Movie Roundup

A couple of weeks ago I rented a bunch of DVDs from the video store, but I never got around to writing about any of them. I've had this draft sitting in my list of unpublished posts ever since. Sigh. I wanna put something down and move on, so in forty-three words or less, here they are:

1. Stranger than Fiction - A funny and poignant tale of a man trying to live life more fully and break out of his mold. Will Ferrell was terrific in this role. My daughter and I both laughed heartily and got a little misty while watching it.

2. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny - It looked funny, but I didn't actually watch it. So sue me. Maybe someday I'll get back to it. But then again, maybe Jack Black's shtick has worn a little too thin with me. We'll see.

3. The Magnificent Seven - Sweeping photography, a stirring score, and a charismatic cast make the American remake of The Seven Samurai a bona fide classic in its own right. Have another look at it.

4. Casino Royale - Quite simply the best Bond movie ever made. If you missed it in the theater, rent it! The parkour sequence alone is worth the time.

5. Science of Sleep - A quirky, unambitious, artsy foreign film by the man who directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It stars the multi-talented Gael García Bernal. While it was somewhat interesting to me, I can't really recommend it to a general audience.

Readers might be amused to learn that I kept having to revise upward the number of words per capsule review. I started out with "fourteen words or less" but it got longer and longer. Jeez I'm a long-winded bullshitter. Or something.

Onward!