Archive for January, 2012

Short Take: Arguably what "Salt" or "Columbiana" should have been

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Screenwriter: Lem Dobbs

Cast: Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Michael Angarano, Bill Paxton

Length: 1h 33m

Synopsis: In a world where you live only for as long as you can defend yourself against stiff physical assaults and the occasional poor judgment of character, there exists Mallory (Carano). A freelancing black ops agent of sorts, her dedication, awareness, savvy, and tenacity have made her one of the most sought after of her kind. After a rescue mission that didn’t go as smoothly as it should have, she begins to suspect that one of her more frequent employers, known only as Kenneth (McGregor), has been planning to set her up for failure. As a test, Mallory takes up his newest assignment where she’ll be working with another agent named Paul (Fassbender), who it turns out is in fact part of a double-cross. Surviving the betrayal placed a giant target on her back, and now she’s on the run looking to clear her name and get revenge on those responsible.

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Short Take: It assumes its shock value will hide how pretentious and hollow it truly is

Director: Julia Leigh

Screenwriter: Julia Leigh

Cast: Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie

Length: 1h 44m

Synopsis: Lucy (Browning) is a 20-something college student trying to scrape by with what little money she’s able to work for. She waitresses, prints copy at a local office, and offers herself to the school labs for the occasional lab-rat-like testing. When she’s not working, we find her courting middle-aged men in swanky bars, showing off an appetite for the erotic. When she answers an ad for an unorthodox waitressing job, posted by a mysterious but obviously wealthy woman named Clara (Blake), she’s told that the job involves being scantily clad but absolutely no sex. Lucy tests out this well-paying, if not unusual gig only to find herself with an even higher paying and more unusual offer. This time she’s propositioned by Clara to come to a secluded mansion to simply take a sleeping potion, where she’ll wake up after a few hours and be driven straight home. What Lucy doesn’t know is that when she’s fast asleep Clara sells time with her unconscious body to elderly gentlemen callers, who proceed to have their way with her. By the end, Lucy is forced to question her willingness to do almost anything for money.

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Short Take: An all around solid effort on a cool premise, but couldn't reach the point of excellence it was trying to

Director: Gonzalo López-Gallego

Screenwriter: Brian Miller

Cast: Warren Christie, Ryan Robbins, Lloyd Owen

Length: 1h 17m

Synopsis: In 1973 astronauts Ben Anderson (Christie), John Grey (Robbins), and Nathan Walker (Owen) are asked to lead the originally canceled Apollo 18 lunar expedition in order to place missile-detecting equipment on the moon in defense against the Soviet Union. Unlike the other Apollo missions, however, this one is Top Secret. Not even the astronauts’ families know where they’re going, but what’s worse is that they never return. Fast-forward to present day: 84 hours of video footage which captured what went on during the mission somehow made its way onto the internet, and the film we see is a spliced together version of it all. The fate of the astronauts, we find, was a horrifying one. Aside from finding themselves stranded, they faced creatures that give new meaning to the word “extraterrestrial.” For those wondering why we haven’t been back to the moon, Apollo 18 provides the answer.

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Short Take: A harrowing story that's emotional but not sappy. Distinctly Spielbergian.

Director: Steven Spielberg

Screenwriters: Lee Hall and Richard Curtis; Michael Morpurgo (novel)

Cast: Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Peter Mullen, Niels Arestrup, David Thewlis, Tom Hiddleston

Length: 2h 26m

Synopsis: It is the era of World War I. The horse of a poor farmer boy (Irvine), named Joey, is sold to the English cavalry so that his family can pay the debt on their farm. Distraught, the boy offers to enlist in the army but is too young. From then on the horse changes hands from a Captain (Hiddleston), to a grandfather (Arestrup) and his granddaughter (Celine Buckens), and a handful of others. All who find themselves in charge of the horse fall in love with it. In having so many different owners Joey ends up traveling far from his original home, and although he has affections for some of his new owners he ultimately seeks to return to the poor farmer boy who raised him. In the end, as property of the German army, Joey risks everything in a desperate charge towards English forces in the hope that he can finally find his way home. Like the soldiers who surround him, Joey demonstrates the kind of bravery that few look to prove they have. But will it be enough?

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Welcome everyone to Movie-Thoughts’ first annual Turn of the Year Awards! While everyone else is making Top 10 lists for the upcoming awards season, we thought it would be more worthwhile to talk about what we feel are the most notable movies of the past year, good or bad. Read about our Best and Worst moviegoing experiences, our biggest surprises and disappointments, the most well-crafted movies, and the overall Best movies of the year. Then, after you’re done reading what we think, tell us your thoughts in the comments section below!

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