Precious: Based on the novel "Push" by Sapphire (2009)

The movie takes place in the 80's and Claireece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is living in Harlem with her horribly abusive mother (Mo'Nique). She gets asked to leave school because she is pregnant. she has a daughter already that lives with her grandmother, the result of sexual abuse from her father. Her mother is more concerned that Precious might steal her man than the abuse that he has inflicted on her. When Precious is experiencing abuse, sexual, physical or mental, she often retreats into a fantasy world where she is the star and is walking down the red carpet and all of the attention is on her.

The principal from her school points her in the direction of an alternative school so that she can continue her education. Her teacher, Blu Rain (Paula Patton) teaches her to read. The girls in her class eventually become just like family, even spending time with her in the hospital after she has her baby. Along the way she meets some people who want to help her including a social worker (Mariah Carey) and a nurse (Lenny Kravitz).

After the birth of her son, her mother abuses the newborn and Precious finds the strength to leave the house. Her teacher helps her find shelter and she begins to look toward improving her life. She later finds out that her father died of AIDS. She sees her mother for the last time at the welfare office while her mother is trying to hold on to benefits. Through all of this, Precious continues to move forward with her life.

This was a very good movie albeit rather depressing. There was a lot of abuse portrayed here so it might be difficult for some to watch although the acting was excellent. Mo'Nique, who won both the Golden Globe and Oscar for her role here, deserved it. Even though she was an evil person, she still seemed to invoke some sympathy, especially at the end when she is at the welfare office. It is a powerful performance. Gabourey Sidibe was also nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Precious. I didn't see what all the hoopla was about Mariah Carey. Her performance was O.K., but nothing to get excited about. I guess any improvement is good, anyone remember "Glitter", oh yeah, no one saw that.

109 Minutes. Rated R. I give this movie FOUR STARS.

Letters To Juliet (2010)

Sophie Hall (Amanda Seyfried) is a fact checker at the "New Yorker" magazine and wants to be a writer. Her boss Bobby thinks that she should stay a fact checker. She is engaged to Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal) who is opening a new Italian restaurant in the next few weeks. The two decide to go on a "pre-honeymoon" since things will get crazy when they get back and the restaurant will be opening.

When they get there, all Victor wants to do is tour wineries and the inventories of his suppliers. Sophie goes along with this for a while, but soon can't take it any more. While Victor goes on one of his tours, Sophie explores the town of Verona where they are staying. Verona is also the town where Romeo and Juliet lived. She locates the house that Juliet supposedly lived and finds people writing letters about their love lives and sticking them to the wall of the house. At the end of the day, a woman comes and removes all of the letters. Sophie follows and finds that there is a group of women that respond to the letters and send them back to the writers. They are known as "Juliet's Secretaries".

Sophie befriends these women and finds a letter written by a woman way back in 1957 when she was studying art in Italy. Sophie responds and is surprised when this woman's grandson shows up asking her what the heck she is doing writing to his Grandmother. She meets Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), the writer of the letter who decides that she wants to try to find her old love, Lorenzo Bartolini (Franco Nero), that she left waiting for her when she went back to England.

Sophie decides to join them, much to the chagrin of Claire's grandson Charlie (Chris Egan). They find that there are many Lorenzo's and decide to check out as many of them as possible.

I won't reveal the outcome. Let's just say that this movie is an enjoyable chick flick. I left the theater feeling happy. Yay! It's not great, but entertaining. Isn't that the point? Hey, I just watched the trailer and it made me smile!

The shots in Italy were incredible, it is definitely on my list of places to go! Vanessa Redgrave is married in real life to Franco Nero, her Lorenzo in the movie. She met him while filming "Camelot" in 1967 and had a son with him, but did not marry him until 2006. She had a long relationship with Timothy Dalton in between.

105 Minutes. Rated PG. I give this movie THREE AND ONE HALF STARS.

Crazy Heart (2009)

Jeff Bridges plays Otis "Bad" Blake, an alcoholic has-been country singer who plays a series of one night sets to scratch out a living. He was once a star, but those days seem gone along with his many marriages. He had a son 28 years ago, but has not seen him since he was small.

The film opens as Bad is getting ready to play at a bowling alley. He meets a journalist named Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who wants to write a story about him. They begin a relationship and he becomes attached to her young son Buddy. Bad gets a call from his agent that country star Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) wants Bad to open for him at a concert. Bad doesn't want to do this as Tommy was once HIS protege, but he needs the money. After the concert Tommy asks him to write him some songs. Bad thinks that the songs would be duets for the both of them, but Tommy just wants him to write them and he would sing them.

This kind of puts Bad over the edge and he begins drinking. He crashes his car and ends up in the hospital. The relationship with Jean makes him rethink his life and he calls his son asking about him and his mother and finds out that his mother had died and his son hangs up on him. After Bad loses Buddy while drinking, Jean breaks it off with him.

He gets help with his drinking from his old friend Wayne (Robert Duval) and cleans up his act. He goes to Jean's to try to patch things up, but she thinks that it isn't a good idea. He moves on and writes a song for Tommy that becomes a big hit and he runs into Jean at one of Tommy's concerts and sees that she is wearing a ring. The last scene is of her interviewing Bad.

This movie is just like a lot of others that I have seen. The difference, I think, is the acting of Jeff Bridges. He was nominated for almost every award out there for this role and won both the Golden Globe and the Oscar. Check him out in "The Big Lebowski".

This movie is based on the novel by Thomas Cobb. The main character is rumored to have been based on a number of real country singers. You do not have to like country music to like this movie.

111 Minutes. Rated R. I give this movie THREE AND THREE QUARTER STARS.

Splice (2009)

Clive Nicoli (Adrian Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) are genetic engineers and a couple working for a pharmaceutical company that is splicing together different kinds of animal DNA to create new kinds of animals.

Their last experiment seemed to work o.k. so they would like to splice together human DNA with animal DNA to see what the results are. The pharmaceutical company rejects their proposal and they decide to proceed anyway to see what happens.

A creature that they agreed would be elimated once it got to a certain stage is created, but Elsa can't bring herself to kill it. She becomes attached to it and it grows and learns at a very fast rate. She names it Dren (nerd spelled backward) and they move Dren to an old farmhouse when they realize that the lab that they work in is going to be remodeled and they can't keep her there. During the course of the movie, the couple who were once so close become divided.

This movie is not really my genre, so it wasn't my favorite. It wasn't an awful movie until the last half hour which I found to be disturbing. I don't know if I didn't like the movie because it deals with mixing DNA's and I find that scary (it is probably already being done but I don't want to know about it), or if the movie was bad. Other critics seemed to like it.

104 Minutes. Rated R. I give this movie TWO AND ONE HALF STARS.

Sex And The City 2 (2010)

This follow up to the first movie was not as good as the first, but not as bad as the critics said it was.

It is a couple of years after Big (Chris Noth) and Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) got married and Carrie is finding that her marriage has begun to be more Ho Hum that she would like (Duh!). Miranda is unhappy with her job, Charlotte is overwhelmed as a Mom and Samantha has been struggling with menopause and is trying to get her mojo back.

Samantha has a client from Abu Dhabi that has offered to fly her there for a business venture and she decides to take her friends.

Most of the movie takes place in the middle east and their adventures in the desert. The opulence is extraordinary as are the over the top fashions, although there is none of the concentration on fashion as a subject as there was in the first movie. There were a few funny parts, although I did not like some of the parts when they were in the middle east markets.

I thought that the movie was just o.k. Let's put it this way, to this day if I am flipping through channels and I see the first movie, I stop (much to Brian's chagrin). If I am flipping and I see THIS film, I won't feel the need to stop. Don't get me wrong, as I said earlier it is not as horribly awful as most of the critics said it was (they hacked it to death) but it isn't nearly as good as the first one and I certainly didn't laugh as hard as I did when Charlotte "poughkeepsied" in her pants! It was also much too long and the plot much too thin. Also, Anthony and Stanford's wedding made me want to vomit swan feathers. Liza Minelli's "Single Ladies" rendition just went on and on.

The movie was actually filmed mostly in Morocco as they couldn't get permission in Abu Dhabi because of the film's content. This movie also has plenty of great cameo's by celebrities like Liza Minelli, Penelope Cruz and Miley Cyrus.

146 Minutes. Rated R. I give this film TWO STARS.

The Messenger (2009)

This independent film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, gave Woody Harrelson an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor this year.

This film follows Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) as he is assigned to the Casualty Notification Department upon his return to the U.S. from Iraq after almost being killed himself by a bomb. He is not pleased with the assignment, but takes it on. His superior officer is Captain Tony Stone (Harrelson) who is his partner and shows him the ropes. Will finds it hard to be as emotionless as the job requires.

He finds it especially hard when the duo must notify Olivia (Samantha Morton) that her husband is killed. Will finds himself drawn to the woman despite the advice given by Tony.

This is a good film. I can't say that I enjoyed it as it's subject matter is difficult. However, all performances are quite good, especially Harrelson's which resulted in an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor this year. This movie did not get the play in the theaters that it should have, probably due to the subject, but hopefully more people will see it on video. Ben Foster was also good. You can see him in a number of films including his villainous performance in "3:10 to Yuma" with Christian Bale.

113 Minutes. Rated R. I give this film THREE AND ONE HALF STARS.

Kick Ass (2010)

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson)is a nerdy kid who decides to become a real life super hero after being mugged and sees a bystander who does nothing to help. He buys a funky scuba suit for his costume and decides to call himself "Kick Ass".

Kick Ass goes out on patrol and gets beat up badly by the very same guys that mugged him earlier. He ends up in the hospital where most of his bones have been fixed with metal plates. He also has damaged most of his nerve endings and this has made him unable to feel most pain.

When he goes back to school, he finds that a girl, Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca), that he is in love with thinks that he is gay since he is so nice and sensitive. He goes along with it to be around her and they spend a lot of time together having sleepovers and applying self tanner.

Dave gets back into his super hero mode and beats up some guys that are chasing after someone. The incident is caught on tape and put on YouTube and becomes an instant sensation. All of a sudden Kick Ass is a hot merchandise property complete with his own MySpace page. When Dave finds out that Katie is being bothered by a drug dealer when she volunteers at the needle exchange. Kick Ass goes over to the dealers house and finds himself in a precarious situation until "Hit Girl" (Chloe Grace Moretz) appears. This 11 year old kills everyone in interesting ways (It kind of has a "Kill Bill" flavor) then leaves with her father "Big Daddy" (Nicolas Cage). Big Daddy is a former cop named Damon Macready that was framed for drugs by a kingpin named Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong). While he was in prison his wife died while having his daughter Mindy who was then taken care of by his former police partner. When Macready got out of prison he began training his little girl all things lethal.

D'Amico thinks that Kick Ass is the one messing up his business by killing off his men when it is actually Big Daddy. They find this out when D'Amico's son Chris(Christopher Mintz-Plasse) decides to become "Red Mist" to try to flush out Kick Ass. When Red Mist takes Kick Ass to the lumberyard where the bad guys hang out, they find that it is on fire and all of the men are dead. Thanks to a nanny cam from Chris' baby days, they also see that it is Big Daddy, dressed a bit like Batman, that is the one doing the killing.

Dave decides to quit being Kick Ass because of the danger. However, checking his My Space he finds that Red Mist is trying to get a hold of him in a bid to flush out big Daddy. Kick Ass notifies Big Daddy that he needs help and they go to a safe house where the bad guys shoot Hit Girl and take Big Daddy and Kick Ass. Hit Girl saves the day, but not before big Daddy sustains lethal burns. Dave tries to get Hit Girl to stop, but she must avenge her fathers death and finish what he started.

This film is based on a comic of the same name and the movie rights were sold even before the first issue was published. Brad Pitt is a producer of this movie.

The most amusing parts of this movie were the parts with "Hit Girl" and her father. While it seems strange to find an 11 year old participating in such violence and some profanity it was still pretty funny. The rest of the movie was pretty good, but not what I would call great. While much was made of Hit Girls language, she dropped a couple of F words a C word and a couple of other small ones, they made it seem like there was an endless stream of profanity. I don't see what the big deal was about. However, I would like to applaud (sarcastically), the parental skills of the parents that brought their what looked like 5 and 6 year old kids to this R rated violent movie. What is wrong with people?

Chloe Grace Moretz and Nicolas Cage both did a good job.

Rated R. I give this movie THREE STARS.