Review: Cars 2

Cars 2 is fun, funny, fast paced, and an exciting spy movie that improves upon the original Cars and has fun with the genre its playing in; while turning in some quality set pieces that a lot of action movies wish they had.

Check out my review of the Toy Story Toons short in front of Cars 2; Hawaiian Vacation.

The original Cars has grown on me every time I’ve seen it and while it’s still my least favorite Pixar film I still think it is quite a good little movie.  One thing I realized recently about Cars, don’t know why it took so long, is that it is almost without a plot.  Sure there is the race but it is just a character piece more or less and that realization even furthered my enjoyment of the original film.  And it wasn’t till we got to Radiator Springs in Cars 2 that I realized how much I liked and missed these characters and their stories.  I honestly think I would have enjoyed Cars 2 had it just been another nice and easy character piece in Radiator Springs and this sequel made me retroactively appreciate Cars even more for its great character work.

People that were affected, consciously or not, by Cars lack of plot will have no issues here as Cars 2 is full of it.  [Read more...]

A Serious Analysis


First things first, if you haven’t seen A Serious Man, I would recommend watching it before reading this.  If you don’t follow my advice, don’t get mad at me when I tell you that Bruce Willis was a ghost…I’ve said too much…

After I finished watching A Serious Man last year, I was stunned.  It was late, I was tired, and although I enjoyed the film I was too confused by the ending and the lack of a resolution to form an opinion.  I drove home in a daze and went to sleep not thinking about the film.  Then something happened to me which I had never experienced before.  I woke up in the middle of the night, and I had pieced everything together.  Suddenly the ending made sense and the film had purpose.  I am a secular ‘Goy’ but I still don’t know how it took me so long to see that A Serious Man was a retelling of the story of Job.

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Review: Hereafter

Clint Eastwood’s latest bests his last couple efforts but for every thing I like about Hereafter there is almost always something that really grates me the wrong way.

The film follows three thread lines of different people that have had a recent connection with death and/or the “hereafter.”  One is a French reporter who has a near death experience in a tsunami, a pair of twins in England that run into family tragedy, and an ex-psychic in San Francisco who is trying to reconnect with the real world.  The reporter is trying to understand what she experienced, the twins are trying to connect, and the psychic is attempting to leave the world of the “hereafter” behind. All these threads serve as fairly interesting character studies but they never blend together all that well.  The characters are obviously disjointed and unconnected to one another and you are left to watch them move parallel through life.

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Review: A Serious Man

The Coen brothers annual entry, A Serious Man, is their oddest film since Barton Fink and for all the thought provoking twists and turns that may befuddle, it remains a funny and often hilariously sad portrait of a man trying to find himself.
Setting you up for something different from the get go, we dive into a scene between a European Jewish wife and her husband, presumably sometime one to two hundred years before the films setting of 1967, as the bicker over a chance encounter the husband had with a man that has been presumed dead for sometime by the wife. Jump ahead to our main characters, Larry Gopnik and Danny Gopnik, inter-cutting between a pair of events that fill come full circle and not without consequence. The film from here follows Larry primarily with diversions into Danny’s life in the final days leading up to his bar mitzvah. What entails though is a strange, random, yet lightly intertwined series of events filled with black humor and many an existential consequence.
The direction and writing from the Coen brothers is as sharp as ever as this very different film would clearly come undone in less skillful hands. [Read more...]

Review: The Grand

This poker mockumentary from Zak Penn is funny and excellent addition to this sub-genre of films that there needs to be more of.
Woody Harrelson is the closet to a lead as “One Eyed” Jack Faro in this ensemble piece about a poker tournament, “The Grand”, with a few million dollars at stake that will let Faro save his family’s casino which he wrote away the deeds to during his drunken/drugged/and sex riddled time of his life. Faro is on the tail end of another rehab stint as he comes back to Vegas to compete against 6 likely competitors. [Read more...]