Davis Freeberg's DVD AllStars

I wouldn't consider this one of the best movies about technology, but it was still pretty good.  Sandra Bullock plays a character who ends up sideways with a shadowy government and ends up having her identity stolen in a big way.  While the plot is fairly predictable and the acting is a little on the weak side, the fast pace action makes it easy to look past it's flaws.  The key to enjoying the film is to not take it too seriously.  Not recommended for those of you who've had your credit hijacked by Nigerian scammers.

I was never really all that interested in seeing Chinatown until Netflix recommended it to me as something I would like.  After recording the movie on my TiVo, I went to watch it, but immedietely I saw it was a Roman Polanski film.

Polanski is a bit of a controversial figure for me because he's been accused of doing some pretty bad stuff.  In the past I've intentionally refused to see his films, so when I went to watch the film and saw it was a Polanski film I almost turned it off.

Like most of the Polanski films I've seen, the movie was great.  The character development was especially well done.  The storyline gripping.  During the entire film, I couldn't bring myself to turn it off.  

Like most of the Polanski films I've seen, it also included some pretty weird stuff, including a character who had an incestuous relationship with her father.  

While overall, the film is very well done, it was depressing for me to see such a great movie made by such a morally questionable man.  Perhaps I should be judging each film based on the quality of it's work, but I can't help but feel a little guilty that I may have helped to support someone who is still considered on the lam.  

If the moral objections don't bother you, then my advice is to check it out, but personally, I wish I would have stuck with my ethics and avoided this one, even though it turned out to be one of the better films that I've seen over the last year.

After being a little disappointed with the first film of this franchise, I came in with low expectations for this film, but was pleasantly surprised at how great this film turned out to be.  Filmed nearly a decade after the original Night of the Living Dead, the Dawn of The Dead takes up where the last one left off.  Being made a generation later really added a lot to the film.  It's images are more disturbing, the plot more engaging and the film more sophisticated.

Unlike the first film that took place pretty much in a farm house, this film takes place at a mall populated by a group of bandits and a gazillion zombies that want to eat their flesh.  The film takes the viewer from the first week of the zombie uprising to several months later.

One of the things I really enjoyed about the film was the fact that it was made in the 1970's.  While there wasn't any references to disco, the culture of the 70's really came through on the film.  I also liked that Romero left the ending of the film more open ended for his follow up film a decade later.  Overall, I felt like this was a stronger film in the franchise.

I was a big fan of the Interview with the Vampire movie and actually read the book Queen of the Damned before seeing the film.  I think that the whole franchise is pretty good, but they didn't do a very good job with the film.  Anne Rice does a good job of using Queen of the Damned to help continue the story of Lestat's life after Interview, but they went cheapo on the sequel and instead of hiring Tom Cruise had another actor play Lestat.  There were also a lot of holes that never got filled in from the first movie.  Overall, the movie was entertaining and a good way to spend 2 hours, but it really didn't have the same bite that the first one had.

It's hard for me to look at movies seperately when they are sequels.  I always want to see the all picture and tend to judge the whoe franchise by it's overall quality.  Normally, I won't see a film, if I'm not prepared to see it's sequel too, but for this pair of dark comedies, my advice is check out The Whole Nine Yards, but skip the tenth yard.

The first movie is dark, witty, very funny.  A lot of sophisticated humor mixed in with it's moments of slapstick.  The second movie is just as dark and at times witty, but the plot makes no sense and it fails at ever being funny.  This is a case of sequels gone bad.  The first one made so much money, that they had to jump in and try to make too much out of it.  In the end the sequel has the same cast of characters, but it feels much more forced and the humor too dependent upon what happened in the first movie.

I walked into this film knowing absolutely nothing about it, except that Gwenth Paltrow was in it.  I left very disappointed.  The story follows a set of characters around the midwest as they all eventually head towards a Karaoke competition in Nevada.  The movie relies heavily on character interaction in the film and during the film you explore a midlife crisis, an absent dad reunited with his daughter and an ex-con on a karaoke crime spree.

The movie tried to take itself too serious and at the end you feel like you invested a lot of emotional energy into the movie, but with very little payoff.  The setting for the film could have inspired a sitcom, but it doesn't go off well as a drama.  While the whole time I wanted to like the characters, at the end of the day their neverending quest for the next karaoke bar seemed like the wrong motivators.  I'd stay away from this one unless it's just you, a bunch of your girlfriends and a half gallon of Hagan Daaz.

This movie is about a female CIA agent who gets kicked out of the CIA and decides to join an experimental female group of Rangers.  The first ten minutes are pretty good, but the movie quickly goes downhill from there.  After gaining Ranger status, she enters North Korea and somehow ends up at a nuclear power plant with her CIA boyfriend.  The whole movie tries to create emotional conflicts that just don't work because the characters lack any real emotional depth.  The scenes look like they were shot on a home camcorder and the overall plot is pretty slow.  On one level the film tried to be something that you'd find on the Lifetime network, but on another level it was all about action shoot em up.  The result was a formula that simply did not work regardless of the demographic it was playing too.