Film Geeks Unite!

Thanks to my friend ‘thecheesefry’ (twitter handle), I have a new time waster.  Flickchart.com is a site that lets you create a personalized list of what your favorite movies are.  And it’s embarassingly simple: you’re shown two posters and choose ‘which one is better?’  How do you side what’s better?  Place in film history?  Rewatchability? […]

Mother and Child

  With The Fighter being a possible exception, the best cast film I’ve seen from top to bottom to come out in the past 12 months has been Mother and Child. The film’s story is centered around three strong female performances: Annette Bening as a middle aged woman who gave up a child at 14 […]

The Fighter

To paraphrase the Sports Guy, the ‘underdog boxer’ genre has probably been worn dry.  Like the gangster genre, boxing has created some of the greatest films ever made (with the Rocky series and Raging Bull immediately coming to mind).  The standard is ridiculously high.  I go with that lead in to say The Fighter is […]

The Kids Are All Right

The opinions I’ve heard about The Kids Are All Right have run the gamut from ‘great indie film’ to ‘whatever word is the opposite of misogyny.’  It got a Globe nomination for Best Screenplay and on the whole I’ve heard good things so I had to check it out. I don’t know whether this is […]

True Grit

I’ll start by saying this: Westerns aren’t my genre.  I ‘respect’ the Coen Brothers films while not necessarily calling myself a fan of every film they’ve done.  Now all that said, I liked this remake of True Grit. I caught myself laughing in the first 30 minutes at Jeff Bridges going into the “alcoholic Dutch […]

The Town

The Town is one of the movies that’s been hanging around all year and has a shot at a Best Picture nomination next year now that they’ve expanded the field to 10 films.  A friend on Twitter referred to this flick as Set It Off for white folks, and I get where they got that […]

Best of 2010

TV and film-wise, there was good work as always but I wasn’t as overwhelmed by things as I have been in years past.  There’s going to be a lot of ‘Top 10’ lists the next couple weeks; here are 5 films and TV shows that caught my eye the past 12 months: 5. Toy Story […]

Love And Other Drugs

  I’ve respected but never really been ‘all-in’ on Anne Hathaway.  Not as highbrow as Natalie Portman, not as ‘that girl’ as Rachel McAdams.  But after watching Love and Other Drugs, I get Hathaway’s appeal now.  She has some of the qualities of those two and the other actresses of her generation.  We use the […]

127 Hours

While not the crowd pleaser that Slumdog Millionaire was (and let’s be honest, few films are), 127 Hours has all the makings of another Oscar-caliber film for Danny Boyle.  Based on the true story of a young man who got trapped in a Utah canyon and had to cut off his own arm to survive, […]

In Closing…

Thanks to all who tuned into “Our Town Pasadena” last night.  I haven’t watched the taping myself yet, but based on feedback it sounds like it went well.  Based on who I’ve talked to, the show was watched from LA to Kansas to Romania.  My next set of business cards will read “Malik Aziz, International […]