CREATION

(no pictures because at this point Guy had given up on me posting these and didn't download them for me to upload and I am much too lazy to do it for this movie)

Picture: Imagine a naked Paul Bettany getting dosed with cold water... Hot.

Guy’s review...

A movie about Charles Darwin and his family. I know it sounds like a real zzZZzzfest... and it actually really is. Hopefully people know enough about this guy so they don’t have to sit through this movie. Wow, this review really started on a bad note.

This movie is essentially about Darwin and his family and not that much about his book “The Origin of Species”. I know now that his daughter died of scarlet fever and that his wife thought that he would go to hell exploring his work in the origin of all living things. This movie is quite depressing. Paul Bettany plays Charles and Jennifer Connelly plays his wife. This is the first movie where this real life couple plays a couple on the big screen. I would have hoped that they could choose something cuter the next time around.

I recently watched “Amelia” which is a movie about Ameila Earhart who flew planes all around the world. I thought that was a boring movie about a pretty boring person. This movie isn’t as bad as that but it still made me wanna skip forward. I guess Paul wants a serious movie out there now that he is taking the action scene with “Legion” and “Priest”. Maybe he should stick to the box office.

Guy’s Rating: If you need a sleeping pill.

Girl’s non-review...

I barely watched it so it would be unfair to judge, but... I'm going to say Guy is absolutely wrong and this movie was brilliant.

Girl’s Rating: Should have won best picture.

AGORA

Guy’s short review...

Egypt 391 A.D.. Rachel Weisz plays Hypatia, the philosopher, who contemplates how the sun and other planets revolve around each other. Meanwhile the Christian faith is starting to get aniron grip in Italy and is slowly forcing the old faith off the map. A lot of death and horrible things happen which all leads to the death by stoning of Hypatia.

I find that I actually like movies about historical events like this. They are very interesting. Sure “Gladiator” was fun and all that but it might not have been completely true. Neither is this movie probably. When this movie started I thought it was gonna be a complete bore fest where people were gonna sit around a campfire talking about perfect circles and how the sun is the centre of the universe. I was very wrong when limbs and blood started flying all over the place.

This movie is about how we figured out how the universe worked and how some of the theories about life came to be. It was a time where people were encouraged to think large (Girl told me this). Too bad the Christians took over and decided that women with large minds and brains were witches and should be stoned and burned at a stake.

Guy’s Rating: Religion makes me angry.

Girl’s even shorter review...

Guy was asleep for most of this movie and I woke him up for the good parts.

He forgets to mention in his review, therefore, that a lot of this movie was talking heads, unrealized sexual tension (and therefore almost pointless), and huge jumps in story and time that made it all seem a bit tension free.

I also like period pieces, and I did study Greek and Roman mythology, touching upon Christian influences. Religion also makes me angry... which is the exact reason I did not exactly enjoy my time watching this film. It just made me angry.

Girl’s Rating: At least it illicited an emotional response.

DAYBREAKERS

Guy’s more vampires!

New vampire movie ideas should be a thing of the past by now considering how many movies about the fanged beasts are out there. With this movie it actually seems that we have a couple more years of good vampire movies to go.

So in this movie, the human race is about to die out. The reason: Vampires have taken over the planet and have fed on almost every human alive. The remaining humans are stored in factories and bleed for the vampire population. Edward Dalton (Hawke) works in a lab to develop a substitute for human blood, which is on the brink of running out. Tests show that if vampires starve they turn into something else, something uglier, hungrier and more vicious. Dalton is against the drinking of human blood and how the vampires are treating them. He’s on the verge of turning into a beast himself when

Lionel “Elvis” Cormac (Dafoe) contacts him. Elvis is a former vampire that has turned back to being human by the help of the sun. Dalton teams up with him to learn about the “cure” and bring back humanity,

The guys behind this movie are called The Speirig Brothers. They have made movie like “Undead” and “The Big Picture”. These movies have not reached huge audiences but you can really tell that they love filmmaking. The brothers do a lot of their own special effects, write and direct. This is an original idea that sets up for a franchise that feels fresh and exiting. Neil, Hawke and Dafoe are all great and it makes me look forward to the second movie.

Guy’s Rating: More vampires for the people!!!

Girl’s I guess it was OK...

I’ve never been a huge vampire fan. The one series I liked is Blade, and we all know where that ended up. Dead in the water after that meeeehhhhh third movie. Ryan Reynolds is hot.

This movie did have an original story line. It did have some good acting moments from Hawke, and it was entertaining almost from start to finish... But I wasn’t crazy about it. Dafoe as this character “Elvis” was awful. He was one of those annoying “badass” secondary characters unthought out and one-dimensional. The only interesting thing about him was the fact he had went from human to vampire to human again.

Sam Neil was just okay, too. A little more interesting than Dafoe with his weird daughter side story thing going on, which I thought they could have done more with, but there was nothing great there. Just the regular calculating, bigwig vampire we’ve seen throughout vampire movie history.

The woman, as well... Where was her backstory? We got a winery that her parent’s owned and a vive la resistance vibe from her, but other than that her character was lacking fleshy detail.

Girl’s Rating: To sum it up, a great premise that wasn’t fleshed out with interesting characters. I’m not recommending it.

CIRQUE DU FREAK: THE VAMPIRE'S ASSISTANT

Guy’s review...

I saw a trailer of this movie a while back and thought that this would be a poor attempt to start a new “Harry Potter” franchise. I love vampires and everything that comes with it so movies like this are my bread and butter.

This movie starts off with two friends. One is into vampires and one loves spiders. One night a flyer is handed to them inviting them to a traveling freakshow. They decide to go. Here they get to see the show of a lifetime with a Wolfman, man with two bellies, guy with no ribs, monkey-girl and a vampire who has a huge spider as a pet. Well our main character Darren loves the spider so much that he steals it. At school the spider escapes and bites his friend Steve who ends up in a coma. The vampire (C. Reilly) makes a deal with Darren to save his friend if he accepts being his assistant.

I’ve looked all over the internet to see if I could find any information if this movie is getting a sequel. I looked cause I actually liked this movie and would like to see them complete the series. It has some great effects, funny characters and a compelling storyline. It has a huge cast of stars that probably cost a lot so it might be hard to round them up again or something but I really hope and think that this could be profitable franchise.

Guy’s Rating: A really fun and interesting new franchise.

Girl’s ditto...

Basically I have the same things to say as Guy. Like him, I saw the trailer and it looked like a joke, an unfortunate joke with unfortunately good actors in it. When we sat down to watch it, we were expecting to shake our heads a lot, laugh in that way directors do not want you to laugh, and generally dislike everything we saw.

The acting wasn’t great, but the story was fun and entertaining, so it didn’t need to be. The evil guy, the penguin-look-a-like necromancer, was a fairly decent villian; however, his new side-kick is like X-Men’s Pyro all over again. Too bad, but the rest of the cast is memorable and I would definitely watch the sequel, if it is going to have one.

Girl’s Rating: Call me crazy, but I enjoyed it and would recommend it to those of us who can watch a movie just for fun.

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Guy's rant...

Terry Gilliam is at it again and this time he takes us inside of a mirror that shows you what your inner most imaginations look like. I’ve followed Gilliam’s career for some time and find that he’s consistently good. It also seems like bad fortune follows him around when it comes to his productions. Watching the documentary “Lost in La Mancha” we see how everything that can go wrong goes wrong as he tries to shoot “Don Quixote”. As we all know, in shooting this project the sad death of Heath Ledger happened.

Doctor Parnassus has a traveling “freakshow”... This movie is gonna be way too hard to explain. All you really need to know is that Parnassus made a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits). The deal consists of him getting eternal life but in return he has to give his first daughter when she turns 16 to the Devil. There’s a way he can get out of it and it is by retrieving five souls before the Devil does.

Here’s where the imaginarium comes in. Parnassus lures people in to a mirror were the visitor sees there innermost imaginations. In their imagination they get two choices, a good and a bad. If they choose good the soul goes to Parnassus, bad souls goes to the Devil. Well, Parnassus hasn’t done too good until he gets help from Tony (Heath Ledger) who he finds hanging from a rope under a bridge.

It feels like there were scenes missing in this movie. That’s understandable considering the main star died during the shoot. I do feel however that they got it together somewhat and turned the material they had into something good. The movie shows what a good actor Heath was and it will make you feel sad at his passing. It has a great array of characters and Gilliam is really a master of making his frames interesting.

Guy’s Rating: For what it’s worth this movie was good, weird, fun and a great memory of Heath Ledger.

Girl’s question mark...

I am also a huge Gilliam fan. I don’t think he makes consistently good movies, though. Blame it on the ill luck, or whatever, but sometimes Gilliam’s genius just isn’t received well by the public - maybe because we don’t get it.

Although this movie was interesting, some of the story line was so nonsensical it was hard to watch. There was so much happening sometimes, I felt like my eyes were hurting from not blinking in order to take it all in. This occurred mostly during the story telling scenes between father and daughter, and at the end when Tony finally shows his true colors.

Also, the whole background story on the character Tony seemed contrived, as though Gilliam had lost his edge on making interesting characters and instead had just gone with the money/loan shark/russian mobster deal. A tad boring in such an elaborate fantasy. Or maybe that wasn’t the story at all, but the scene with the ladders was worked in after Heath passed away, and they had to make due with it. Either way, I was a bit disappointed with Tony’s story.

Girl’s Rating: Sure, watch it because it’s Terry Gilliam, but I can’t guarantee you’ll like it.

THE BOX

Guy’s spinning review...

I’m starting to think that Richard Kelly just sits down and writes random sentences when he comes up with his scripts. This movie might not be as confusing as “Donnie Darko” but it has some weird element... very weird one.

So Cameron Diaz lives in a suburban neighborhood. Her husband works at NASA and she’s a teacher with one toe on her right foot. One day a man shows up at her front step with a box. In the box is a red button. The man tells her that if she pushes the button a person which she doesn’t know will die and in doing this she’ll make a million dollars. If not the button will be reprogrammed and given to someone else. She mauls this over with her husband and decides to press the button. She gets the money and after the button is removed from the house all shit breaks loose. Weird doorways though the universes are opened. People starts stalking the family with their mouths open. Apparently the button was designed to test humanity.

I was a big fan of “Donnie Darko” but this movie and his previous one “Southland Tales” makes me think that that accomplishment was just a weird fluke. I found myself enjoying this movie while watching it but now two days afterwards I think that it just annoyed me.

Guy’s Rating: Stick with “Donnie Darko”.

Girl’s blech!

Awful! So bad, it went past the “so bad it’s good” line to just the “so bad” area, again. I have no idea what anyone was thinking when they wanted to make this movie. They went wrong in a number of ways.

A premise like this should be shot in a manner that leaves a lot of questions left unanswered, in that slow, progressively both horrific and thrilling way. However, with two B actors, I guess they couldn’t expect them to perform half as well as would be needed to pull that off... So, they created a script and a film that was straight forward, left little to the imagination, and only had one or two good scenes (none of which had the leading characters in) that were of note.

There was nothing compelling about this story, save the premise. It’s too bad, because they could have made an interesting, fantastical horror movie with it, but they didn’t...

Oh! And every time that button was pushed, it was pushed by a woman! Seriously, stop pushing the Pandora thing. We did it once in mythology - that doesn’t mean we have to be the ones to do it every time.

Girl’s Rating: Boo! Two thumbs way way down, and David Kelly is a misogynist.

THE BLIND SIDE

Guy’s review...

This movie has gotten a lot of buzz during this year and ended up with a bunch of different nominations. I’ve never been a huge fan of Sandra Bullock but I have to give it to her that she had a pretty impressive year this year. Considering that she’s in a custody battle with pornchick Janine Lindemuller over her husbands kid. She still seems to be able to pull it together and bring home some moula.

“The Blind Side” is about a huge black kid called “Big Mike”. He starts in a school where he has no friends, the teachers (all except one) dislike him and he only has one T-shirt. Well, Sandra Bullock’s character, who’s a very wealthy woman, takes him in to her house where she clothes and feeds him. They figure out that he has some talent when it comes to blocking in football. He turns into a star and Sandra starts calling him her son.

I had some preconceived thoughts about this movie. Those thought were of the negative kind. I liked “The Proposal” for some weird reason but couldn’t see myself watching this movie. Well, it turns out that this movie wasn’t half-bad. Sandra’s acting was more than decent and the chemistry between the young son of the family and Mike was cute and kind of funny. The thing that surprised me the most was that the acting of Tim McGraw wasn’t awful.

Guy’s Rating: If you’re interested in the Oscars then watch this so you’re up on the nominees.

Girl’s review...

I also did not know what to expect from this film. The trailers were awful, to the point I was worried Sandra was throwing away her career... I guess I was wrong.

Despite the trailers, we watched it anyway. Not because we wanted to, but because we had to. There was Oscar buzz surrounding the film and Guy’s job required the watching of it. So, I reluctantly sat down in front of the TV and rolled my eyes doing so.

I wasn’t blown away. There were some God awful lines, and some unnecessary characters and sexual tension (maybe I was the only one to pick it up between Big Mike and the older daughter). Yet, all in all, I was also surprised by how much I had misjudged what the movie would be about by the trailers. See, in the teaser I saw, they included Sandra saying the two cheesiest lines in the movie “No, he is changing me.” and something along the lines of “Where is my son?” or whatnot, in that pinnacle moment for Sandra’s mother bear character. It was just too Disney to be Oscar worthy, but, again, that was just the teaser.

That Country singer wasn’t just not awful, he was pretty good at the one-note, doting husband of the power house mother character. Most of the time, those unthought out characters come off boring, but he brought some offbeat charm to the screen.

Big Mike did a good job of being big, acting stupid but not actually being stupid, and hitting things. His character could have used a bit more umph to support Sandra’s persona, but oh well, he is a football player after all!

Girl’s Rating: Although Sandra is the only thing worth watching in this movie, she does make the whole film worth watching. I guess that’s why she got the Oscar.