My Own Little World

There are times when I will be watching a film, really enjoying it, and suddenly feeling like something is off. I often cannot put my finger on what exactly the flaw is, but because I can’t put my finger on it I dismiss it and still say the movie is good. There are other times, however, when after talking with other people about the film, I understand exactly what the flaw is. Watching Murder on the Orient Express was one of those experiences. I love myself a good old-school mystery in the vein of Hitchcock films like To Catch a Thief , and my prior experiences with star and director Kenneth Branagh (in particular his four-hour unabridged adaptation of Hamlet ) as well as the rest of this star-studded cast made me very excited to see this film. I didn’t expect a fantastic film, but I was secretly hoping that it would revitalize this largely dead genre. Unfortunately, Murder has one really big flaw that makes it largely forgettable: it doesn’t know how to balance knowledge ...

Wow, 2014 has come to a close. I've really enjoyed this year, especially in film. Over the next several posts, I'll be compiling all the films I've seen from this past year that I didn't review in full. As always, to see how I rank these films relative to each other, take a look at  my IMDB list for this year. Transcendence  - Watch it on cable.  I wanted to see this movie so much when I first heard about it. Christopher Nolan's cinematographer of choice Wally Pfister in my opinion made his films perfect visually. However, Transcendence  never really knows what to say about technology, bouncing back and forth between a the-environment-would-be-better-without-it perspective and a people-would-be-more-social-without-it view. It has such a convoluted plot and characters that fail to have a lot of dimension that all of Pfister's visually amazing direction just gets lost. Grade: 40 Edge of Tomorrow  - Buy it.  This is the most underrated film of th...