Crazy, Stupid, Love.

A middle-aged husband’s life changes dramatically when his wife asks him for a divorce. He seeks to rediscover his manhood with the help of a new found friend, Jacob, learning to pick up girls at bars.

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Director: Glen Ficarra

Writer[s]: John Requa, Dan Fogelman

Starring: Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Analeigh Tipton, Jonah Bobo, Marisa Tomei, Liza Lapira, John Carrol Lynch, Kevin Bacon, Josh Groban

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Typecasting and formulaic film scripts are the most common occurrences in Hollywood. How many times have we seen: the female make-over story? love stories with straight-forward, one-sided occurrences, outcomes, and themes? Steve Carell play a 40-something sad-sack? Ryan Gosling as just a pretty face? The short answer: a ton of times. Another Hollywood production that features most all of those is Crazy, Stupid, Love. But it also features more. A lot more. It takes these commonalities, ideas, themes, and typecasts, and shatters them as the film develops into a new, refreshing take on many different fronts. And that is why it is one of my favorite movies ever, for its laughs, its themes, its style, its writing, and because after six or more viewings so far, I have not come close to tiring of it.

The Deep Blue Sea

The wife of a British Judge is caught in a self-destructive love affair with a Royal Air Force pilot.

Netflix: Instant Watch

There has always been an interest in the back of my mind somewhere for English theatre and early to mid 1900’s Europe. I loved Midnight in Paris so much because that would be a top three genie’s wish for me, to make that trip back in time. So when I saw that Tom Hiddleston, born and raised in England studying acting and classic humanities, was in such a genre film, I jumped at the chance to fulfill my interests. Hiddleston is best known [in this country] for playing the antagonist Loki in Thor and The Avengers. He landed the original role in Thor after working with director Kenneth Branaugh, another classic enthusiast, in some British TV productions. Hiddleston has always had a connection to classic theatre, and I’ve been waiting to see a non-comic book film of his, both in the past and the future.

Take This Waltz

Take This Waltz is the story of Margot [Michelle Williams], who while being married to Lou [Seth Rogan] for 5 years, falls in love with her newly acquainted neighbor Daniel [Luke Kirby].

Your Sister’s Sister

The first tip I would give to any avid movie watcher is to go to whatever film your watching’s IMDb page and read through the “trivia” section towards the bottom. You will usually find some really fun and interesting tid-bits that will usually make a film more interesting and cool. In this movie, for example, I found that not only was the filming done in only three days, but a lot of the actors’ work was improvised. This is something I haven’t seen before in a film, and with a low-budget like this one had, it’s intriguing to me to think that we have three actors who were given a story, characters, and some guidelines, and then let loose. Let’s see what transpires!

A year after his brother Tom’s death, Jack is invited to get away from it all and spend some time at his best friend Iris’s family lakeside cabin. He accepts the offer only to find Iris’s sister Hannah. After a tough break up with her girlfriend, Hannah and Jack are both ready and willing to pound down a few shots and end up having sex. They awake to find that Iris herself has come down to the cabin.

The Raid: Redemption

As a kid, my favorite films were action, especially ones starring Jackie Chan, where people used hand-to-hand combat as opposed to guns or swords to defeat their foes. As the years went on and I got older, those movies never got too popular and I didn’t see them as often as I did when I was younger. Chan has making those films since then, but for a while Hollywood and other places started producing more elegant, whimsical, and traditional martial arts films like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which I loved, but it wasn’t the kind of brute action I still loved. I found what I was looking for a few times in recent years from Tony Jaa, but not much else.

Now, me and other fans like me have a new hope. The Raid: Redemption has no background story or purpose, nor does it need one. The plot is simple: a group of policemen are attempting to overtake a large apartment building controlled by a crime lord. You learn this in the first few minutes. The rest of the film is just action, pure and simple.