Movie Clip Notes

**Attempted to provide some sweet movie clips, but it looks like the movie studio (Universal Pictures) has put a block on any sort of “fair use” videos of their movie. Lame.**

The Kingdom was a somewhat welcome surprise of a movie. I didn’t have very high hopes for such a plot in the time of other reactionary U.S. versus the Middle East movies this year. But The Kingdom was more of an action/detective story, and kept the preachiness to a tolerable low level.

And the two main, non-American actors (Ashraf Barhom and Ali Suliman) performances were excellent.

Plus, any movie espousing “Pabst, [is the] best beer on the planet” gets top marks every time.

The awesome trailer. “Bullet the Blue” by U2 always felt to me to be the weakest song on their Joshua Tree album, until this trailer, when I heard the lyrics for what seems like the first time. “In the howling wind comes a stinging rain, see it driving nails into the souls on the tree of pain.”

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Lady Chatterley reminds me in all the right ways of the similarly wonderful movie, The Lover. Incredibly sensual love scenes, very little dialogue, a forbidden love, pitch perfect acting.

And Marina Hands is absolutely breathtaking. I look forward to seeing her in future movies.

Is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (now that’s a mouthful) worth seeing? I guess so.

It’s interesting to see how Jesse James might have been during his latter years. But the story goes on and on, with little insight into anyone but Robert Ford’s motives.

And while Casey Affleck is creepy as hell, which is ideal for his role, Brad Pitt brings nothing to the movie. Is there a discernable difference in his acting when he’s showing some heavy emotion (anger, sorrow) between this movie and Troy and Fight Club? His crying always seems to make me laugh.

I had such high hopes for this comedy, especially after listening to the always funny Paul Rudd explain the movie’s interesting premise at last year’s Sundance. And with such a great cast, how could you go wrong.

The Ten truly was an odd and eccentric movie. But also, unfortunately, very unfunny. It was actually quite bad, to be honest. The “CAT Scan” piece and the final bit had one or two funny jokes, but the rest was simply not funny, I don’t care where your sense of humor lies.

3:10 To Yuma was a well directed, well acted, well shot western. And yet, there’s nothing really spectacular that stands out here. The story is a bit silly near the end, especially Russell Crowe’s character’s motivation. But Ben Foster continues to amaze with his acting.