In Time

In Time's concept and world are cool, but they're wasted on a lackluster plot and Justin Timberlake's bad acting.

I was interested in this movie when it came out, and I remembered it had gotten semi-favorable buzz. I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to see this weekend. I think it would've been a better movie without Justin Timberlake. I looked over Ebert's review after I watched it, and he thought Justin was great, but I'm not with him on that. His acting was terrible; it pulled me out of the movie practically every time he said something.

It's totally engaging just because of the concept, but plot is a letdown. They could've done a lot more with it. It was cool seeing people like Pete from Mad Men, Cillian Murphy, and Matt Bomer. They all really helped carry the movie. There shouldn't have been so many "time" puns. It got ridiculous.

In the House

In the House was appropriately tense, and it had some interesting moments, but it all fell apart at the end and rendered the entire movie pointless.

It's been five months since I saw a movie I disliked as much as In the House, so I guess that's a good thing. I was interested in it based on the trailer, and I forgot to check and see if it was any good or not before I decided to watch it, but I probably would've watched it even if I had done my research. It's tough to watch movies in a foreign language. You have to read the whole time, and you miss out on getting to watch what's going on. French is cool, though. I didn't used to like it, but it's starting to grow on me.

World War Z

The zombies in World War Z are effectively disturbing, but there's really no reason to watch it.

World War Z is another movie that I didn't want to see. The little ant-people in the trailer didn't make it look interesting, and neither did anything else. Roeper said it was "entertaining as hell," though, so I figured I might as well see what it was all about. It turns out my initial reaction was accurate. There isn't really any reason to see this movie, unless you just have an interest in watching Brad Pitt fight zombies.

Brad does a fine job with the character, but it's still not very believable. The guy is just too perfect. He's always calm, always joking; it doesn't work. The zombies were effectively creepy. Even if the CG did look bizarre, it was still scary seeing a crowd of zombies coming at you like that, and the speed with which they were able to turn an entire city was impressive.

The Berlin File

 If you know Korean, you should definitely watch The Berlin File. Otherwise, it's probably going to be confusing. I didn't know what was going on at least half the time, but there was some cool action/spy stuff, and the plot reveal was satisfying. 

I was interested in The Berlin File after I saw the trailer for it, but Roeper never reviewed it, so I had to rely on IMDb. It was rated 6.6, so that was inconclusive, but the top reviewer liked it, so that was good enough for me. It turned out to be insanely confusing. I think you have to watch it twice if you don't speak Korean. They showed text with people's names/professions when we first saw them at the beginning, but it didn't help at all; there wasn't time to commit any part of that to memory, and then I spent the entire rest of the movie just trying to figure out who was who/what was going on.

That made it more satisfying when it was all revealed at the end, though. Every bit of information I managed to figure out was a triumph. It didn't help that there were North Koreans and South Koreans that were all Korean. At least Myeong-soo Dong was wearing a hat for a while so I could get a handle on who he was.

The Heat

There were a couple scenes in The Heat that weren't funny, and Sandra Bullock's face is a disaster, but Melissa McCarthy carried the movie and kept me laughing entire way through. 

I thought the trailer for The Heat was funny enough, but I figured the movie would be pretty dopey, and I wasn't interested in seeing it. Everybody seemed to like it after it came out, though, and Roeper gave it a good review, so I didn't want to miss out. I'm definitely glad I saw it. It was just as funny as the trailer, and unlike so many movies, it didn't have all the good jokes in the trailer. There were tons of good jokes for the whole movie, not just the three or four you see in the trailer. And the director says in the commentary that he likes to put alternate stuff in the trailer so there's new stuff to see when you watch the movie, so there you go.

The first thing I noticed in the movie was that Sandra Bullock looks terrible. It's like she went to her plastic surgeon and said "give me the Michael Jackson." I'm so glad I didn't see this in the theater. It would've been like Sylvester Stallone in The Expendables all over again. Blech. I can kind of relate to Ashburn, though.