the popcorn!

This may be the most fascinating and mind-boggling  thing to appear on the Internet since Google redefined Internet search. Just as we had no idea when it first launched how central to life Google would eventually become, this is another of those things where its potential importance could be easily overlooked.

Wolfram Alpha is a project still in its infancy, with the fairly humble goal of making all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. Tbeir goal is to make whatever is to make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Note the term “whatever can be computed”.  They are attempting to redefine what it is that people choose to compute. So many thing around us have data associated with it. We just don’t think of, for example, a person’s name as a point of data — but it is. Music is mathematical. Movies, theatre, music, and popular culture are vast systems of information (think of box office numbers, grade reading levels, musical theory, etc.)  Here’s a site that treats EVERYTHING as data and delivers information you hadn’t even thought about discovering. Unlike Google which brings what is KNOWN to you from sources that know it — Wolfram Alpha is figuring stuff out. It is inventing new information by comparing things that are known. At least I THINK that’s what its doing.

Watch the screencast here to see what this about and be prepared to think about knowledge retrieval in a new light. The possibilities here are somewhat staggering — and it’ll take a long time to fully grasp the potential of retrieving information like this. I’m Bookmarking this site with a capital B.  The site itself, by the way, is the relatively difficult to remember: wolframalpha.com

I’m really going to have to shift my inner paradigm to figure out all the ways this could be useful to everything I’m working on. Going to be VERY interesting to see if this becomes an essential building block of culture and knowledge. Wow!

An unexpected surprise. My hat is off to J. J. Abrams and his writers for pulling off a near-impossible feat — breathing new life into a long-moribund franchise – and the legerdemain with which they melded the style, tradition and flavors of the beloved original, while energizing it at warp speed to today’s digital fast-edit pacing.

Seriously – this film had rubber-faced aliens, sexy babes with primary-colored skin, and silly-looking monsters and yet they fit and blended with the hi-tech revamps and cgi.  The story moved with great pace, the winks and nods to the Star Trek heritage were enjoyable, and it worked as an exciting action picture AND a character piece. The movie was at times suspenseful, at times classic sci-fi, and at all times great fun. Thankfully it did not take itself too seriously.

This isn’t serious sci-fi – but, as the original it’s “Wagon Train in Space”, but with all that modern movie-making go through into the mix. Sort of “Star Trek Fast and Furious.”    Everything a summer blockbuster should be.

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Every dollar that is put into the volunteer sector translates into many dollars worth of volunteer impact.  So vote early and often!  Thanks!

Love monsters. Love Aliens. Love animation. Love 50s sci-fi flicks. Loved the trailer for this high-concept 3D animated movie.  Now, if only I hadn’t wasted my time with the other 85 minutes of this disappointing reminder that Dreamworks doesn’t exert any energy on a script or characters. Celebrity voices can do nothing to rescue bad dialog, banal plotting, and unfunny jokes. I did not laugh once. I was not thrilled nor chilled for even a fleeting moment — even though it was a movie with robots and giant eyeballs (I have a fondness for both!)

I will say the 3-D environments were terrific – the camera moves and crowd designs were all impressive and visually appealing. I was not however at all impressed by the doll-like faces of the human characters with their big, barbie-like eyes. The voices didn’t seem well integrated with their faces, which made the performances seem detached from the characters…  (other than Bob the Blob who had no mouth to synch!)  How could anyone make Hugh Laurie so unfunny and uninteresting?  Guess I’ll have to wait for Pixar’s “Up” to see the potential that can exist with animated 3-D in the hands of artists who believe a script is the most important element in an animated film.

This smart, complex French Thriller (“Ne le dis à personne”) was released in France in 2006, but did not get even a limited release in the U.S. until 2008. No wonder.  It’s complicated. Difficult. Fascinating. And it makes you think. Recommended for those who like things Hitchcockian and aren’t afraid to read French subtitles. You’ve really got to watch to keep up with the many characters and complex web of lies and relationships that surround  the mysterious murder of a man’s wife eight years ago that resurface when new murders reopen the police investigation. Some terrific little action sequences that benefit greatly from their human scale. I cringed and jumped more at this man crossing the French Beltway in traffic than from any fireball or atomic explosion I’ve seen in films in ages. And a truly scary female baddy that you don’t want to meet in a dark alley!   Just out on DVD.