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.
Continue reading The Adjustment Bureau (2011) →
The Debt is the second highly acclaimed Helen Mirren (The Last Station, Gosford Park) movie I watched last month. The first was The Queen, for which she won the Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role Academy Award. I had high expectations for The Queen and was disappointed by it. I found it boring and just not nearly as good as all the critics made it out to be. It also starred Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, Underworld), who I’m not the biggest fan of. I also had high expectations of The Debt, but they needed to be higher to see the movie in the theater. After watching it at home, seeing it on the big screen would not have been much different. The movie was a good movie that had a reasonably interesting (though not entirely believable) story that held my interest the entire time.
The most overlooked performance by a lead actor in 2011 was Michael Shannon’s performance as the delusional Curtis LaForche in the Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) bone-chilling drama Take Shelter. Though Shannon’s acting career began in 2001, and the first three movies he appeared in (Pearl Harbor, Vanilla Sky, and 8 Mile) each grossed over $100,000,000 at the box office, it wasn’t until 2008 when he earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor after two jaw-dropping scenes as a mentally unstable man in 
Despite its 37% rating on www.rottentomatoes.com, I found Terry George’s (Hotel Rwanda, The Boxer) to be a thrilling and captivating drama about the loss of family, moral responsibility, and the guilt a human being can become rattled with when committing an unthinkable crime that you become more and more confident that you are going to be able to get away with. While this movie did poorly at the box office (just over $100,000…no, not $100,000,000), it stars three Academy Award nominees, including Jennifer Connelly, who won Best Supporting Actress in 2002 for A Beautiful Mind.
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.