Bradley Cooper, you have a new fan. In the first blockbuster movie of your career that you were asked to carry, you knocked Limitless out of the park. So no longer will I reference you as “one of the guys from The Hangover.” After looking at your filmography, I’ll be the first to tell you that you’ve made terrible career choices, but maybe you were getting your feet wet. Maybe at the ripe age of 34, after eight years of meaningless roles in some of the awful movies of the last decade, including Failure to Launch, Valentine’s Day, Yes Man, Case 39, The A-Team, He’s Just Not That Into You, and, perhaps the cream of the crop, All About Steve, you’ll finally be recognized for what you potentially could bring to a movie. When I first saw the trailer for Limitless, I thought there would be no chance I would see it. But after reading some reviews about it, I added it to my Netflix queue and slowly watched it work to the top of my list.
Continue reading Limitless (2011)
Category Archives: Fantasy
The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
As I started watching The Adjustment Bureau, I was surprised to see it was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. I then spent the first ten minutes of the movie trying to think of all of the novels and short stories written by Dick that were made into movies. The list is massive and includes hits like (Minority Report, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly), misses like (Imposter, Next, Screamers), highly overrated movies (Total Recall), and highly underrated movies (Paycheck). I wouldn’t put The Adjustment Bureau in any of these categories. It was a moderate hit ($62 million domestically, $128 million worldwide) based on a $50 million budget. It earned a 72% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was more a hit than a miss, but it certainly was no Minority Report or Blade Runner. Another interesting fact about Dick was that for every movie/short story, he wrote that was made into a movie, he wrote 15-20 times as many that were not made into movies. Philip K. Dick was, in his day, to the science fiction genre what Stephen King is to the horror genre today.
Melancholia (2011)
After being thoroughly disappointed by Terrence Malick’s tone poem The Tree of Life, I was hesitant to watch Melancholia after watching its similar artistic trailer and hearing comparisons between the two movies. However, unlike The Tree of Life, which I went to see thinking would be a good movie, I decided to view Melancholia because some were calling it the best performance of Kirsten Dunst’s (Spiderman, The Virgin Suicides) career. While Dunst was deserving of the praise, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the experience of Melancholia.
Thor (2011)
I don’t know enough about the Thor story coming in, so there were parts of this movie when I wasn’t as confused as I was surprised. I saw Thor after seeing Captain America (even though Thor was released a few months ago). I liked the World War II storyline of Captain America. I also liked the mythology storyline of Thor. However, I was not a fan of the back and forth between and present day. I know that many probably liked this aspect of the movie, but I was so engrossed with the movie’s first 15 minutes that I didn’t want to leave this story to enter “the realm” of the present day.
The Green Mile (1999)
The Green Mile was Frank Darabont’s (The Mist, The Majestic) first movie following The Shawshank Redemption, a riveting prison movie that has found a permanent spot on many critics and movie fan’s top ten of all-time lists. The expectations were high for The Green Mile, if not altogether unrealistic. Like The Shawshank Redemption, this movie was set almost exclusively in prison. Like The Shawshank Redemption, this movie was based on a Stephen King novel. Like The Shawshank Redemption, this movie was set somewhere in middle America, reasonably close to the time frame of World War I, though neither of these movies ever really talks about any war. The Green Mile was set in 1932, while The Shawshank Redemption was set in 1946. The expectations for The Green Mile might have been unrealistic. I say this because of the reasons mentioned above, but also because it starred Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump, Philadelphia), Hollywood’s #1 leading man at the time, who was fresh off of receiving his 5th Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor after his performance in Saving Private Ryan. While The Green Mile is not as good as The Shawshank Redemption (my favorite film of all time, at the time of this review), it is still an incredible movie that everybody should see at least once.