Quick Reviews

I finished a bunch of movies over the weekend- Here are the quick reviews- Triangle- this is the first time we had seen this one- Very cool sci-fi horror. A single mother of an autistic child goes on a weekend boat trip with a man she just met and 4 of his friends. They get stuck ina storm and their boat overturns. They are rescued by a large ship passing by, but, once onboard, they cannot find anyone else on board and they finally see a masked person (but not in a Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees way) trying to kill them. The single mother slowly figures out the mystery and has to figure out how to stop it. It just keeps building and building and building and gets much more twisty than originally suspected.While rated R, if you have cable, watch for it to come around on a commercial station- I doubt that it would be hard at all to do a TV edit. Film-7 Movie- 7 Marc Pease Experience- Although only 84 minutes long being written and directed by Todd Louiso (the one who is NOT Jack Black who works with Cuscak at the store in 'High Fidelity') and starring Jason Schwartzman, ben Stiller, and Anna Kendrick, this is one of the most botched films I have ever seen. It has plotlines that go nowhere, non- resolutions to the main conflicts in the story (even though the film seems to think it resolves everything and goes for a happy ending, a botched sense of comedic timing, an epilogue that, again, serves no place in the story- just really disappointing and sad, even though there were a few moments here and there (since it deals with the insanity of putting on a high school musical version of 'The Wiz' and many quirks from my drama days can be seen. Film-1 Movie- 1 Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist- This is trying to show a wild crazy night of unpredictability (a la Adventures in babysitting), love of music (High fidleity) and finding one's true love (Pretty in Pink, et al), again, it works on almost no level. Although Michael Cera and Kat Dennings try very hard, I just didn't like either of them enough to care if they got together or not, the love of music is discussed but doesnt really show in the characters and the way they talk and behave and obsess (which High Fidelity did so well), and the wacky hijinks in order to find a drunk friend who disappeared and trying to find a favorite band's secret show don't really work as being very wacky (except for the travel of one character's wad of chewing gum throughout the night). Cera and Dennings do all they can, but all told, not very good. Although it was a HUGE step up from Marc Pease. Film- 4 Movie- 5 Cincinnatti Kid- 1965 Steve Mcqueen film which also stars Karl Malden Edward G Robinson, cab Calloway, a very young and thin Rip Torn, Ann Margaret, Tuesday Weld, Jack Warden, Joan Blondell... McQueen is a young, hotshot stud poker player in 1930's New Orleans who is going to go up against living poker legend played by Robinson, in a several days long poker event. This is about Poker in the way that Charlie's Angels was about law enforcement. A great character study where there is no real good or bad guy (following the lead of 'The Hustler'). While you root for McQueen because he's McQueen, he's not really a good, or nice, guy. But he is always cool. I am very surprised that my dad never showed me this one the way he did Great Escape or Bullitt, as I would put it right up near the top of my list of McQueen movies, just under Escape, Bullitt, and Papillon. Film- 9 Movie- 8