When in Rome

Mark Steven Johnson's When in Rome wants me to think the protagonist, Beth is not "open to love." This movie really, really wants me to believe this. All of Beth's friends and family and even Beth seems convinced of the fact, but I wasn't.

The Tooth Fairy

It seems that this week's reviews have both asked me to reach in for my inner child. I did my best--especially with this movie, Michael Lembeck's The Tooth Fairy. I'm going to make a wild guess (or hope) that not too many grown adults will be interested in seeing a tooth fairy movie featuring The Rock, a pink tutu, and as many tooth puns as can be crammed into 102 minutes. So, I tried to watch with kids and parents in mind. I even realize that anyone, adult or child, walking into this film would not be expecting intellectual stimulation. Even while keeping all of this in mind, I still couldn't recommend this to anyone.

Legion

Action movies aren't supposed to be boring. They can be a lot of things: funny, complex, cheesy, cringe-worthy, ridiculous, loud, unbelievable, awe-inspiring... any of those things or a whole list of adjectives more. But boring? That's an action movie's one cardinal sin. If it's going to be awful, fine. Be awful. But don't be boring about it.

Jersey Shore

When I first heard of this show I thought it would make me glad I’m Sicilian instead of Italian and not from New Jersey. The focus of the controversy behind the show was how bad it made Italians look by reinforcing stereotypes instead of trying to reduce them. However, I found that while watching I never really felt like the people involved were representative of a culture. The most that I believe could be said of the cast members is that they are specimen of a subculture; merely examples of a group of people who have latched onto their fashion and things they’ve seen in Goodfellas as representations of their culture. Watching them with their modified and overly made up bodies didn’t feel like watching actual people. I felt like I was watching cartoon characters because they are merely caricatures of themselves. The same thing happens whenever I watch a MTV produced bit of entertainment. They’ve built an empire on sociological experiments in which little if not nothing is learned.

Einstein: His Life and Universe- Brenia

“Life is like a bicycle. In order to keep your balance, you have to keep moving.” Albert Einstein wrote this in a letter to his younger son, Eduard. Einstein was known for these sorts of witty comments. He also had a talent for finding simplicity in a complex universe. When his son asked why he was famous, he answered, “When a beetle walks along a branch, he doesn’t notice when it curves. I was lucky enough to notice what the beetle did not.” Einstein’s faith that the answer to the universe’s complex problems were simple ones is what drove Einstein throughout his life. He referred to this faith in physics as religious in nature. Physics was his passion and his sanctuary from the painfully personal. However, Albert Einstein was a whole human. He had love and pain, flaws, and also strengths. Humans are complex and there usually isn’t a simple explanation. Walter Isaacson seems to understand this. Einstein: His Life and Universe isn’t about Einstein the genius or Einstein the celebrity; it’s about Einstein the person.

Archer

I've been looking forward to this show immensely for a few months. I only vaguely paid attention when I first watched its sneaky pilot after the season premiere of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia because I didn't want to miss it too much during the wait. The awesomeness of the pilot got through to me though and I'm glad that after these months of waiting, this episode was just as great. I've been watching Adult Swim since its inception and it's always managed to amuse me in the middle of the night. I also watch a good amount of FX so when I heard Adam Reed (co-creator of such awesome shows as Sealab 2021 and Frisky Dingo, et al) was developing a show for FX, I was pretty excited. Archer is my favorite so far--with hilarious dialogue delivered by amazing voice actors and simple yet engaging animation. I'm quite happy about this combination of Adult Swim type programming and FX and I hope it turns out to last.

The Book of Eli

As human history has taught us, religion is a weapon. In the wrong hands, it can be twisted and molded to drive people to a whole litany of atrocities and horrors. Wars have been fought over it. Acts of terror have been committed over it. In the right hands? Religion can provide a measure of hope to the hopeless, comfort to the weary, light in the darkness.

The main characters of The Book of Eli know that really, really well. In this post-apocalyptic future, set 31 years after an event referred to only as "the Flash," Bibles have been destroyed. Religion, you see, was thought to have been the fuel to the Flash's hellfire, and some time after the remnants of society crawled out from their holes, they set to the task of incinerating every copy of scripture that they could find. Of course, they manage to destroy every copy but the one that Eli (Denzel Washington) stumbles upon sometime before the movie begins. And so Eli, spurred by a voice telling him only to go west, starts his long, arduous walk. He is almost a juggernaut in his quest, not deviating from the path, not being stopped by anything in it. He dispatches would-be bandits with vicious and lethal precision, in an almost super-human manner. He seems protected by a force greater than himself. That is, until his iPod runs out of batteries and he runs out of water, forcing him to stop at the nearest barter town. That barter town is run by an eccentric man named Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman at his most manic, who is desperate to get his hands on a single book. He sends out raid parties to bring back any book they can find, and it's not long before we figure out that Carnegie wants Eli's book because religion is a weapon. And with the only copy of the book, Carnegie can go from being the baron of a small barter town to a sort of cult-like leader, able to lead a veritable army of people to do his will.

The Lovely Bones

I never read Alice Sebold's book on which the film is based, although I wish I had so I could know what the tone of the story is meant to be. I certainly couldn't figure out what the tone of Peter Jackson's film version of The Lovely Bones was supposed to be. While, overall I found the film to be long, overly sentimental in all the wrong places, and bipolar, it had some great acting by everyone involved--which just made the whole thing that much more frustrating to watch.