Nerd in the 'Noke

Bridge of Spies (2015), PG-13, 141 minutes - I'm a sucker for historical dramas so this film, a Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks collaboration, was a must see in my mind.  Unfortunately, I didn't get around to seeing it as quickly as I would have liked.  Fortunately though, it enjoyed a fairly decent theatrical run, allowing me to finally check it out a couple of weeks ago. Bridge of Spies is based upon events that occurred in the 1960's: the Cold War prisoner exchange of suspected spies between the United States and Russia, and the unexpected catalyst of the exchange negotiations: an insurance settlement lawyer named James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks).  Donovan is first asked to act as defense lawyer for suspected Russian spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance).  It is of no concern to anyone that Donovan has limited defense experience as Abel only needs representation so that the court can go through the motions of 'due process'.  At a time when the threat of nuclear war was ...

Captain Phillips (2013), PG-13, 134 minutes - We all remember the story: in 2009 an American cargo ship, the MV Maersk Alabama was hijacked by Somali pirates, and in the process became the first such American ship successfully taken in two hundred years.  The situation had the potential to be an absolute disaster, but thanks to the ship's Captain, Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks), the crew suffered no casualties and was reclaimed by the United States Navy.  I remember this story dominating the news for days.  It really was an amazing story, but there's something about watching it play out in front of your eyes that makes it that much more unbelievable. This was one of the films that I missed last fall as we were getting prepared for the wedding/honeymoon and I'm glad that I finally had a chance to check it out in my push to catch as many Oscar nominees as possible before tomorrow's Academy Awards.  In any other year, we probably would have seen Tom Hanks snag yet an...

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 ...