Nerd in the 'Noke

Chappie (2015), R, 120 minutes - Over the last few years, writer/director Neill Blomkamp has quickly become one of my favorite film creators.  His filmography so far is relatively limited, but his creativity, socio-political awareness, and effects abilities combine to produce very compelling stories.  Chappie is no different, exploring the creation of a true artificial intelligence inside a mechanized police-bot in the violent streets of Johannesburg, South Africa in the very near future. Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) is a robotics engineer and the creator of the humanoid droids that weapons engineering firm Tetravaal has outsourced to the Johannesburg police force.  The success of Wilson's droid design has led Tetravaal to cut funding to another line of enforcement droids in development by fellow robotics engineer Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman).  Deon continues efforts to improve his droids even further, developing an artificial intelligence that will allow them to ada...

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), PG-13, 124 minutes  - The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a movie that my fiance and I have had been meaning to check out via NetFlix for quite a while.  We've actually had it here at the house for almost a month, we just hadn't been in what we thought the proper mood was for a two hour long movie about the elderly staying at a hotel in India.  Last night we finally felt like we were ready to give it a shot and I kind of wish we hadn't waited so long. This movie follows seven people from England all at varying stages of later life.  For differing and independent reasons they all decide to travel to India to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly and Beautiful.  Evelyn (Judi Dench) is a widow who is trying to prove to her son that she doesn't need someone to constantly look after her.  Graham (Tom Wilkinson) is a retired lawyer returning to the country in which he grew up, searching for the love of his life. ...

It's been a few weeks since I last posted. As some followers of this blog may know, I'm buying a house and have been wicked busy going through that whole process. As a result, I haven't had much free time for movies until the last few days. So anyway, the reviews return today with a double shot: The Last Airbender (2010), PG, 103 minutes - I've been looking forward to this pretty much since it was first announced. Even more so when the teasers and trailers started to be released. So I was worried at the beginning of the week when every advance review I saw or heard about absolutely thrashed this movie. One of the largest complaints was that inexplicably, a large portion of the cast was Caucasian, which was odd because they were all playing Inuit characters in the Nickelodeon cartoon (Avatar: The Last Airbender) that this movie is based upon. I decided to just accept this oddity going into the movie. It happened, nothing could be done about it, I was going to ...