Review – Ghosts at Sea

Because if you call your movie “Boring Canadian Lake Haints” nobody will watch it. For thousands of years people have been crossing the world’s oceans, yet the best tales these folks can conjure are some dreary little bits about haunted restaurants somewhere near the shore. See if desperate

Review – 13th Child: Jersey Devil

Alack for the poor Jersey Devil. It’s among the coolest of monsters, but it always seems to end up with the short end of the cinematic stick. The visuals mostly consist of low-budget interviews intercut with the same three drawings over and over. And oh those interviews. Some of it is legitimate folklore, but most are on par with those juvenile ghost stories we all used to make up with our friends when we were eight years old. You know, the kind that go something like “Once there were some boy scouts who were on a hike but then it started raining so they ran into a cemetery and hid in a mausoleum only then Dracula showed up and he was going to drink their blood but then Mrs. Dracula showed up and she was going to drink their blood but then three Frankensteins showed up and they started fighting the Draculas but then ..." and so on. Honestly, this was so bad that a parody would end up looking exactly like the original. See if desperate

Review – Tim’s Vermeer

Obsessive millionaire Tim Jenison develops the theory that Johannes Vermeer used optics to trace reality onto canvas. To put this to the quasi-test, he creates a painstaking reproduction of the scene from “The Music Lesson” and then spends months trying – with exceptionally limited success – to duplicate the masterpiece. I’m not surprised that Penn and Teller produced this bit of dull strangeness. The theory clearly is that the secret to understanding anything is merely to unravel the trick of how it’s done. Inadvertently the production demonstrates just how faulty this approach can be. See if desperate

Review – Admission

Okay, Tina Fey. Enough with the sitcoms about successful, intelligent women completely obsessed with child bearing. This time around she’s an admissions officer for Princeton, obsessed with the notion that a brilliant-yet-unorthodox applicant is actually the child she secretly gave up for adoption 18 years earlier. As is sadly all too typical of Fey’s work, the picture sports a few highly entertaining moments that fail to save it from ending up as another run-of-the-mill relationship comedy. Mildly amusing

Review – The Last Days of Patton

Imagine a made-for-TV sequel with George C. Scott reprising his famous role, and you’ve got a pretty good idea what to expect. The general didn’t live long after the war ended, so this production is appropriately smaller in scope (though strangely not that much shorter). The first half of the story finds our protagonist up to his old rubbing-everyone-the-wrong-way tricks. But after the car wreck this is consistently depressing stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – How to Train Your Dragon

Disclaimer up front: Toothless (the main dragon) reminded me a great deal of one of my cats. Thus I may have enjoyed this a bit more than the average viewer might. Objectively, however, this is an entertaining story told with a solid script, good cast and decent quality animation. Worth seeing

Review – American Hustle

ABSCAM gets an indie dramedy twist. The celebrity casting and the off-the-rack soundtrack compete for most overpowering element of what might otherwise have been a more entertaining production. Mildly amusing

Review – (500) Days of Summer

Turns out putting the time stream in a blender doesn’t make pedestrian romance any better. Zooey Deschanel is cute, but the rest of the picture is an annoying parade of self-pity thrown by a oh-so-typical guy who just can’t understand why his relationships fail. Mildly amusing