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I’m not sure how many people are familiar with the process of moviemaking, but when a film is not up to studio expectation and takes a long time to finally arrive to theaters after filming has wrapped, the result is sometimes due to financial issues with the studio. But most of the time it’s due to the fact that the studio has seen the final product, and it’s so abhorrent and without any value, redeeming, comic or otherwise, that it will be released as quietly and without recognition as possible. Now I don’t know if there were any financial issues surrounding Strange Wilderness, but I will say this: the film was shooting as far back as December 2005 and was released in February 2008, and at this point on rottentomatoes.com, there is not one positive review from the three dozen that are on the site. I’ll leave it to you to decide what the reasons why are.

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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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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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When it comes to teen high school comedies, I think I have seen them all. They all seem to have the same premise. It is usually a couple of guys who are in high school and are looking to get laid at a prom or party or wherever they can get it. Nothing has changed in the 33 years that I have been watching movies. It works, the premise still works. But not all movies can pull off the perfect teen comedy…but Superbad comes super close.

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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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There was first the cloned sheep, Dolly. Now today, cloning is actually very popular in science. Just do a simple Google search and you’ll find many articles on cloning that are occurring or have occurred. Heck, there was even an active website at one time about gene banking a pet. How far is science willing to go? The cloning of humans is not so far out of reach but most likely will not happen in my lifetime. When it does, you can bet that government will try and step in and stop it.

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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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In the 1940’s Walt Disney was asked by President Roosevelt to take a good will tour across Latin America as an ambassador of sorts. He declined the invitation, protesting that he wasn’t the handshaking kind and that the cause would be better served using someone else. Not to be deterred, Roosevelt made a counter offer. What if Walt would go to Latin America with a film contingent and then create some kind of a production out of the tour. A government subsidy was even offered. Walt accepted the invite but turned down the subsidy.

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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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Let’s say we take one of the greatest (if not the greatest) female novelists of all time, and reduce her life into a romantic fluff piece aimed squarely at fans of modern chick-lit? We’d get something close to Becoming Jane. That may be a bit harsh for this light-hearted tale of a young Jane Austin. I wasn’t completely underwhelmed by the film, more like just *whelmed*.  Fortunately, this Blu-ray Disc is a nice surprise otherwise with superior video transfer and a nice audio track to boot. So, all is not lost, you husbands of women who force such films upon you.

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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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I am sure at one point or another in everyone’s life; they wished they could be successful, smarter or healthier than they already are. It is only natural. Now what if I told you that when you have children of your own you could make that decision for them? Would you do it?

Vincent’s (Ethan Hawke) dream is to one day go into space. Since a very young age, he had read every book he could get his hands on to find out what it would take be an astronaut. Vincent fought off his parents urges to give up that dream because they knew he could never do it. Why? It was because he wasn’t created the”natural way.”

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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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It was back in 1999 when I first saw Run Lola Run. I remember exactly where I rented it, what city I was in and who I watched it with. I read about the film online and when the opportunity came about to rent it, I jumped at the chance. One of my main reasons for wanting to rent it was because my companion was in fact German and from Germany and I knew she would enjoy watching a movie in her native language. Little did I know before watching Lola, it would become one of my all time favorite movies.

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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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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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Three female friends are there for each other’s personal storms. One is a coke-addled sensation addict, one aspires to be an artist (and does her share of powder too) and the third is taking refuge from an unhappy marriage and questioning her sexual identity. Many scenes of heightened emotion are the order of the day.