Phenomenon

John Travolta is George Malley, a kind-hearted, simple man who is a mechanic in a small town. He's known and loved by the entire town and is celebrating his birthday one night when he sees a bright flash of light and a loud boom. Suddenly, he is super-energized with an endless thirst for knowledge and the super-accelerated mind to be able to process that knowledge. He is suddenly able to predict earthquakes, crack cyphers, perform telekinesis, and learn languages in less than an hour. All the while he's trying to win the affections of Lacy, played by Kyra Sedgwick. Meanwhile, his lifelong friends slowly turn on George as his new found "powers" frighten them. There's a sweet love story in the middle of this movie along with a bunch of kind, simple people. Hard to explain but this is a movie that really connects with me. I can totally relate to being the academic "freak show" and so, much like Good Will Hunting, that part of George's story resonates for me big time. Anyway, this is a movie I probably like a lot more than it really deserves but can't help it. 9/10.

Dark Tide

OK, I've read the reviews so I was expecting terrible going in. No problem there. I was looking for brainless entertainment while I just chilled out. And, hey, 2 hours of Halle Berry in a bikini, how bad can it be, right? Well...the answer is "pretty freaking awful". Holy cow. This is a really strong candidate for worst movie I've ever seen. It's just such a mess of...well, everything. The story is that Berry is a diver who free swims (i.e. outside of a cage) with great white sharks. She retires after her diving partner gets eaten by a shark. So no more shark diving. Until her husband, from whom she's estranged, shows up with a millionaire Brit who wants to free swim with sharks. Halle is REALLY AGAINST THAT because, ya know, guilt and stuff, until dude backs up the Brink's truck full o' cash. They go out on the water and mayhem ensues. Along the way, we get terrible dialogue delivered by bad actors and good actors acting poorly all mixed into a choppy story that has no meat on it and doesn't flow at all. The whole thing is just plain terrible. Really, just amazingly bad. 1/10.

Vantage Point

Dennis Quaid is a Secret Service agent seeing his first duty since taking a bullet for the prez some time ago. That dude from Lost is his partner. They're in Spain for some conference with a gazillion other world leaders and the prez is going to give a speech in the courtyard of a palace or something. Anyway, the prez gets shot and all chaos breaks out. The gimmick, and title of the movie, is that we see the same 15 minutes or so from all different vantage points in order to piece together what all happened. The action is fast, the movie is slick, and the gimmick is a fun one. There's some twists and turns, of course. There's also a much higher than I remember body count (this being the second time I've seen the movie). Anyway, this is a well-done movie with everyone doing a good job in their part. Entertaining, definitely. 7/10.

3 Days to Kill

A rather un-serious take on the spy thriller genre. Kevin Costner is an assassin who has just retired and wants to establish a relationship with his daughter before he dies. Turns out he's got some cancer that's going to kill him. He also has specific knowledge and skills the CIA needs to another assassination. They, in turn, have some magic medicine that's going to make Costner all better. Quid pro quo, ya know. The result is a pretty entertaining movie with some nice funny spots, like Costner's phone ringing at inopportune times with his ringtone for his daughter. Amber Heard co-stars in a completely useless role. She's Costner's CIA contact but her shtick is some kind of noir femme fatale or something. Whatever. She can't act and her part is terrible. Fortunately, she's not on screen all that much. Anyway, this is hardly a great movie but it's amusing and Costner is pretty good in it. 5/10.

Juno

Ellen Page is Juno, a 16-year old who gets pregnant by her boyfriend Paul, played by Michael Cera. Juno isn't ready to be a mom so she's going to give up her child for adoption by a couple played by Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman. The movie is about Juno's relationship with Paul, with her dad & stepmom, and with the adoptive couple. In general, this movie works pretty well. I think I liked it more the first time I saw it but it's still pretty good on a second watch. It feels fairly authentic though Juno's dialogue is often really rude and is disaffected youth to the extreme and ends up being grating and annoying frequently. There are a lot of funny moments and the cast is terrific. Page and Cera were basically made for their roles and the supporting folks (Garner, Bateman, JK Simmons, and Allison Janney and a great cameo from Rainn Wilson) are all fantastic. Anyway, this one is pretty good, right at the Tabedoza line - 7/10.

St. Vincent

Bill Murray is Vincent, a crabby old Vietnam vet who just wants the world to leave him alone. Melissa McCarthy and her son ("Oliver") move in next door. Oliver and Vincent strike up an unlikely friendship when Vincent becomes his babysitter. While this movie treads over old ground (the crusty old guy who learns from a young friend, the feel-good ending, the old guy with some tender secrets underneath, the hooker with a heart of gold, etc), it does it really well. This is funny and touching and well-done. McCarthy is good in her role, as understated as you'll ever see her, with nary a fat joke to be found. Here she's just...a normal mom, struggling to make things work. Anyway, this was really good. 8/10.

Reign Over Me

Adam Sandler is Charlie Fineman, a dentist whose life is destroyed when his wife, three children and dog, are aboard one of the planes on 9/11. Don Cheadle plays his college roommate who sees Fineman wandering the streets four years later. Fineman has disconnected from the world, retreating into a life of endlessly remodeling his kitchen, video games, and shutting himself off. Sandler is REALLY great in this. He shows us Fineman's pain and it is raw and overwhelming. Cheadle is excellent as always and the rest of the cast does a nice job of rounding things out. This is a fantastic movie. The ending is perhaps a bit too easy but the rest is really great. 9/10.

Rampage: Capital Punishment

Uwe Boll's sequel to the surprisingly good Rampage about a guy who loads up on armor and guns and shoots up his town and...gets away. Now he's decided to take over a TV station and broadcast his "You are all brainwashed" message to the world. This one is nowhere near as good. There's just nothing here, really. A very disappointing sequel to a movie I liked a lot. 3/10.

Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1)

Liked it. A lot. The show has some issues - the occasional anachronistic phrasing, a tendency early on to force feed you technical stuff to establish credibility, some random events not really followed up on - but it still works. The cast is terrific and the characters feel authentic. And there are some great moments - when Joe walks into a conference room at Comdex '83 and sees the Macintosh for the first time and senses a paradigm shift in computing, that's a great moment. That resonates with me big-time because I remember that feeling myself - 11-year old Tabe seeing a Mac and having his mom drive him to computer stores just so he could play around with MacPaint. I'm happy to hear they've signed on for a second season and can't wait to see what they do with it. 8/10.

Kids For Cash

This movie tells the story of the "Kids For Cash" scandal from Pennsylvania where two judges were accused of improperly sentencing juveniles to a privately-owned detention center in return for cash payments from the owners of that facility. The reality is a little more nuanced than that. There's no proof offered that the judges were getting kickbacks specifically for sentencing kids. More they were bribed to force the shutdown of the state facility (which, from all sounds of it, NEEDED to be shut down) and guaranteeing they would sentence kids to the private facility. The two judges split $2.2m for their disgusting actions. The movie tells that story and also dives into the details of some particularly egregious miscarriages of justice. There's the girl* who was sentenced to jail for creating a fake/satire Myspace page of her vice principal. There's the kid who served *5 years* for buying (supposedly unknowingly) a stolen moped. There's the girl who served 6 years for getting into a fight in school. And on and on and on. In each case, they were essentially tricked into not having legal counsel present. Amazingly, both judges for some reason consented to participate in the documentary, with neither coming off particularly well. This is just a truly awful story and the movie tells it well. It's horrifying what the system did to thousands of kids. The only good news is that both judges are in prison for a long time. Excellent documentary - 9/10.

* - The Myspace girl and the daughter of one of the judges are now somehow friends and are actually trying to work together on juvenile justice issues. Go figure.

Interstellar

LOL. Seriously, that's my reaction. There's some nice ideas and themes in this movie but...man. There are so many plot holes, mistakes, and leaps in logic it's like somebody took a machine gun to the script. Good grief. Even technically it disappoints. It was apparently shot on film- film left out in one of the dirt storms from the movie, that is. It's grainy, dull, and flat. The special effects are unimpressive, with some looking like they were ripped straight out of a medium-budget sci-film. From 1984. Anne Hathaway's dialogue and delivery range from pretty good to laughably terrible. And, well, it's an Anne Hathaway movie so, of course she cries. Maybe she's crying over the way her skin changes shades for no apparent reason, from pale to almost ghostly white and back again. Matthew Mconahayhayhayhayhay spends the entire movie acting like he simply doesn't have the energy to enunciate or even fully speak his lines. The little girl who plays the daughter is very good in her limited screen time. Jessica Chastain looks good but is pretty unremarkable in a part that doesn't ask much of her. Having said all that, like I mentioned, there's some nice themes here. The overarching "survival instinct" theme is well-done. The pull of love and family are well-done. The last 5-10 minutes of the movie is really good. And, despite being 3 hours long, the movie doesn't feel particularly long. In the end, though, this movie is simply not good. 4/10. Maybe.

John Wick

Do you want to see 90 minutes of Keanu Reeves half-growling his lines and busting out headshots on a whole bunch of fools? Yes, yes, you do. This movie does nothing original - except perhaps not having Reeves bang the hot female assassin trying to kill him - but it does everything really well. It's slick, it's fast-paced, it has some humor and Reeves is fantastic in this. The bad guys are a bunch of cliches (Russian bad guys who smoke with the youngish son who's a totally entitled douchebag listening to obnoxious rap music) mixed with the "Mayhem" guy from car insurance commercials but you don't care. They mess with Keanu's dog and he makes them pay. And it all just...works. So ignore the flaws, dream of a world where John Wick kidnaps Liam Neeson's daughter or something, and enjoy this movie. It's a lot of fun. 9/10.

Standing Up

Came across this one on a "what's new on Netflix" site a few months back and the premise (victims of a horrible summer camp prank go on a journey of self-discovery and stuff) sounded promising so I added it to my list. Last night, decided to give it a shot. it's apparently based on a beloved children's/juvenile book. I wouldn't know. Anyway, admitting that I'm not the target audience, I still thought this wasn't very good. And wouldn't have been when I was 12 either. Howie & Grace are stripped naked and left alone on an island by their fellow summer campers. They decide to find some clothes and wander around for a few days instead of returning to camp. They make some friends at another camp and sort of try to get Grace's mom to come rescue them. I say "sort of" because Grace calls her mom, screaming and crying for mom to come get her but when pushed for a reason why, instead of coming up with something even remotely close to what happened to her, she just says "they're all a bunch of hypocrites". Yeah, THAT will get mom to come take you home from camp. Whatever. It does do a nice job of not having completely ridiculous situations or adults that are over-the-top. And we get a nice feel-good ending. In the end, not quite what I'd hoped for from the IMDB reviews. 4/10.

If I Stay

The wife really wanted to see this one and I had to pay penance for taking her to Gone Girl, LOL. Mia is a world-class cellist who falls in love with Adam, the lead singer of a local rock band that's about to go big. Mia and her entire family of impossibly cool parents and brother are in a car crash that leaves Mia fighting for her life. We then see her spirit running around the hospital reviewing her life while she tries to decide whether to live (and return to a horribly altered life) or die (and end her suffering). This movie is a mess. I thought the premise was stupid when I saw the previews and I was right. The script is a joke, ignoring the ages of the characters constantly (yeah, I'm sure the local bars are more than happy to have 16-year olds drinking without checking IDs), with faux angst and tension, and just...ugh. I get that I'm not the target demo for this movie but c'mon. This stunk. 3/10 - maybe.

Gone Girl

I really, really wanted to like this one. Heard great things about it, was intrigued by the story and......was let down. I'd heard all about this "shocking twist" but I saw it coming from pretty much the opening 5 minutes of the movie. In fact, it was so underwhelming that my wife & I actually sat there and discussed other options that would have been better twists. Felt there was never really tension and the ending disappointed greatly. When the credits started rolling, everyone in my theater was looking around and asking each other "That it's? It's really over?", expecting there to be more. We felt the same way. In the end, this was a mediocre effort that really should have been a lot better. 6/10.

Out of the Furnace

Christian Bale is the steel-plant-working older brother of Casey Affleck. Affleck is an Iraq War veteran struggling to find his way in post-war life. To make ends meet, he's fighting in bare knuckle underground fights. Woody Harrelson is a big deal in that scene. Affleck gets in over his head and Bale, after serving a stint for killing 2 people in a DUI, has to rescue him and get revenge. This is a movie that's dead-set on being gritty and it works in that regard. Unfortunately, there's not actually any tension. Coupled with a ridiculous ending, it just ends up not really working. 5/10.

The Frozen Ground

Nicolas Cage is a detective who locks onto the scent of a possible serial killer in Alaska. John Cusack - spoiler alert - is that serial killer. Vanessa Hudgens is the prostitute victim who got away and brings the whole thing to light. Cage, Cusack & Hudgens are all fine in their roles but the movies ends up being nothing special. There's not a lot of tension or drama. Instead it kind of just lurches forward from one example of Hudgens' character running away from safety to some other dangerous situation for no apparent reason. Speaking of Hudgens, it's pretty obvious she took this role to show how grown up she is. Look, she's a hooker who smokes, does drugs, and says the f-word a lot! This is all based on the real story of serial killer Robert Hansen. In the end, it's pretty good but never rises up. 6/10.