Romance/Horror, 90 Minutes, 2009:
You know what the torture porn genre needs? More romantic comedy! At least that’s what somebody had to say to get this movie made. Actually they had walk into a meeting – probably several – and convince a whole room full of people that the winning combination has got to be horror-romantic-torture-thriller-comedy. Or maybe it was thriller-romantic-torture-comedy-horror. Or maybe…
Drama/Romance, 97 Minutes, 2012
You know what makes a good love story? When you can’t decide if the people involved are assholes or not, that’s what. If they’re clearly assholes then it’s easy: they don’t deserve love and it’s a bad love story. If they’re clearly not assholes then it’s also easy: they’ll get love but it won’t matter because it’s not real and it’s a bad love story. On the other hand, if you’re honestly not sure there’s a good chance that those characters may be worth caring about. Real people are assholes sometimes and a good love story needs real people.
Drama/Comedy, 93 Minutes, 2013
Miss Sinclair (Julianne Moore [IMDB]) is a dedicated high-school English teacher in a small, Pennsylvanian town. Her encompassing love of literature has given her an overactive romantic sensibility and little patience for ordinary relationships. She’s perfectly content being left alone with her teaching, her cats and her books.
Sci-fi, 125 Minutes, 2013
This really wasn’t such a bad idea but tell me, Stephanie Meyer fans, does every single, blessed thing she writes involve a blank, emotionless girl in a love triangle? Is it a new genre, like Dub Step or dinosaur porn, that I’ve just been blissfully unaware of?
“Video Game High School” on IMDB
Sci-Fi, 123 Minutes, 2012
[This isn’t technically a movie. Rather it’s a web series whose first season has been cut into a movie for distribution on NetFlix. I’m going to treat it like a movie. So there.]
This entire thing is unabashed, shameless pandering to the video game crowd. In this world video games are king. Good players are the rock stars and every teen wants to go to “Video Game High School”. Brian D is an everyman schlep who accidentally frags the school’s star, “The Law”, and gets a scholarship for his trouble.
Comedy, 122 Minutes, 2001
I recently decided to introduce this film, one of my absolute, all-time favorite movies for ever-and-ever, to my kids. Both of them, ages 11 and 14, groaned out loud at the idea of “reading a movie”. Both were completely entranced, as I knew they would be, in the first 10 minutes.
Comedy, 107 Minutes, 2011
This is a spiritual sibling to “Bridesmaids” [IMDB] both in tone and in the simple fact that the two share a hell of a lot of their casts. For the greater part, the movies are aimed at the same people, have similar levels of tastelessness and generally both work pretty well.
Comedy/Musical, 112 Minutes, 2012
My 10-year old daughter begged to watch this movie about a cappella singing. Why not? The movie lets us know that a cappella singing is the coolest God-damndest thing in the entire world! If you could smoosh extreme cliff-diving, lion-taming and sex into one glistening ball of awesome you might approach how cool a cappella singing is. For my part I immediately shoved the movie into the corner of my brain where anything I’ve ever seen about “Glee” goes to wither and die painfully.
Why did I end up liking it so much?
Drama, 97 Minutes, 2012
This isn’t really a “comedy” (although it’s billed that way). You really won’t laugh at it. It’s a somewhat decent drama however. A light, non-threatening, ultimately unimportant drama to be sure, but a decent one nonetheless. It’s flawed and these flaws tend to undercut its message but I’m willing to admit that I may not be the target audience here.
“The Giant Mechanical Man” on IMDB
Comedy/Drama, 94 Minutes, 2012
Full disclosure: I love Jenna Fischer [IMDB]. Just love her to death. She can do no wrong. Any problems with this movie are somebody else’s fault. That said there’s really not all that much wrong here.
![IMDB, The Host [2013]](http://depressedpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/imdb-the-host-2013.jpg)
