a) Paranormal Activity 2
Last weekend was my wife's birthday and we got a babysitter and went out to the movies for I think only the 2nd time since our son was born. There were a few different movies we thought about seeing, but ultimately when we got done with dinner, the one that was playing soonest was this, and we just kind of went with that even though we hadn't seen the first Paranormal Activity. As the movie started, I got a creeping sense that may have been a mistake, since the family in the movie has a son that's just a little older than our kid, and watching a baby in peril is maybe not the best way to spend a night out when you're trying to enjoy yourself and think about your own kid at home. But thankfully neither of us freaked out and we ended up enjoying the movie. It was definitely well done and I feel like this newer generation of mockumentary horror movies has learned from Blair Witch's mistakes and they're better at making the characters seem realistic and likable.

b) When In Rome
The post-"Veronica Mars" movie career of Kristen Bell is starting to feel like one mild disappointment after another, considering that she only got a chance to be funny a couple times in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and that's probably the best flick she's been in. This one is pretty goofy and just visually is one of the worst-looking modern mainstream movies I've ever seen, I'm not sure what was up with the way they shot it. There are a couple of big laughs in it but for the most part it's a cast full of people who've done better and should know better.

c) The Vicious Kind
Since I'm generally most familiar with Adam Scott doing comedy in stuff like "Party Down" and Step Brothers, it was interesting to see him grow a beard and do this kind of serious role in kind of a dark movie like this. I wasn't crazy about the whole thing, the plot unfolded in a way that was kind of predictable, but there were some little moments where he got to be funny that cracked me up and gave the whole thing a little bit more character.

d) Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs
This was pretty good and very visually well done, easily one of my favorite non-Pixar computer animation features to date.

e) The Brothers Bloom
I wasn't the biggest fan of Rian Johnson's debut feature, the neo-noir Brick, but I thought he definitely had some potential and I also enjoyed the episode of "Terriers" he recently directed. So this is kind of a huge disappointment in the sense that with one movie Johnson goes from being a promising new voice to just another young filmmaker who cops all his moves from Wes Anderson. There are some moments when this is more charming than cloying, but not many.

f) Fanboys
Another entry in the underwhelming film career of Kristen Bell, although she's not in this much and doesn't deserve much blame. It was mostly just kind of stale and full of really tired nerd comedy signifiers, and did very little of interest with the premise, and ended on a really blah note. Also Seth Rogen's dual role thing is just embarrassing.

g) Dune
I'm still slowly working my way through David Lynch's body of work and trying to figure out if I'm really a Lynch fan or just like Eraserhead. And obviously this is kind of a divisive one and not a good one to judge him by, but I still wanted to see it, though I'd attempted to read the book as a kid and just never got through it. Visually there's some great stuff here, it's fun to see him work with a big budget back in the '80s when sci-fi movies still had to get kind of creative with their aesthetics and there wasn't a lot of established ideas about how space movies should look yet.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 30, 2010 at 11:14 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.