Review – The Return of the Pink Panther

I can’t believe I’ve reviewed more than 3000 movies before getting to this one. It was one of my favorites when I was a kid, the first Pink Panther movie I ever saw. Though I admit I don’t find it as ass-laughing-off funny as I used to, it’s still a solid mix of Peter Sellers’s wonderful gift for physical comedy and a moderately entertaining caper story. Worth seeing

Review – Hugo

If a movie costs an estimated $170 million to make, is it still possible to call it a “cute little picture”? Martin Scorsese journeys ever closer to becoming one with Steven Spielberg by serving up a dish filled with childhood wonderment and special effects. However, buried under the thick sugar coating is an amusing romance about George Melies and the birth of motion pictures. Mildly amusing

Review – Rampart

Other than James Ellroy himself, who exactly is the audience for this kind of thing? Somewhere there must be a substantial market of folks who like to spend an hour or two with perpetually miserable characters in relentlessly unpleasant situations. Well, this house isn’t part of that market. Even the production values are nauseating. Dark Blue did the same bad cop routine without the “gritty reality” camerawork and editing. See if desperate

Review – No Strings Attached

My wife and I opted to watch this movie a day after learning of a death affecting someone close to us, figuring that a romantic comedy would be about as far as we could get from killing, horror or anything else not in keeping with the situation. So naturally in the first ten minutes the characters end up at a funeral. That notwithstanding, this is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from an Ivan Reitman picture in which Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher play a couple who start a relationship of sexual convenience that ends up emotionally complicated. Mildly amusing

Review – The Great Mouse Detective

I watched this for two reasons: I like Vincent Price (who voiced the villain), and I wanted to see the first ever combination of hand-drawn cels and computer-generated images (however brief the latter was) in a feature-length animation. Mission accomplished on both counts. The rest of the picture was a missable mess from one of the low points in Disney’s animation quality history. Mildly amusing

Review – Mirror Mirror

I’m not surprised to find Hollywood and the SyFy Channel drawing closer together. However, I am a little shocked that the mainstream movie industry seems to be adapting its quality standards to match high band cable rather than the other way around. Though the weak, juvenile-joke-heavy script is the main culprit, the whole production has a cheap, amateurish feel to it. Odd, because I’m betting the studio dumped some serious cash into it. At least it was a light, fluffy little picture, just what I was in the mood for at the time. Mildly amusing

Review – The King’s Speech

Poor George VI (ably played here by Colin Firth). Thrust into a position he was never intended to have by his elder brother’s fondness for an American divorcée and Adolph Hitler, the new monarch must find a way to overcome his tendency to stutter so he can do the public speaking part of his new job. With the assistance of his wife (Helena Bonham Carter), he develops a relationship with a speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) who helps him with his stammering and the underlying psychological damage that caused it. Overall this Oscar-winning drama struck me as a touchy-feely, 20th century reheat of The Madness of King George. Mildly amusing