Welcome to “Friday Favorites” which highlight some of my favorite movie-related things.
Juno is, for me, a near perfect movie. It owes a lot of its success to a clever script by Diablo Cody and great direction by Jason Reitman, but the bulk of its magnificence rests on the shoulders of its cast. Ellen Page is Juno, and all of the supporting cast (Michael Cera, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney and Jason Bateman, just for starters) give heartfelt and genuine performances that are simultaneously hilarious. But one character that I feel has always gotten a bad rap is Jennifer Garner’s Vanessa.
I’ve had several conversations about Juno with people I know. Some of them love the movie, some hate it, but one of the surprising things that I hear often enough to bother me is that people hate Vanessa. Continue reading
Epic is almost exactly what you would expect from the trailers. In many ways, it’s a ripoff of Ferngully, minus the obvious environmental message (one of Ferngully‘s most endearing attributes). It varyingly hints at or downright copies elements from that movie, from characters, to story, to design. It also borrows from a slew of other films, including Arthur and the Minimoys, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Spiderwick Chronicles and Happy Feet. I knew all of this going into the theater, and had already begun to write my review in my head when something unexpected happened. Epic won me over.
Warning: This review contains some spoilers from the first book in the Divergent trilogy. 
Divergent, the first book in a trilogy by Veronica Roth with a film adaptation coming next year, has been compared to The Hunger Games, and it’s easy to see why. Both books feature strong female protagonists in violent and dangerous situations. Both books have a similar tone, and are told in the same first person style aimed at “young adults” (my dislike for that term as related to books is a topic for another post). However, that’s largely where the similarities stop.
This is my analysis of Star Trek Into Darkness. 
The Love Pirate 