Nerd in the 'Noke

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), R, 120 minutes - George Miller returns from a stint directing more family friendly films (Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet, Happy Feet Two) to reboot his iconic character first introduced to the world thirty six years ago in 1979's Mad Max (starring Mel Gibson). Taking place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland of a world, the film opens with Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) munching on a two headed lizard and thinking to himself about one thing: survival.  Moments later he is run down and abducted by a group of War Boys, minions of the land's ruler Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne - who also played the primary villain Toecutter in the 1979 original).  This sequence kicks off what becomes an almost two hour, pedal to the metal car chase that only slows for plot advancing dialog on a couple of occasions.  The basics: Immortan Joe controls all of the precious natural resources around The Citadel and limits their distribution to in order to subjugate his...

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), PG-13, 157 minutes - I'm just going to go ahead and get this out of the way: Dark of the Moon was much better than anticipated and those of you who told me as much were right. I'd also like to point out that I never said this looked bad, just that I wasn't wicked excited about it after the disappointment that was Revenge of the Fallen. Dark of the Moon might be the best of the three Transformers films. The origin story is out of the way and the plot gets back to story aspects from the original Generation 1 cartoon from the 1980's. Megatron is the plotting/scheming villain that he was always meant to be, and the soldier side of Optimus Prime comes out (this time believably), after he no longer feels he can trust the intel provided by his human allies. The short version of the plot: the space race of the 1960's was fueled by the crash landing of an Autobot ship known as The Arc on the moon. Lost in the wreckage was Senti...