1,600: MURDER at 1600

The movie post that wordpress doesn't want you to see!  Between eaten posts and laziness, it seems like the count got off somewhere as far as the site here is concerned.  In truth, I'm up to 1626 at the moment. -In Bruges - a better movie than a city, if the movie can be believed.  I appreciate movies that deliberately subvert movie cliches (Hard Candy pointed out 'why are you threatening me while you're still tied up?) - in this case, it's the fact that blanks are still dangerous. Additional points are awarded for a lean and economic script that uses every part of the buffalo.  I do think, however, that this movie may in fact be zany.

-Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One - An early sort of pseudo-documentary.  Kind of interesting historically - or it would be if anyone at all claimed influence by it - but as an early example of such a common genre now it's mainly remarkable for the line 'every since we've been married I've had abortion after abortion after abortion….'

-Quick Change - This was great, it starts as a cool take on a heist and the ensuing getaway is a solid 90s comedy.  There's something about the writing conventions that just feels great when they hit the right notes.  I hope that comes from a sense of storytelling and not nostalgia.

-The Spanish Prisoner - A twisty turny Mamet thing, plus Steve Martin.  Really great until the last five minutes.  I just don't think he could have possibly gotten there that fast.

-Battlestar Galactica: Razor - This was a waste of time.  When it was new, I bet fans were happy to see nominally new BSG to tide them over, but I'll bet they would have been even happier to have a new story instead of this rehash of previously discussed events.

-Paranoid Park - Like Soderbergh, Van Sant makes the movies for everyone and the movies just for him, and in his case I prefer the latter.  This movie features the most useless subtitles ever.

-The Number 23 - Sometimes you hear about how bad a movie is, and you just have to look.  Turns out, pretty bad.  And nobody had ever even mentioned the Sin City-lookin' sequences.

-Final Destination - This was pretty dumb too.  While there's something familiar and comforting about a script that hits the right beats (in an interesting way) there's something about formulaic editing that just sucks the life out of a movie.  Line.  Cut to character about to speak.  Wait 1 second.  Character says line.  Cut to character about to speak.  Wait 1 second.  Character speaks.  Audience falls asleep.  Maybe they didn't shoot any reactions or mediums.

-Home Movie - From the director of American Movie, a series of shorts sewn together, each about people who live in unusual dwellings.  I may have oversold the movie with that last sentence.

-Ong-Bak: Thai Warrior - See, now what I learned in Gladiator (no, not Gladiator, Gladiator, from the writer of Striking Distance / director of Road House) is that the top of the head is the hardest part of the body.  Don't know why, that's just one of those things that stuck with me.  But here's Tony Jaa, going out of his way to bash people right atop their noggins with accuracy and enthusiasm.  He does a terrific job of it, going after guys in a flurry of human elbows and knees.

-The Yes Men - So these guys pretend to be these other guys, and in character as those guys they pretend to be a third set of guys who pull these elaborate pranks on the World Trade Organization.  The movie shows us some of the pranks, and how the people being pranked fall for it.  I guess you pay a ton of money to attend a conference, you don't suspect lies.  Anyway, I'm glad I didn't buy this on DVD for thirty bucks a few years ago.

-John Oliver: Terrifying Times - I have a standing appreciation of John Oliver.  I even claim that weird indie band 'before they were cool' kind of fandom.  The Department, Political Animal, The Bugle, The Daily Show, and this standup special are all the places you can enjoy John Oliver. And often Andy Zaltzman.

-Anvil! The Story of Anvil - At times almost heartbreaking, at other times so absurd and inextricable from Spinal Tap that it seems like it couldn't be real.  (The drummer is named Robb Reiner, for pete's sake.)  But hey, I want to believe.

-The Station Agent - Sought out after learning about writer / director Thomas McCarthy's involvement with the real best picture of 2009, Up.  This was roundly terrific.  I feel like it could lead to some seriously boring discussions though.

-Ninja Assassin - This was a return to $5 Mondays at Cleveland Cinemas.  Also, this sucked.  It didn't look very good, but I was hopeful based on a) director of V for Vendetta James McTeigue and b) the title.  And besides, ninjas.  And then what do they do?  CGI ninjas.  Waste of everyone's time.  Bleh.

-Avatar - I enjoyed watching this movie.

-Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian - I knew this was written by a couple of The State, but I guess I'd seen bad reviews or something.  It was mostly pretty good.  Some bits that didn't make sense to me were either explained in the first movie or didn't jibe with the first movie at all, depending on who I asked.

-X-Files: I Want to Believe - Often referred to as a 'monster of the week' movie in comparison to Fight the Future as a 'mythology' movie.  Morbidly amusing to note they killed off Mulder & Scully's child instead of having them lug him along to crime scenes or deal with babysitters or something.

-Unknown - I think I mixed this up with a Vincenzo Natali movie.  Maybe 'Nowhere.'  It was roughly Sci-Fi Original in quality.

-Sherlock Holmes - Really cool, really solid, I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would, after all the hand wringing that preceded it.  There's kind of a problem that Holmes knows all the details of a murder he neither witnessed nor investigated in any way when he's recapping everything for the audience.  Deleted scenes, I hope.  I wonder what happened to the competing Judd Apatow version...

-Up in the Air - On the one hand, this was pretty good.  But on the other, it's pretty much the same 'slick misanthrope suddenly feels the need for deeper meaning and finds it in family' thing that the director's already made two of.

-It's Complicated - Great cast, but still kind of boring.  I recall the discussion afterward being about how shoddily made parts of it were.  Bears an odd resemblance to Modern Family.

-Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask - Raised more questions than it answered, unfortunately.  How DO you make a man impotent by hiding his hat?  I've hidden hats before.  I don't -think- that was a side effect.

-Book of Eli - As of January 18, this is my favorite movie of 2010.  Cool and fun and works pretty well as Fallout: The Movie.  I felt an odd connection to it when I saw that it was written by Gary 'Gaz' Whitta, former editor at PC Gamer.  Sure, I don't actually know him, but I've read and listened to his work for a while, and it's no surprise that there are some game-like elements in the movie (a good thing).  The fact that people aren't really talking about this one is a benefit to you, the viewer.

-Across the Universe - This was strongly recommended to me, but it's not so much a movie as a collection of videos for Beatles covers.  I'm pretty sure that the reason the non-music parts don't make any sense is to cram in as many additional Beatles references as possible, but I just don't know their catalog well enough to appreciate it.  I guess I've never been into boy bands....

-Assassins - Stallone is an assassin just days from retirement, Banderas is an assassin just coming up.  Moore is a hacker in the finest 1990s computer technology tradition.  The whole thing is worth it for this one entirely inappropriate exchange.

-Laura - A fun old murder mystery where nothing is as it seems!  Really!  It's great when a movie lives up to one of those review cliches.  They probably could have sorted the whole thing out a lot sooner, but not in a 'well why didn't he say that one sentence two hours ago' kind of way.

-Heart and Souls - Kind of reminds me of the original story that lead to Monsters Inc.  Fun premise, well done, just another more or less forgotten '90s flick.

-Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -  Not at all what I expected.  I guess it gets grouped in my head with The Bridges of Madison County or a River Runs Through It, probably for no other reason than having leafy green poster art, since I haven't seen those either.  Anyway, for some reason, I was under the impression this was going to be a good movie.

-Day Watch - Didn't like Night Watch, didn't like Wanted, didn't really like this.

-Food, Inc. - This was the movie being used to demo my new movie watchin' monitor, so I made it the first movie I watched on said monitor.  Not great.  Doesn't really add anything new to similar programs that have been coming out for what seems like years now.

-Black Cobra and Warriors of the Wasteland - Two more courtesy of Doc Mock.  Black Cobra himself, Fred Williamson, actually appears in WotW too.

And now, even shorter reviews for short films:

-Balance - A: Awesome.  It's right here if you want to see for yourself.

-Bullethead - yuck.

-Un Chien Andalou - I thought the cloud on the moon was more effective than the actual eyeball shot.

-100 Years at the Movies, President McKinley and Escort Going to the Capitol, President McKinley Taking the Oath - kind of neat, but mainly just me working on my lists at icheckmovies.

-Validation, Signs - two sketch-like shorts of a very simple premise heightened over time.  Neither mind-blowing nor disappointing.

-Hangar #5 and I Love Sarah Jane - two shorts made as effects demos, the latter in conjunction with fxphd, and notably better acting  (Sarah Jane would become Tim Burton's Alice, I think.)

-The Adventures of Andre and Wally B - very early pixar work.  Not terrific, with its off-camera punchline.

-Dug's Special Mission - Very recent pixar work.  Much more terrific.  Looney Tunes in flavor.

-9 - Slightly less good looking than the feature that followed 4 years later, but containing just about as much story.

-Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade - Another short that was expanded into a feature.  Rather less CGI intensive though.

-Anna is Being Stalked, The Delicious - two by Scott Prendergast, whom I heard interviewed on TSOYA.  The former played at Sundance.  I would not be able to explain why.  There was nothing for me in these.

-The Cat Concerto - Inspiration for the Mouse Organ?  No, that's a Katzenklavier, this is an Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry cartoon.

-The Cat Piano - speaking of the Katzenklavier...didn't really dig this one.

-Skhizein - a little bit weird and unsatisfying, which probably effectively communicates the feeling of being displaced by 97 centimeters.  Terrific idea.

and finally...

-Murder at 1600 - You might be surprised to learn that this suspense featuring Wesley Snipes as a cop who plays by his own rules and builds meticulous scale models of entire cities who is called in by White House staffers going through the motions of pretending to be interested in solving a murder and insists on pushing through the lies, upholding the law, and bringing the murderer to justice was chosen only because of the number in its title and is not, in fact, especially good.

Movie Picks for 2010

So far, I'll tell you this: Book of Eli is my favorite film of 2010.  Will it be able to hold the title after I've seen any other movie hitting theaters in the next 12 months?  Are there, in fact, any other movies being released this year?  More than 250 of them, supposedly.  Let's take a look. My categories aren't quite the same as last time, although I've got twice as many movies in my top tier, they don't represent "the best chance of both being good and doing well" so much as the titles that have grabbed my interest the strongest.  Assuming they're all released, the A-List are the movies I won't hesitate to go see, even though quality-wise there are some gambles in the mix:

The A-List: Buried, Carlos the Jackal, From Paris with Love, Get Low, Greenberg, Harry Brown, Inception, Iron Man 2, Knight and Day (sure, this might be terrible, but half of the trailer is intriguing), The Last Airbender (From M. Night, and apparently condenses 60 episodes of a good cartoon into 1 live-action movie, so it might be terrible too, but let's hope not), Let Me In, The Mechanic (the original is terrific, and Statham is probably the Bronsonest modern actor we've got), Paul, Prince of Persia (should be stuffed to the gills with neat Parkour stuff. Hopefully it's a Pirates 1 and not a Pirates 2), A Prophet, Red Tails, Splice (from Cube-master Vincenzo Natali!), Stone, Four Lions and The Town (if Affleck directs as well as last time, with Gone Baby Gone).

The B-List:  I'd like to see most of these, they've got something in their corner that makes them more appealing than 60% of this year's announced titles: 13,  The A-Team, The American, Black Swan, Blitz, Brighton Rock, Cemetery Junction, Centurion and Eagle of the Ninth (an unrelated pair of movies about the Roman 9th Legion), Clash of the Titans, The Company Men, The Conspirator, Daybreakers, Due Date, Edge of Darkness, Eat Pray Love, Enter the Void, the Expendables, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, Frozen, Green Hornet, Guardians of Ga'Hoole (from Zack Snyder), Happy Tears, Henry's Crime, Hereafter, How to Train Your Dragon (Dreamworks is a big red flag, but I like Chris Sanders...whose movie is it really going to be?), The Irishman (Cleveland mob movie!), Ironclad, Jack Goes Boating, John Rabe, The Joneses, The Karate Kid (Kung-Fu Kid, you mean), London Boulevard ([ready for closeup joke]), Lottery Ticket, Machete and Predators (representing a return to the Rodriguez that makes things), Micmacs (Jeunet), Morning Glory, Mother's Day, Mr. Nobody, Never Let Me Go, North Face, The Other Guys, Please Give, Priest, Ramona and Beezus (I hope it does well enough to spawn a sequel so we can see those french fries at the end of Ramona Quimby, Age 8), Rapunzel, Red, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead (!), The Rum Diary, Salt, Sanctum, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (worrisome, it looks like the late 80s have been thrown in a blender with Michael Cera, but on the other hand, it's Edgar Wright), Shutter Island, Social Network, Solomon Kane, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Jon Turteltaub is one of those people that I should get on with just great, but it doesn't work - this is something that I should love, but I bet I'm let down again like Nat'l Treasure.  Ah well.  We'll always have 3 Ninjas), The Tempest, Tomorrow When the War Began, The Tree of Life, Triage, Tron: Legacy, True Legend, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, Twelve, The Way Back, The Extra Man, Wild Grass, The Winning Season, Womb, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

The C-List: These have some promise, but I'm either doubtful about the end product or there just isn't enough info out there yet to boost it to one of the above categories.  I'm sure I'll see a few of 'em, but these are more likely to be rentals because they haven't grabbed my attention (yet).  Lower expectations based on the advance material that's available right now might make for some nice surprises by year's end.

The Adjustment Bureau, Afterlife, Abel, Agora,  Animal Kingdom, The Beaver, Biutiful, Black Death, Breaking Upwards, Brooklyn's Finest, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Cop Out (I want to back Kevin Smith, but that's one rough trailer), Cracks, The Crazies, Date Night, The Debt, Despicable Me, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dinner for Schmucks (a title that says 'no, we're not remaking a french film.  why?  what have you heard?'), The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Dorian Gray (the same one we didn't get last year), The Dry Land, The Experiment,  Fair Game, The Fighter (dropped a category from last year, somehow), The First Gun, The Ghost Writer, Glorious 39, Heartless, Hesher, Hot Tub Time Machine, Howl, The Hungry Rabbit Jumps, It's a Wonderful Afterlife, It's Kind of a Funny Story, The Kids are Alright, The Killer Inside Me, Killers (fun idea, lots of worrysome names), The Last Word, Letters to Juliet, Life During Wartime (aka Happiness 2), The Losers (is this the double for the A-Team, or the Expendables?), Love and Other Drugs, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, MacGruber, Main Street, Megamind, Middlemen, Mother and Child, My Own Love Song, My Soul to Take (the Wes Craven movie, not the duo of horror and action movies I worked on a few years ago that seem to have vanished from IMDB again), Nanny McPhee 2, The Next Three Days, Nightmare on Elm Street (couldn't've cast a better new Freddy, but it's not like any of the other Platinum Dunes horror remakes have been any good), Night Catches Us, Ondine, The Lightning Thief, Perrier's Bounty, Red Dawn, Remember Me, Repo Men (which was apparently shot before Repo: The Genetic Opera), Robin Hood, The Romantics, Route Irish, Runaways, Saint John of Las Vegas, Secretariat, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Shanghai, Skateland, Somewhere,  Solitary Man, Stay Cool, Sympathy for Delicious, Takers, 3 Backyards, Unstoppable, Unthinkable, Valhalla Rising, Wall Street 2, Warrior, Waska,  Welcome to the Rileys, What's Wrong With Virginia, The Wolfman (I'd hope for more, but it's turned over an awful lot of creatives.  You bring in a half dozen writers, almost as many directors, editors, and composers, and there's going to be some wildly differing ideas on what kind of sauce was being made in the first place), Yogi Bear (might get a watch just for Andy Daly), You Again, and Your Highness.

No Thank You: These are mostly movies I want to avoid.  They have something (usually multiple somethings) in their corner that's working against them.  Here is the trite, the cash-grabs, the formulaic, the pot jokes, and the Jonah Hill.

44-Inch Chest,  Alice in Wonderland, Alpha and Omega, And Soon the Darkness, Area 51, The Backup Plan, The Baster, Beastly, Bitch Slap, Born to be a Star, Bounty Hunter, Burlesque, Case 39, Cats and Dogs 2 (More like G-Force 2), Chloe, Confucius, Crazy on the Outside, Creation, Cyrus (Jonah Hill?  Yuck.), Dear John, The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, Death at a Funeral, The Descent 2, Easy A, Extraordinary Measures, Fish Tank, Flipped, Furry Vengeance, Georgia, Get Me to the Gig (Jonah Hill?  Yuck!), Going the Distance, The Greatest, The Good Guy, Green Zone, Grown-Ups, Gulliver's Travels, HIGH School, Hippie Hippie Shake, Holy Rollers, I Love You Phillip Morris, Jackass 3D, Jonah Hex, Kickass, The Last Song, Leap Year, Legion, Life as we Know It, Little Fockers (the only good thing this franchise has ever brought me is a pal who liked to do Jimmy Fallon's weekend update bit on camping trips), Marmaduke, Multiple Sarcasms, Nowhere Boy, Our Family Wedding, Rabbit Hole, The Resident, The Roommate, Saw 7, Season of the Witch (flashlights off!  Don't disturb the witch!), Sex and the City 2, Shrek 4, She's out of my League, The Spy Next Door, Tooth Fairy, Piranha 3D, Step Up 3D (only, of course, because I haven't seen the first two installments of either series.  I wouldn't know what was going on), Tell Me, To Save a Life, Twilight 3 (does the fact that they're rushing these out mean the studio considers it a flash in the pan?), Tyler Perry's next cynically exploitive something something (working title), Valentine's Day (just following the Love Actually formula isn't enough to get a hopeful rating anymore, especially when this one looks to be following that formula a little too closely), When in Rome, Wonderful World, The Yellow Handkerchief, You May Not Kiss the Bride, Youth in Revolt (I can hardly imagine a less appealing movie.  Maybe if it had Jonah Hill in there somewhere), and The Zookeeper (oh.)  This category also lands Harry Potter 7 and Toy Story 3.  I'm not sure if there's a Potter entry that worked as a good standalone movie and while I'll probably end up seeing TS3, the recent double feature rerelease of the first two doesn't have me looking forward to another rehash of the same elements.

2009 of Movies

A year ago I threw imaginary darts at an imaginary wall of movies as I imagined them.  Let's see how I did. I saw 35 of 2009's releases, according to IMDB. (Edit: Should be more like 40 for the year, since IMDB lists Hurt Locker, Ponyo, Taken, Brothers Bloom, and Anvil! as 2008s) I'm pretty sure reposting last year's lists and breaking them into ratings and thumbs and stars isn't an interesting thing to do, but in broader strokes, every A-list pick I saw I liked, I liked more of the B-listers than I didn't, and I was delighted to find three I bet against on my top list for the year.

Top list for the year? Well okay.  Since this is the year that we got the results of the writer's strike, it felt kind of thin on the ground to me.  Maybe I just missed out, since it seems I only saw, say, 5 of Ebert's 21. If I have to pick ten you should take a look at, I'm going with: Anvil!, Brothers Bloom, District 9, Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, The Informant!, Moon, Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, and my favorite movie of the year, Up (along with it's two companion shorts, Partly Cloudy and Dug's Special Mission).

Also likable enough:  Avatar, Coraline, Drag Me to Hell, Taken, Up in the Air, Ponyo, Watchmen, Banlieue 13: Ultimatum, Night at the Museum 2.

Didn't particularly like: Crank 2, Friday the 13th, Funny People, It's Complicated, Push, The Girlfriend Experience, Wolverine, Zombie Girl, Terminator 4.

Hated: Zombieland, Ninja Assassin, Monsters v. Aliens.

I still need to track down and make time for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, This is It, In the Loop, Tyson, Big Fan, World's Greatest Dad, Julie & Julia, A Serious Man, Whip It, The Road, Princess and the Frog, 9, The Cove, and just maybe The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Public Enemies, and the Hangover.  That's a list borne of things I might've picked on my own, and titles I wouldn't've expected if not for some emphatic positive reviews.

Of the 2008s I missed in last year's post, I was underwhelmed by Man on Wire and Let the Right One In (victims of their own hype?) and Timecrimes.  I liked Dear Zachary and In Bruges and Zach & Miri, and I never got to Counterfeiters, Appaloosa, or Boy A.

2010 Picks are on the way!

#1,514: KRAA! The Sea Monster

Surviving Disaster ended last month.  Better Radio rages on.  Applied for UCB's Maude and Beta teams.  Writing a lot of things.  Booked holiday plane tickets.  Watched some movies.  Watching movies faster than I'm writing 2 liners about 'em though, so I'm just going to do that in sections for a little while. -The Last Temptation of Christ - Courtesy of the hulu.  Started off funny.  Became less so.

-Let the Right One In - Cool, especially for explaining what happens to a vampire who ISN'T invited in.  I may have been late to the scene, but at least I saw it before the remake.

-Secret Beyond the Door... - Not a very good secret, frankly.  The orchestra liked this movie significantly more than I did.

-Closed Mondays and Your Face and Kiwi! -Animated shorts, like you read about, presuming you read about short films, or animation, or something.  Maybe a general interest publication with a particular focus this month on award-winning short subjects.  Kiwi was great.

-Shooter - I guess if they explained the shock reveal of the last couple minutes at the beginning when it was equally valid, it wouldn't be much of a movie.  Certainly, Marky Mark wouldn't've had to commit the dozens of murders he ought to be prosecuted for instead.

-Battle for Terra - Humans are the invaders! Oh no!  It wasn't clear why flying creatures need flying machines, or what they have to fear from falling.I think it looked good except for the humans, but it didn't stick with me.

-The Girlfriend Experience - A Soderbergh experiment.  Better than Bubble.  Making the story non-linear just seemed like a technique to spread a thin story...thinner?  That can't be the analogy.  That's not something you'd do on purpose.

-Toy Story and Toy Story 2 - in 3D!  Hadn't seen these before, but part 3 is coming.  Except now I don't want to see it.  Part 2 was almost exactly the same movie the first one was, with the same jokes, the same one song, same...everything.  Seems like a waste.

-Zombieland - Yuck.  This is to the zombie genre as timecrimes was to time travel.  It's the smallest possible amount of story they could bother with and still technically be a zombie movie.  Just terrible.

-The Informant! - Hey, this was really good.  Soderbergh's 90s by way of the 70s.  Lots of great comics in cameo roles, cool story, funny, well done, this is the opposite of cinematic warm mayonnaise.

-The Strangers - Worth it for one long genuinely creepy shot of Liv Tyler on the phone, with one of the strangers hanging around in the house, unbeknownst to her.

-Redbelt - I heard sometime later that this is a movie people don't like.  Those people are wrong.  Fancy Mamet-y plotting unfolds, honor is preserved.

-KRAA! The Sea Monster - Truly a misunderstood horrible monster of the sea.  Courtesy of Doc Mock's Movie Mausoleum.  (still, better than the sequel, KRAAmer Vs. KRAAmer)

#1,497: Inglourious Basterds

Here's a post that didn't post at the end of August, because I was too lazy to do all the two-line reviews: Feverishly hacking away at the mountain of editorial assistance required to bring SpikeTV's Surviving Disaster to a television screen near you starting next Tuesday, Sept 1, and every Tuesday thereafter for the next ten weeks.

In June, we had a little time off and I went off to edit a feature film shot on the RED, The Selling, written by and starring Gabriel Diani (who you can hear in episodes of Better Radio, my sci-fi sketch comedy radio show (re: podcast) ).  It's great, by far the best feature I've worked on so far.  Spooky and funny in turn, it's a haunted house story that's more inconvenient for a real estate agent than it's terrifying for a family.

While I was working on that, I was also watching:

-Public Access - Bryan Singer & Christopher McQuarrie's first movie.  Not exactly...good.  Reminded me of Sex, Lies, & Videotape a bit.  And there's the formative version of the big twist they'd get right the next time around.

-Jandek on Corwood - Documentary on a musical recluse.  Not at all as interesting as its own subject.

-Zombie Girl - Same problem, different cause.  I'd suspect this was shot without a plan, and pieced together from the footage, which is a much less likely route to a captivating doc.

-Man on Wire - I probably would have been way more into this one if I'd seen it cold, a year ago when it was new, instead of hearing all the details all over the place in advance.  It was, however, a fun inaugural run for MustacheTV.

-Captivity - Kim Bauer Gets Kidnapped: The Movie.  Snooze.

-Push - Why aren't original movies about superheroes any good?  What's the exception to this rule?  Is it because (almost?) all of them try to break from comic book tradition with the edgy, raw, gritty idea of using superpowers in order to be lazy?

-The Great Debaters - Good, but pretty by-the-book example of one of these.  Also, I think it had some anachronistic stuff about Hitler and WWII that wouldn't've happened yet at the time the movie takes place.

-The Hurt Locker -  This was pretty good, but also kind of a cheat.  What's more exciting in a movie than the stock moment of 'will the bomb be defused in time?'  And this movie is a huge collection of those scenes!  I did wonder though, about what they might have been saying with the spent cartridge floating and bouncing in slow motion, and why they bothered to set it 5 years ago when it probably wasn't written that way, with all its references to things that didn't exist 5 years ago.

-G.I. Joe - I was never at all a fan of G.I. Joe back in the day, so I went into this one not knowing who anyone was.  Thankfully, they make it easy on newcomers by putting one of everyone on both teams.  I wonder if the toys were just repaints of the same figure.  It's been a good year for animation, so this is far from getting the 'one of the best animated movies I've seen this year' joke.  Still, way better than Transformers, even if I did doze off for a bit somewhere in the middle.

-Funny People - First Apatow movie I've seen.  Good thing they didn't call it 'Good Actors.'  I liked it overall, especially from the perspective knowing a bunch of upcoming comics.  That Jonah Hill guy though; yuck.

-District 9 - Cool movie.  Loved it less than the popular response.  Close as we'll get to Half-Life: The Movie.  Still don't like when mock docs don't commit.  Hope, like Cloverfield, they'll have the guts not to take the bait on a sequel.

-District 13 - Action parkour fighting movie!  Kind of like Escape From Paris.

-District 13: Ultimatum -  The sequel to action parkour fighting movie!  I actually liked this one even better for the most part.  Crazy and more elaborate fights, flashier parkour chases, and an even more disappointing ending!

-Ponyo by the Sea - Hot on the heels of the original, Studio Ghibli's anime remake of last year's action hit Taken is a terrific retelling.  It hits the beats of the original while still adding something new to the father's relentless search for his missing daughter.  The casting for the English dub was well done, and the recruiting Liam Neeson to reprise the original role is brilliant.  The primary difference in this version is that the girl is overcome with Hugo's Disease.  I don't think anything I've seen in the theater this year so far has gotten as much laughter as this did.

-Last of the Mohicans - the 1936 version.  AND

-Last of the Mohicans - the 1992 version, which is a remake of the 1936 edition, not a fresh version of the book.  I thought I'd start a series here on double features, but it's been a while since I saw these, and I was surprised by how lousy they were.  Even more so, how the movie doesn't seem to be about the Last of the Mohicans (who, by the by, aren't extinct).

-Inglourious Basterds - this was fun to see, the way it's always fun to see more from someone who has such a distinctive mark on their movies.  And it was fun to see the audience around me not-enjoying it, from the walk-outs to the guy who kept complaining that scenes didn't make any sense and it was too much work to read the subtitles.  I liked the way it would make silly concessions and then double back on them and turn out to be clever.  I wonder how much it changed since it's premiere at Cannes, since Ebert's review didn't seem to apply to the finished cut.  Also, one gets the sense that the clan of Basterds were only included as an excuse to use a title QT loved on his movie about something else entirely.

8 or 9 out of 17 this round.