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Buzz In: What's Your Favorite Movie Sing-along Scene?

BuzzSugar — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:01:39 -0700

Sigh. Movie sing-alongs. They are so good. When Top Gun was first out, if I wasn't head-over-heels for Tom Cruise already, his belting out of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" to Kelly McGillis would have sealed the deal.

And come on, who didn't want to run down to their local dive bar, take some shots and belt "Sweet Caroline" after that fantastic scene in Beautiful Girls? Also, I will never tire of the part in My Best Friend's Wedding when that gorgeous man, Rubert Everett, kicks off an all-restaurant sing-along to "Say A Little Prayer for You."

For me, sing-alongs can take a good scene and make it the best scene. They tap into that basic human desire to break into spontaneous song and dance when the mood strikes. OK, maybe that's just my basic desire.

So tell me, what's your favorite sing-along scene of all time?

After the jump, I just had to include the clip from My Best Friend's Wedding (note the people waving their lobster claw arms in the background toward the end!), so read more.

What's Buzzworthy? Comfort Movies

BuzzSugar — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 09:30:00 -0800

Watching challenging films is a worthy goal, but sometimes, I just want to relax with a movie I've seen a zillion times before. My comfort movies may not be the best or smartest movies in my collection, but they're perfect for curling up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and mentally reciting the lines I've heard a million times before.

So for this week's Buzzworthy challenge, I'm asking you to bookmark your favorite comfort movies, the most trustworthy films in your collection. I'm starting you off with Beautiful Girls, a movie I've seen more times than I could count on my fingers and toes put together. All through college, I toted around a VHS tape with a recording of it from my parents' TV; then, I upgraded - slightly - to a beat-up official version I bought from eBay. I finally got the movie on DVD a couple of years back, and I still pull it out every time I just want to watch something familiar. For good measure, I've tossed in a couple of my other standbys, Laurel Canyon and Drop Dead Gorgeous.

Just use BuzzSugar's cool bookmarking tool to find your favorite comfort movies from around the Web, tag them with the phrase comfort movies, and let me know why you love keeping them around. I'll post some readers' favorites here next week.

You can also now make a list of your picks. Here are mine:

Movie Night: Holiday-ish Films

BuzzSugar — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 22:58:22 -0800

So many movies, so little time. Thankfully, BuzzSugar is here to help you sort through them all! Each week, we'll choose a theme for a Movie Night and feature three must-see movies in keeping with that theme. This week's theme: holiday-ish films.

There are two types of holiday films. The ones, like Deck the Halls, that are entirely driven by holiday-based plots, and movies like The Holiday, where the action just happens to unfold over a holiday backdrop. Here are three of my favorite holiday-ish films that are fun to watch this time of year.

Love Actually

Nothing puts the warmth and cheer of the season into your heart quite like a film all about love in its various forms. Love Actually brings us many love-centric storylines at once: There are the coworkers awkwardly courting, the little boy whose world revolves around his beautiful classmate, the new marriage threatening to become a love triangle, and the old marriage starting to show cracks in its foundation. The wonderful cast (Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Liam Neeson, Keira Knightly, and Laura Linney, to name just a few) is stellar enough to make the movie truly enjoyable, and it's even more fun to see how the stories intersect. And if you're anything like me, the real footage of people greeting loved ones at the airport in itself will be enough to get you all misty-eyed.

To see the rest, read more

Beautiful Girls

In Beautiful Girls, the holidays are the perfect time for Willie Conway (Timothy Hutton) to go back to his hometown, introduce his soon-to-be-fiancee, Tracy (Annabeth Gish), to his father and brother, reconnect with old buddies, and reevaluate his life. The movie explores the idea of growing up, making sacrifices to live the life you want to live, and learning to be content with what you have. Willie's in a very mature relationship with a nice woman and lives in New York City, while his old buddies stuck around their old hometown. He befriends precocious 13-year-old Marty (Natalie Portman) next door, a fast-talking, dry-witted mini-adult who develops a crush on Willie. It's a highly realistic and funny film about the old problem of wanting what we can't have, and coming to terms with adulthood. Added bonus: Rosie O'Donnell goes on an absolutely classic tirade about women's magazines, men and relationships. Priceless.

While You Were Sleeping

Yes, the idea of someone fooling an entire family into thinking that she is their comatose son's fiancee is far-fetched. Yes, it requires some serious suspension of disbelief, and yes, the characters in said family are caricatures. Still, it's all worth it for this sweet, familiar comedy of mistaken identity. Basically, Lucy (Sandra Bullock) saves the life of a man named Peter (played by Peter Gallagher), though he is knocked into a coma in the process. When she goes to see him in the hospital, his family assumes she is his fiancee and she chooses not to correct them. She ends up spending holiday time with the quirky clan, quickly falling under their warm, charming spell. Before long, she realizes she is in love with her "fiance's" cute brother, Jack (Bill Pullman), which of course sets up an awkward situation, especially when Peter wakes up.

Source, Source, and Source

Talking New Moon With Kellan Lutz and Ashley Greene

BuzzSugar — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:15:50 -0800

Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and Taylor Lautner may be dominating the promotional circuit right now, but they're not the only cast members with something to say about New Moon. I had the opportunity to chat with costars Kellan Lutz and Ashley Greene, aka Emmett and Alice Cullen, during their recent stopover in SF. They chatted about their characters, the vampire craze, and what it's like to be a "Twilight celebrity." Here are highlights:

On why so many people are crazy for the Twilight Saga:
Ashley: I think this film in particular is highly relatable. There are a lot of situations that people can relate to. The love story - everyone can relate to being in love or being in lust. You add the vampire, and it adds that next level fantasy. Vampires are mysterious and sensual and dangerous and unattainable. And everyone wants what they can't have. I think on another level that this came together at the perfect time. All the elements just fit, the casting was spot on, and we're in a difficult time right now with our economy. That's why you never have a drop in ticket sales because everyone wants an escape, and this movie is very much an escape from reality.
Kellan: It's a good escape but also it deals with so many situations, on so many positive notes. Just looking at it from the vampire coven to the wolf pack. It just deals with everyday issues just on bigger levels, in a way. And you have Bella as the keystone in many situations. You can just all relate from different countries to issues within the United States. It's easily relatable.

To read a lot more about working with three different directors and why they feel so lucky, just read more.

On how their portrayals of the Cullens are similar or different from the books:
Kellan: We got the jobs because we brought something new to it. You can interpret the characters each their own, but I think it's what we did alongside. Just like Kristen said - she's playing Bella but she's putting her Kristen spin on it, just like all of us are. And I think that's what's making it unique. We're still following the cheat sheets that Stephenie created by making the books, and there's Wikipedia. We have a lot of information to go off of. But I hope it's what I did in my audition that set it apart from the other guys trying out.

Ashley: I think it's mannerisms too. People do fall in love with this book, but I think part of it is that they always want more. You can't write out every human mannerism. You can imagine it, but seeing the emotion in someone's eyes and seeing them be affected it - it was kind of easy to give something to it, because we were just being people. We kinda just got lucky.
On how much more of the Cullens we can expect in the remaining movies:
Kellan: Realistically, we stick pretty close to the books. Obviously us Cullens would love to be in the books a lot more, which would mean we'd be in the movies a lot more. Talking New Moon, the scenes that the Cullens - except for Ashley, playing Alice who gets to go to Italy and be a main lead in the movie - us Cullens, we have to stick really close to the books, and the scenes that we're in are really crucial to the story, as you know - the birthday scene, the voting scene. I don't know, it was kind of a tease. Chris Weitz is such an amazing director, and for us, for myself - I only worked about a week on that movie. And it didn't even seem like I really got a taste for what it was.

Ashley: In the third film, you'll see a lot more of the Cullens because it's all of us collaborating and then getting ready to fight this war that's coming up. In the second one, my character got a much larger role because Alice is the Cullen, other than Edward, that really embraces Bella and they end up becoming best friends. In the beginning, you see her throw this huge party for Bella, and then Alice is the one who does, in fact, come back for Bella when everyone else decides to skip town. Alice is responsible for dragging Bella over to Italy, and she and I the whole time are fighting to save my brother's life. And then of course we get held up by the Volturi and stuff like that. My character got to grow a lot, which is really cool. You get to actually see the relationship develop between Bella and Alice, where in the first one you didn't. The first one was very much about the romance and showing the audience why these two people are willing to die for each other.
On working with a different director on each film:
Ashley: Each director is going to be very different. They're artists as well, and I don't think any of them are quite the same. The books, when you read them, all have very, very, different tones. So I think it's highly appropriate that we switch directors each go. The first one is very much a romance and is a very scenic, beautiful film. And Catherine's really, really great at capturing that. She's very high energy and works well in chaos and stuff like that. And it was fantastic because we didn't quite know what we were getting ourselves into, and so it was nice to have her to guide us when we were freaking out a little bit. She was just so high energy, and it was really contagious. We were sad to lose her and move on to the second film, but then we got Chris Weitz and he's the complete opposite! But great as well. He's so giving and caring and collaborative and created this atmosphere that was kind of a safe haven for us. And it was really nice because we didn't know, switching directors, if they were gonna embrace us or if they had a completely different vision than what we created in the first one. It was nice that he was right there on the same page with us. And the second one is a warmer film, even from the color scheme. The first one is very blue tones, and the second one is much richer and warmer and I think he did a great job at capturing that. And we just finished shooting with David Slade, and I think he's highly appropriate as well. He just finished shooting 30 Days of Night and Hard Candy, and they're both very dark, edgy films. And Eclipse is very much that. It's all centered around the anticipation and us getting ready to fight this huge war. We just finished filming, we haven't gotten to see much of it, but I think it's gonna be fantastic. He is, technically, the most advanced director. The angles that he shot and how he knows that tweaking something can affect a whole scene and the lenses. He was really nice to work with.
On coping with the fan effect and being a "Twilight celebrity"
Kellan: That's what blows my mind, 'cause I feel like it's really unearned in a way. The fans are making our careers. Without them, we wouldn't be working and doing the saga. There's so many times that trilogy books become a movie and the first one bombs, and then that's it. And you're always hopeful that you get to do them all. Especially since we're all in love with our characters. I love Emmett Cullen to death, he's my favorite character I've ever played. It's just so cool to have made it this far, and I think we all hope that we get to finish this series and do Breaking Dawn. This is such a blessing, it's every actor's dream to be part of something like this. It's not terribly hard either. We don't shoot halfway around the world; we don't shoot for a year of our lives. I know a lot of us have homes, we have pets, we have family. And it's really nice to shoot on the West Coast, either Portland or Vancouver, and have the chance to fly down if we need to. But it's definitely amazing to be part of something like this. And I don't think any of us knew how crazy it would be and how exhilarating it would turn out to be. Going to the premiere, really just, wow. I don't even remember it because I was really just starstruck by how many fans and signs and cameras. It felt like I was just walking through a strobe light room. It's amazing.

Ashley: I still think we can't really wrap our heads around what's going on and what's happening. We're still in the midst of filming and kept very busy from one film until the next. It's only these brief moments where you sit back and are actually able to take a breath where you go "Whoa. Wow. This is crazy." I mean, the amount of tickets they've already sold for New Moon - I'm pretty sure I can't even get a ticket if I tried to see my film in Jacksonville and it's mind boggling. We're just very lucky. I went into this film thinking "Oh my gosh, I got a job" and the it turned into the biggest break of my life. I think we all feel very blessed to be a part of this.
On how it feels to be part of Twilight fan fiction:
Kellan: It's an escape, in a way. We do live in a trivial time period right now. There's so much depression that it's kinda cool to be a part of something where people use it to be an escape. In a way that's kinda what Stephenie did -she had a dream and just elaborated on it. It became a huge success and it's really encouraging that people are doing the same and just making up this journey.

Ashley: That's why people love it so much I think. You can take it and make what you want of it. Before the demographic was teenage girls, but now it's women of every age and guys are starting to get into it, too. It's because there is that element of fantasy. If you're 8 years old you look at it one way; if you're 80 years old you look at it another. I think it's fantastic that we can draw such a huge crowd. The other thing is - it blows my mind but people are making connections over this film and over this book. there are mothers and daughters and grandmas who can all sit and talk about the same story and all fantasize about it and I think that's a really cool thing. I think it's rare.

To see all of our Twilight and New Moon coverage, check out TwilightSugar!

What to Download: New Music Today

BuzzSugar — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:38:24 -0800

T.G.I. Tuesday! I've already sorted through the big DVD releases of the day, but now I have new songs to revive your iPod, Just take a look at these three albums. (And if you want to see your own music reviews featured on Buzz, submit them in the Music Review Group in the community!)

Music mash-up: Seems like everyone is releasing a holiday album lately - remember Bob Dylan's? Now, Tori Amos is trying her hand at the genre with Midwinter Graces. It's a big risk for Amos, who puts her own spin on classic carols. Traditionalists might cry foul when she mashes up "What Child Is This" and "The First Nowell" for "What Child, Nowell" or re-purposes "Silent Night" into a love song, but at least Amos is thinking outside of the box. The quieter songs work best, thanks to Amos's ethereal voice. I recommend "Emmanuel" or "Winter's Carol."

All over the place: Wale references Kanye West in the first track on his big studio debut Attention: Deficit, and the mention is fitting. Wale seems like a Kanye in the making, mixing in sparkly, bragadocious tracks with songs that raise controversial social issues (like "Shades," which tackles racism). He also brings in a long list of collaborators, including Lady Gaga (on the already-released "Chillin'") and Mark Ronson. As a result, the album jumps around like, as the title hints, a kid with ADD. You may recognize Wale from this year's VMAs, and he's undoubtedly one to watch. For now, download "Pretty Girls" and "Diary," which samples from one of my favorite films, Amelie.

See one more release when you read more.

A classic formula: Bon Jovi fans really love Bon Jovi, and on the band's newest release, The Circle, the rockers aren't afraid to deliver exactly what their followers want - even if it feels recycled. "Working For the Man" should appeal to those who enjoy pumping their fists along to songs like "Living on a Prayer," and "When We Were Beautiful" almost feels like a U2 copycat. The guys cover the regular themes there - love, leadership, the highway of life, etc. - so there are no big surprises. Still, as far as guilty pleasure Bon Jovi goes, it doesn't disappoint.

What to TiVo: Saturday

BuzzSugar — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:50:09 -0700

ABC has College Football
CBS has repeats of Three Rivers and 48 Hours Mystery
FOX is new with Cops and America's Most Wanted
NBC has repeats of Mercy, Trauma, and Law & Order: SVU
ABC Family has The Goonies
E! has Chasing Amy and repeats of The Girls Next Door and The Soup
Comedy Central has American Pie
MTV is new with Made and has a repeat of My Super Psycho Sweet 16
Showtime has a repeat of Dexter and is new with the rockumentary Bon Jovi: When We Were Beautiful
Late-night highlights include Megan Fox and U2 on a repeat of Saturday Night Live on NBC

Buzz Interview With the Cast of Precious, Part 1: Paula Patton

BuzzSugar — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:30:27 -0700

The buzz about Precious has been building ever since it swept awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival. (I even put it on my list of Fall movie picks.) Now with its release around the corner and Oscar whispers beginning, I sat down with some of the stars and the director himself. The film is based on the novel, Push, which follows a pregnant sixteen-year old living with her abusive mother. Despite the film's dark subject matter, every cast member I spoke to brought up the story's healing and feel-good power.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be bringing you their interviews. First up: Paula Patton, who plays Precious's teacher and mentor, Ms. Rain.

On the film's unexpected success: "We thought it’d maybe be on Netflix or in my mother’s living room! And then Lee called me in the beginning of the year and said, 'We’re going to Sundance.' That was it for me. That was an award to be able to go and be part of the selection, and then it just steam-rolled.”

For more of what Patton had to say, read more.

On her response to those who think the film is going to be depressing: "I understand saying, 'I want to see it, but I don’t want to see it right now, because I don’t want to go there.' It’s not like that. I say it’s like buying a ticket to a roller coaster ride. You laugh, you cry, you scream, and at the end of the ride, you’re left shaken, but with your heart more open. What’s beautiful about this film is that it breeds love."
On what she learned from Precious: “I think we’ve all judged a Precious. What this movie tells you is, don’t judge, because you don’t know their story. I think when we made this film we all had to admit our own racist feelings, our own prejudices, and deal with them head on.”

On newcomer Gabourey Sidibe: “So many actors will have worked their whole life and never achieve what [Gabby] achieves in this film. It’s remarkable. She’s not Precious. She’s like, ‘Paula, oh my god, did you see The Hills?' She’s such a girly-girl and loves to be happy. It's a difficult thing when you have a character that’s talked about the way she’s talked about - you're fat, you're ugly, you're stupid - that it took someone as smart and as confident as Gabby to play her and not be affected by it.”
On the inspiration for her character: "[My mother] was a public school teacher for 35 years, and she was one of these teachers that went above and beyond the call of duty. She would bring students back to the house, help them pay for books, and be supportive. When I decided to do this role, I was like, this is for my mother and for all the teachers out there who are like her.”
On what's next for her: “I just finished a comedy with Queen Latifah. I went from [a character] who has dedicated her life to helping others to someone who is the most selfish human being on the planet. I call her a gold-digger with a heart of gold. It was so much fun to explore a different character and flex those comedic chops!”

Are you looking forward to Precious? I'm dying to see it and Patton's film with Queen Latifah now!

Photos courtesy of Lionsgate and Source

Whip It: A Rollicking Good Time

BuzzSugar — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:30:56 -0700

Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, roller derby comedy Whip It, is not unlike the actress's persona: cute, fun, and with a whole lot going on.

Ellen Page stars as quiet 17-year-old Bliss Cavendar, whose mother (Marcia Gay Harden) wants to make her the queen of small-town Texas beauty pageants. Bliss meekly goes along with the idea, her voice too small to tell her mom she hates the contests. But one chance visit to nearby big city Austin and everything changes. Bliss admires some intimidating derby girls, and after sneaking off to a match, decides to try out. What follows is a fast-paced, highly entertaining girl-power anthem.

To read more about what I did and didn't like about the movie, just read more.

The movie is perfectly cast; Page plays a shy teen easily, never giving up her sweetness even after she adopts the moniker "Babe Ruthless" and gets repeatedly knocked into the rink sidelines. The team who welcomes her, the Hurl Scouts, is a motley crew: Eve and Zoe Bell don't become much more than background players, Barrymore is an ebullient if minor supporter ("Smashley Simpson"), but team captain Kristen Wiig is one of the hearts of the movie. With a part bigger than the trailer implies, Wiig (I never get tired of the derby names: "Maggie Mayhem") emerges as a mother figure when Bliss's relationship with her own mom is strained. It's nice to see her playing straight for once, and besides Page, Wiig is really the only multi-faceted derby girl.

That's not to say that the derby girls aren't anything special. Beautiful, tough, and impossibly cool, maybe you wouldn't want to meet them in a dark alley, but you'd definitely want to be invited to their party. Juliette Lewis looks every part the queen bee - aggressive and sexy, she'll push you in a locker before you know what hit you. And naturally, there's a love interest, musician Landon Pigg - but he's kind of an afterthought, which I liked. By not giving in to the cliche that a girl gets everything she wants when she finds her passion, it strengthens the movie's pervasive girl power idea.

The movie isn't just about derby; it's a coming-of-age tale too, and Bliss didn't come from a shaky foundation. Alia Shawkat (yay, Maeby!) plays the hilarious and supportive BFF who doesn't exist just to cheer Bliss on from the sidelines. She's got her own thing, and is too confident to be left behind when Bliss gets wrapped up in her new life - a refreshing departure from the typical best friend character. And Harden isn't merely a strict parent caricature; she may want something completely different for her daughter, but her caring nature shines through.

It's not all success on skates, though. Sometimes the portrayal of the derby world gets to be an overzealous glorification. Sure, it's an amazing outlet for a lot of people and one of the few contact sports that really belongs to women, but the movie pushes the sexualization of the players a little too far. It's already sexy that the women play such a powerful sport, so it's not really necessary to do close-ups of the actresses' bare flesh to show the bruises.

There are a few things you could criticize about Barrymore's direction; for instance, Shauna Cross's screenplay is really quite funny, but some of the actors' lines fall flat. Also, the roller derby scenes have such potential to be exciting, and they could have been even more epic. Then again, this is Barrymore's first outing as a director, and it's still what you would expect from her: a fun-loving, freewheeling confection of a movie with a killer soundtrack.

Photos courtesy of Fox Searchlight

Zombieland: The Feel-Good Zombie Flick of the Year

TresSugar — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:30:23 -0700

A Note From Buzz: With so many new movies this week, my friend Très was nice enough to apply her scary-movie expertise to review the box office's newest zombie flick.

In the United States of Zombieland, zombies outnumber people. A mad-cow tainted burger tipped the population in favor of the drooling, limping, and grunting set, and now zombies roam a crashed-car littered, empty-minimall-blighted zombiescape.

Columbus (Adventureland's Jesse Eisenberg), the virginal antihero of horror-comedy Zombieland, has learned to survive this zombie apocalypse by keeping a list of necessary survival skills. Rule #1? Cardio. If you don't want zombies gnawing on you like an hors d'oeuvre, you'd better be fast and limber. In addition, beware of bathrooms, practice the "double tap" (make sure your zombie's actually dead after you kill him), and don't be a hero. (Regarding this last rule - some rules were made to be broken.)

When Columbus meets up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a swaggering cowboy type with a penchant for tank-like cars, shotguns, and Twinkies, and the spitfire sister duo of Wichita (Emma Stone) and Arkansas (Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin), Zombieland takes off like a scary/fun amusement park ride. To find out what happens on this motley crew's wild road trip from hell, read more

There's something funny about zombies and the zombie genre, and in his first feature film, director Ruben Fleischer plays their comic possibilities to the hilt. Zombies don't have what you'd call well-rounded personalities; they're pretty predictable. They have bad attitudes, come out of nowhere, grunt, and see all nonzombies as food to feast on. They're the perfect foil (or straight men, even) to a cast of characters with more than enough personality to make up for the zombies' boorish one dimensionality.

Take nebbishy Columbus. The world changed for him, he tells us in an early voice-over, when a pretty neighbor he calls #406, asks to stay over because a crazed homeless man tries to bite her. Sadly, although she falls asleep on Columbus's shoulder, she wakes up as a rabid zombie and begins chasing him around his apartment, forcing him to repeatedly knock her over the head with a toilet lid. "The first time I let a girl in my life," deadpans Columbus, "and she tries to eat me."

This kind of witty dialogue abounds in Zombieland, and although fans of gore and violence against zombies will be more than satisfied (Tallahassee's scenes of zombie-killing, especially, have a Tarantinoesque choreography to them), it's really the mismatched goofball characters and how they bond and evolve, surprisingly, that hold the film together. A hilarious cameo from Bill Murray in the Beverly Hills sequence of Zombieland, also, is practically worth the price of admission.

Harrelson chews the scenery as Tallahassee, but as we find out, part of the reason he's hell-bent on killing zombies is because they took away his baby boy. As for the sisters, tough-girl Wichita just wants to take care of her little sister Arkansas (who, as a good shot, doesn't seem to need much help), but a beautiful girl has needs, too, and before long she develops feelings for Columbus. Will he or won't he finally be able to live out his nerd-boy fantasy of brushing the hair over a girl's ear?

You probably know the answer to that question, but just because Zombieland adheres to certain formulas doesn't mean that it doesn't revive them in witty ways. Although the zombie-killing gore fest may not be for everyone, Zombieland's amazing visuals, charming characters, and witty dialogue may leave a goofy grin on your face as you leave the theater.

Photos courtesy of Sony Pictures

What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday

BuzzSugar — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:30:19 -0700

All of the new DVD releases hit stores (and Netflix) on Tuesdays. So each week in What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday, I sort through the best of the batch and tell you what to add to your queue. Check out this week's picks!

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
I admittedly wasn't a fan of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past when it came out in theaters, but it may be worth considering if you're in the mood for a romantic comedy that doesn't make you think too much. The premise: When playboy Connor Mead (Matthew McConaughey) attends his brother's wedding, he runs into his first love Jenny (Jennifer Garner), setting off a Christmas Carol-like chain of events, complete with ghosts. Yes, the plot's contrived and Connor is incredibly smarmy, but I enjoyed the supporting cast of characters, especially Emma Stone as an 80's ghost with a bad perm and Michael Douglas as Connor's Lothario uncle.

27%

Two more up next, so read more.

Observe and Report
Observe and Report follows a self-important, semi-delusional mall security cop (Seth Rogen) who flips out when he realizes he may not become a police officer - or win over the makeup counter girl of his dreams (Anna Faris). When I first reviewed it, I was surprised by how dark the film turned out to be for a Rogen and Faris comedy. Still, it does have a few laugh-worthy moments, and Rogen fans will probably want to add this to their must-see list.

51%

Lymelife
Set in the 1970s, Lymelife is an ensemble drama that follows two families in a Long Island neighborhood dealing with a Lyme disease scare. It boasts a decent ensemble cast, including Cynthia Nixon, Alec Baldwin, and Timothy Hutton, but Rory Culkin (yes, Macaulay's brother) is the heart of the film as a 15-year-old struggling in the midst of messed-up chaos. (Emma Roberts also turns in a memorable performance as his crush.) The reviews were mixed when the film released in theaters, but if twisted suburbia is your thing (i.e., American Beauty or The Ice Storm), then Lymelife is worth checking out. Bonus material includes an alternate ending.

54%