Passengers

It’s a pretty horrible situation. There’s a colony spaceship on its way to another star with 5,000 people in cold storage. But there is a malfunction and one of them is revived, while still 90 years from the destination. It’s impossible to go back in the deep freeze (which seems implausible, but is necessary to the plot). After a year with no one to talk to but a robot bartender, he wakes ... Read more »

Passion

I had high hopes for this because it was directed by Brian De Palma, who is sometimes very good, and stars Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams, who are both very good. And it does go along well for quite a while, and then it tries too hard to have twists and surprises in the manner of Hitchcock, who De Palma has always emulated. But it eventually got to be Too Damn Much, and not believable. No ... Read more »

The Passion of the Christ

Since my Aramaic is a bit rusty and I don’t speak Hebrew, the following review will be in Latin. Caveat Emptor! Cave Canem!

Isthay oviemay ouldshay ebay alledcay “The Assionpay of the Oviegoermay.” Evernay avehay I ufferedsay oughthray uchsay a epulsiveray isplayday of omitousvay erversionpay. Elmay Ibsongay has anagedmay to urntay the orystay ... Read more »

Passionada

What I imagine reading one of those cookie-cutter romance paperbacks would be like. We didn’t care for the characters, everything we saw was completely predictable, and we shut it down after an hour with no curiosity about how it all came out. One thing surprised me later, looking it up on IMDb. The second female lead, Emmy Rossum, 18 years old, has landed one of the plum parts of the ... Read more »

A Patch of Blue

Aside from figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I can’t think of a person who has done more for civil rights than Sidney Poitier. King was the man on the political side, pushing new laws and breaking old barriers on the battlefields. Poitier was up there on the silver screen, where his influence was arguably even more profound, because his movies showed how ... Read more »

Patriots Day

The first of two films about the Boston Marathon bombings. Slated to come out later this year is Stronger, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tatiana Maslany. That one will focus on one real-life couple: Jeff Bauman, who lost both his legs, and his girlfriend Erin Hurley. This one attempts to tell the larger story of what happened from the bombing itself to the killing ... Read more »

Patton

I suppose that as long as the human gene pool throws up walking piles of shit like Kim Jong-il, Osama bin Laden, and Adolf Hitler, we will need men like George S. Patton to stand against them … but I sure wish we didn’t. I think most military historians would agree that he was America’s best fighting general since Robert E. Lee (who, technically, was on the other side, but he was a West ... Read more »

Paul

It’s funny how for many years now, my favorite SF movies have tended to be spoofs, satires, like Galaxy Quest or Idiocracy. Well, maybe it’s not so funny, since the reason these movies score so heavily is that most movie science fiction is idiotic, on the seventh-grade level (or lower). It’s so easy to satirize or lampoon, it’s such a ... Read more »

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2

(NOTE: I was recently hospitalized for four days. So I did what I did the last time I was there: I watched movies from the small selection they offered. This was an opportunity to take in some that I normally would have passed on. And just as last time, I found they were all movies I was wise to have skipped. At least they didn’t make me any sicker. This is one.)

If there was ever ... Read more »