Menu Close

Category: Movies

10 Movies for vicarious travel

10 Movies for vicarious travel

My blogging angle has clearly become almost exclusively travel-oriented, and any self-respecting travel blogger has to have a list of his favorite travel movies. So here is my attempt to establish bona fides. I set out with the goal of picking not just the movies filmed in gorgeous locations but…

Drive-by movie review: Moneyball

Going through recent Oscar contenders, I find another movie that I like well enough but do not hold worthy of an Oscar consideration. It gave me a glimpse into inner workings of a baseball franchise, which I always find fascinating (although I have little doubt that the eponymous book on…

Hooked on Beatles

Last weekend we went for a movie screening of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, shown as part of New York International Children’s Film Festival. Lifelong Beatles fan that I am, I have never actually seen the movie in its entirety before, so it was a treat (followed up by a nice…

Drive-by movie review: Hugo

It is brilliantly made. It deserves all of those non-acting Oscars that it received and probably a couple more (I loved the score and the overall editing was superb, but those two awards went elsewhere). And it directly speaks to our love of cinematography as a magical art form –…

Oscar coincidence

For the second year in a row, I manage to see one single Oscar contender for the Best Picture award ahead of the annual ceremony. The movie wins the corresponding Golden Globe award and is generally regarded as a front-runner for the Academy award, but ends up losing both the…

Mid-year movie roundup

With my continuing meager creative output, I figured I could for once fall back on an almost-forgotten recurring feature. After all, we did decide a couple of months ago to trade in cable movie channels – which, in the States, seem to never have the movies I want to watch…

Movie [drive-by] review: Alice in Wonderland

The children and I went to see Alice in Wonderland on Sunday. We are all big aficionados of Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, and anything coming out in 3D these days has a strong attraction for us anyway. We weren’t disappointed. The 3D experience is quite rewarding, special effects and amalgamation of…

Oscars

NBC pissed me off with their atrocious Olympics coverage. ABC then decided to get on my bad side by making me miss Oscars. Almost. I was almost expecting the looping “important message from Cablevision” that blamed all ills on ABC throughout the day on Sunday to be replaced by live…

2009 movie round-up

With my very limited movie-watching programme of the second half of the year, I was surprised to learn that I managed to see more films for the first time this year than I did last year (50 vs 47). What follows is my by now traditional year-end round-up. First, a…

Movie review: Avatar

I freely admit that I’m not a cinema-going type. My misanthropic tendencies are acutely tested in the presence of inconsiderable louts with their cell phones, eating habits and inability to refrain from talking to one another during the showing. As a result, I rarely go to the movies, unless it…

15 Movies Meme

In the absence of truly original content, I sought to fall back on a gimmick today, that being the trebly-symmetric date of 09/09/09. Except, to keep the symmetry intact, I would have to talk about something related to the Olympic Games, as I did both on 07/07/07 and on 08/08/08.…

Late June movie round-up

In less than three weeks since my last movie-watching summary I managed to see 11 movies, some of them fairly recent releases. Half of them were watched on transatlantic flights, plus I worked through the DVR queue a bit, in anticipation of fast-approaching cancellation of my satellite TV service. Here…

Early June movie round-up

This is a bit of an inertia post. I do not feel ready to completely abandon my drive-by movie reviews, but none of the movies I caught in the last month or so were truly on my to-watch list (not even Star Trek, an impulse decision, or Coraline, watched at…

Coraline in 3D

The girls and I went to see Coraline today, which was my first experience with “real 3D” movies. Not the old spectrum-shift type that looked very confusing when not seen through special glasses; and the glasses themselves were not of the flimsy cardboard variety with one red eye and one…

Movie review: Star Trek

If this blog is any kind of a guidance, yesterday was only the third time in a year that I actually went to a cinema to watch a movie. I might as well give my brief expressions of that here. Since most people who are interested in Star Trek undoubtedly…

April movie round-up

The three films that I watched for the first time during the month of April are all, to a degree, “acclaimed”, if not critically, then at least among some of my friends. That last consideration drove my selection a bit, on the few occasions where I did find time to…

March movie roundup

You would think that after a short hiatus I’d come back with plenty of stuff to talk about. You would be wrong. I am not touching any of the current events or political topics (not that I have ever been prolific in that area), there is nothing exciting going on…

February movie roundup

Anyone who pays any attention to the movies widget somewhere on the right-hand sidebar may have noticed that it’s been pretty stale for the last few weeks. Convergence of recently recorded episodes of NCIS, House and ER, the James Bond month on Sky Movies, old Russian variety shows that were…