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It doesn’t seem to matter if the movie is horrible or excellent; Will Smith is just box office money. Every movie he does just seems to generate mountains of cash. I, Robot is no exception. A summer blockbuster when released theatrically, I, Robot grabbed the attention of Sci-Fi fans around the world. The question remains though, even if the movie makes a ton of cash, is it worth you time? In the case of I, Robot, absolutely!

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Tang Wei plays a student who is a member of a radical theatre troupe during the Sino-Japanese War. She and her cohorts determine to assassinate a prominent collaborator (Tony Leung). In order to get create the opportunity for the killing, our heroine must infiltrate Leung’s household. She is on the threshold of becoming his mistress when he leaves Hong Kong for Shanghai. Three years later, now backed by the Resistance, she makes a new attempt. But she hasn’t counted on the entanglements of passion in the affair she has embarked on.

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Honestly, I don’t know what the bigger tragedy is, the fact that John C. Reilly has been a funny performer for years, or the fact that it’s taken guys like Judd Apatow and Adam McKay a chance to show off his comedic talent. For those who don’t know, Reilly was in a hilarious ten-minute blooper reel in Boogie Nights which showed that he could improvise with the best of them. The guy also played Bigfoot in an episode of the Tenacious D show that aired on HBO in the mid ‘90s. But sure, put him in Chicago where he was nominated for an Oscar or in ensemble films directed by some of film’s greatest voices. His true love, that which gives him much joy and pleasure, appears to be when he’s goofing around, like he does in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

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I have seen just about every Jim Carrey comedy that has come out in the theaters and most of them I found pretty downright funny as hell. Working with the Farrelly Brothers for the first time since Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey is hoping to strike gold once again. Sadly, Me, Myself & Irene falls short.

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You probably remember where you were when you saw the trailer for Twister. Hot off the heels of Forrest Gump, which was a nice story with some pretty cool computer effects at the time, Twister simply took the effects to a whole other level. Barns were torn apart, cars were tossed into the air, and that one shot, where the car is driving as a tractor is thrown and slammed into the ground, and the tire from the tractor hurdles through the car window. You wanted to go see that film, whatever the cost might be.

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Going in, I really had no interest in Shall We Dance? When I was told I would be reviewing this, I knew right away that I would not like the movie. So, when I sat down this evening and watched the film, I actually did give it a chance and I am glad actually I did. I came out pleasantly surprised.

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ABC has made a killing from the bored housewife situation. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that films would attempt to put those kinds of situations into their plots. The film is billed as an erotic thriller; however it’s really two separate films. The first half works the erotic side of things. There’s plenty of nudity and sexual situations, starting with three chicks all over each other for a photo shoot. Here we meet Claire Dennison (Ford). She’s a successful businesswoman, perhaps selling porn to the Japanese.

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Romantic comedies make most men put their body in the fetal position and pray that the bad people will make it stop until they are shown the newest incantation of a Vin Diesel action flic. This just in, Vin Diesel doesn’t really make action films anymore. Crap, how about Mel Gibson, no? Hey, Sly Stallone still does action movies. Yeah, but we are also pretending he’s still relevant. Anyhow, most people have negative connotations about romantic comedies. That way too much syrupy dialog mixed in with corny humor about two people on the opposite side of the tracks establishing that common ground and coming together. Dedication, at the core is a story of a children’s writer finding love with his new illustrator. However, getting there is one strange animal indeed.

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I give credit to Paul Anderson for being passionate about his material. It doesn’t hurt that, in his short-storied career, he’s directed some of the more memorable films over the last several years, including Daniel Day Lewis in the engrossing and excellent There Will Be Blood. Wait, this isn’t the dramatic director, it’s another guy? Well, OK.

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I’m going to admit right from the start, I hate cell phones. They’re evil, and I didn’t need a horror film to tell me about it. The world would be a safer and certainly a more courteous place without them. Just last week I was run of the highway by a Werner semi because the idiot driver was on his cell phone. So it didn’t come as any surprise that someone was bound to include them as part of a horror film.

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I remember a few years ago when Closer was released. The cast was very promising and the movie received nothing but rave reviews. The one thing about Closer is that while it is extremely sexy and dangerous, it also can easily resemble any one of our lives. Whether you are single or in a relationship, who doesn’t feel instant attraction at times when they meet someone for the first time. The dilemma is, do you act on those feelings or ignore them? Is it worth the risk?

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A couple of years ago, I was out a trip to New Jersey on business with my boss. When we got there, he wasn’t feeling well, so I had him sit down while I went to the clinic down the hall to see if some medical attention could be given to him. As I turned the corner with an attendant, that’s when I saw him hit the floor. After a few moments of stabilization he was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that he had a stroke. A co-worker and I stayed with him for the duration of the next couple of days until his family could get there, and over that time, he suffered several smaller strokes in the process. One minute he could talk rather lucidly, and like flipping a switch his facial muscles would sag and be nonresponsive. Once his family came, we managed to get the chance to come home, and he spent several more days in the hospital, remarkably without any repercussions from this incident, and came back to work, where we still talk (I’ve moved to another company) and share the occasional gallow humor about what happened.

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It’s hard to peg a movie like Things We Lost in the Fire. While people want to slam it and say that it’s not an uplifting movie, I think that upon further review, they might want to examine those behind it, and see that it’s another solid effort from them.

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You’ve got to expect some pretty big things from a film that uses the massacre at Wounded Knee as a mere starting point. Add Viggo Mortensen fresh from his stint as Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s excellent Lord Of The Rings trilogy, and how can you not expect big things? And if that’s not enough, we’ll throw in some genuine Arabian sheiks and breathtaking cinematography… oh, and there’s horses.

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Since we have already reviewed The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe on DVD, some non-format specific sections of this review have been ported over to this Blu-ray review.

After the transformation of the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings books into hugely successful films, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to tackle C.S. Lewis’s famous novels The Chronicles of Narnia.

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Pretend just for a few seconds that you are an aspiring song writer. You realize that the only way to possibly succeed in doing that would mean having to pick up and move elsewhere to do it. Mind you, you don’t have much money or a job waiting for you at this destination but you know you are good enough and will stop at nothing to get what you want. Do you forgo your dreams and wonder what could have been or do you pick up and go?

That brings us to Coyote Ugly.

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I think that by revisiting Unbreakable, and looking at it outside of M. Night Shyamalan’s other films like The Sixth Sense and Signs, there’s actually a pretty good movie going on there. I mean, a movie that grossed $95 million domestically can’t be considered a failure, right? It did, however, do amazing overall numbers, the international totals brought the film up to a near $250 million gross. However, I guess when you put them up against Signs ($227 million domestic, $408 million worldwide) and The Sixth Sense ($293 million domestic, $672 million worldwide), maybe it can be considered disappointing, but the film itself is pretty good.

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Does ultra realism make for a better movie? There have certainly been examples of startling realistic moments in cinema that have been quite effective, but mostly because they create an experience for us that actually reaches us in a way that we’ll never be able to forget. The storming of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan was one such incidence. Those of us who have never been to war walked away from that scene feeling like we’ve now experienced the closest thing possible without actually being there.

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The last time I saw both Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix in a movie together, it was in 2000, in The Yards. It just so happens that the director of We Own the Night, James Gray, also directed that film. Having not worked for 7 years should have been a tell-tale sign of things to come. However, I was hopeful that this time around, with We Own the Night, Gray would be able to hit pay dirt. Sadly, We Own the Night comes up broke.

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Don’t you just miss the old days of the Cold War? Let’s be honest. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, there just haven’t been any interesting bad guys around anymore. Sure, there’s plenty of bad guys out there, more now than likely ever before. But these bad guys are just nasty and about as colorful as a 1 crayon box of crayolas. If you miss those old days, then Crimson Tide is the film for you. It’s one of those last looks back before an era disappears under the horizon never to be seen again.

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Will Smith finds himself in a bit of a career quandary if you ask me. Sure, one of the good sides to being as as he is is that he’s quite the popular guy that nobody wants to see get killed. But the popularity has seemed to stymie him a little bit. When he does dramatic work, it’s clear that the push is for him to win an Oscar, like in Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness. So when people look past that intent, even when he might want to do dramatic work, he’s forced to take on slightly darker roles in action films, which I guess serves as his happy medium of branching out while still pleasing the people. I Am Legend is another one of those examples, very similar to another Smith sci-fi film named I, Robot.

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This could be either one of the greatest home cinema experiences of your lifetime, or you may be bored to tears. Thus is the dilemma of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Either way, go buy this Blu-ray, that way you can at least feign serious film collector.

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