Beowulf: If you thought The Polar Express was great but would have been better with graphic violence and cartoon nudity, then here’s the flick for you, guy who only exists in Robert Zemeckis’s mind.
30 Days of Night: This film tells the terrifying tale of a small-town in Alaska that’s forced to spend a month in the dark with Josh Hartnett. Fortunately, a group of merciful vampires comes along to put them out of their misery.
The Darjeeling Limited: Easily among the top-nine best Darjeeling-centric movies of 2007.
Gone Baby Gone: Ben Affleck directs Casey Affleck in this well-received drama that I can only assume was scored by Ulysses Affleck and catered by Geppetto Affleck.
Martian Child: If you loved K-Pax, then this one is for you, Mrs. Spacey.
We Own the Night: Probably the closest I’ll ever get to realizing my dream of watching Marky Mark of the Funky Bunch duet with Johnny Cash.
Now that we’ve all been eviscerated, decapitated, chopped, filleted, flayed, and riddled with bullets by Rambo, battle-weary moviegoers may be in desperate need for something a little more uplifting. While some may see the title “Son of Rambow” and immediately assume that Asylum is once again seeking to cash-in on the box-office of a major theatrical release, a closer look reveals that this film isn’t just another cheap knock-off, but a nostalgic coming of age comedy drama that actually uses the original Sylvester Stallone action classic First Blood as a springboard to explore such themes as faith, imagination, and friendship. Granted this concept may sound a bit too heady in black and white, but a closer look at the recently released trailer for Son of Rambow reveals that writer/director Garth Jennings may have in fact assembled all the ingredients necessary to whip up one of the year’s most quirky and endearing indie films.
It sounds like an interesting enough premise for a story: a young Japanese man is stifled by the pressure to excel in school, but scared to do noticeably better than his peers; he suffers from alienation amongst his friends, but he’s unequipped emotionally to talk about it with his family. One day, he just shuts himself in his room and stays there.
It’s the premise for the anime series Welcome to the NHK, which came out on DVD in the US in October, but the phenomenon is real. According to the New York Times, about a million Japanese people – mostly young men – are thought to suffer from hikikomori, a condition wherein the person holes up in their room and rarely or never comes out for years, or sometimes decades.
“No one calls Fred Claus the white Christmas movie. The Perfect Holiday is a movie about the holidays. It’s not race-specific. If there’s more than one black person in the movie, it’s an urban romantic comedy, an urban thriller - it’s just a flipping movie. The way kids think, the demographic they pander and chase - they don’t care. The same way guys are like, ‘Halle Berry’s hot, Jessica Alba’s hot’ - they don’t say, ‘She’s a hot black girl’ or ‘a hot Latina’. They notice trends, they buy movies they like, they Google people they like. It’s not race-specific… Give me a break. It’s an old-fashioned notion of marketing, and how they like to label things.”
I have to say, I think it’s interesting that Union is voicing a beef with the very idea of marketing a movie as race-specific, but she doesn’t even broach the issue of the word “urban” somehow equating “black” — even when a movie takes place in the cushiest of suburbs. She’s cutting right to the chase. I like it.
Bright, original, and ceaselessly entertaining, Juno is the best movie of its kind to come out in years. This is quite a feat considering that the 2000s has seen its share of funny but poignant comedy/dramas with lo-fi indie soundtracks, and most of them were really good. So it’s not as though Juno is satisfying and enjoyable just because it’s a breath of fresh air, or because it shuffles off the textbook constraints of the traditional comedy or drama. Movies like Thumbsucker and Me and You and Everyone We Know have already set the precedent for telling hearteningly unfiltered human stories with honesty and quirkiness. No, what Juno achieves goes above and beyond these exploits. Utilizing the groundwork laid by its predecessors, it handles subject matter that’s even slipperier, but it’s a hundred times more accessible. Juno strikes an impossibly perfect balance between biting wit, brutal honesty, and unapologetic optimism.
So how does a movie about a high school junior who gets pregnant by her best friend and decides to give her baby up for adoption come to be this intelligent, sweet, and thoroughly watchable? Maybe it’s alchemy. Many great movies reach their particular brand of excellence by way of that intangible chemistry between the actors and filmmakers that makes whatever they come up with so much greater than the sum of its parts. The only problem is that it’s hard to gauge just how big of a role chemistry plays in the greatness of a film when all the participants do their jobs perfectly.
Beowulf: If you thought The Polar Express was great but would have been better with graphic violence and cartoon nudity, then here’s the flick for you, guy who only exists in Robert Zemeckis’s mind.
Now that we’ve all been eviscerated, decapitated, chopped, filleted, flayed, and riddled with bullets by 
It sounds like an interesting enough premise for a story: a young Japanese man is stifled by the pressure to excel in school, but scared to do noticeably better than his peers; he suffers from alienation amongst his friends, but he’s unequipped emotionally to talk about it with his family. One day, he just shuts himself in his room and stays there.
Bright, original, and ceaselessly entertaining, 