Movies... More of Them

Well, here's the latest batch of movies I watched. See all of my 2007 reviews here.

1408 (7.5/10): The overall tone and execution of this film were both wonderful and dark, but in the end I failed to pull in any connections between all of the different "horrors" that John Cusak's character experiences and their importance to the character. Since this was billed as a psychological horror film, I expected there to be something to connect all the pieces and make the movie more than just a haunted house flick, but there really wasn't. Regardless, it was still a good movie that is head and shoulders above all of the lame torture porn movies rampaging through theaters.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (5.5/10): Having only seen the first Harry Potter movie (and hating it), going in to this film I found that it was hard to know why anyone was doing anything. Sure, I picked up the gist of this movie's storyline, but having not been entrenched in the Potter world I found I could care less about any of the characters since I didn't understand any of the underlying motives. Other than that, it was a decent fantasy flick with some notably terrible acting from the child actors. I'm sure Potter fans loved it. I didn't.

The Simpsons: The Movie (9/10): This is the real deal. Having been disappointed with the show for the last few years, my expectations were quite tempered, however, this ended up being extremely gut busting funny in classic Simpsons style. There are a number of new quotable lines that you can expect to be filtering into everyday vernacular, most notably the "Spider-Pig" lines. So far this is probably the funniest movie I've seen this year.

A Mighty Wind (7/10): Christopher Guest, the king of mockumentaries, puts together a film chronicling the reuniting of folk music's legends. It's decently funny, but lacks the amount of laugh out loud moments that Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman had. In fact, parts of the movie feel strangely like an actual documentary in that they lack the over the top nature that made Guest's other mockumentaries so fabulous. It is still a solid movie, just not as funny as I would have expected.

This Film is Not Yet Rated (8/10): I'm sure everyone has, at times, questioned why a certain movie received the rating it did. I do quite often. I also find myself wondering why it only takes a slip of a nipple to make something R, when it takes at least a bloody double-digit body count to get an R rating if there are no nipples or f-bomb dropping. It was quite interesting to see how closed off and out of touch the MPAA really is, but on the other hand, the investigative method used (hiring a horribly annoying private investigator) was often very amateur. If the PI sections of this documentary were left out and more focus was given to the secretive, cultish behavior of the MPAA it could have been a perfect 10.

Brick (8/10): I may be in the minority, but I loved this movie. Not so much because it was a cinematic masterpiece, but because it was a wonderful throwback to noir movies of ages past. This is, essentially, a film noir movie as portrayed in a modern high school. For anyone who doesn't view the movie as an homage, it will no doubt seem boring, cliched, and overacted. Viewed as an homage, it is a clever movie that takes the well established noir archetypes and injects them into a modern high school setting.