Word of Mouth Scale

There’s a special place in my heart for comic book movies. With the right director, they can take an otherwise outrageous comic and turn it into something that makes you think, “Yeah, I can buy into that.” Sam Raimi’s doing it with the Spiderman movies, and Bryan Singer did it with the first two X-Men. Fear set in when Singer stepped aside to put new life into the Superman franchise, and Brett Ratner (Rush Hour 1 & 2, The Family Man) took over the helm. Visions of Joel Schumacher ruining Tim Burton’s Batman movies started dancing in my head.

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Capote

I must confess at the start of this review that I went into this viewing expecting the best. I think that Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of the best actors working right now, and find his performances enjoyable even in less than stellar movies. I also, generally, enjoy Catherine Keener, and I had heard that this movie was a knockout.
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United 93

If you have not yet seen this movie – go.

If you have already seen this movie – go again.

If you are afraid to see this movie, don’t be. It is very respectfully done, very moving, and very palatable. This is not an action movie interpretation, it isn’t presenting any specific viewpoint, yet you do get a sense of all the things that went wrong and just how complacent we were. Just how complacent we are becoming again, BTW.

This isn’t a good movie for children, not because of the subject matter but because of the pacing. There isn’t a lot of overt violence to scare them and bad language is minimal. The movie, however, is presented more or less in real time and so young viewers, with no idea of what is unfolding, will be squirmy. For teens, it is a good movie to see, though their level of interest will be directly proportional, I imagine, to their knowledge of the events of 9/11.

For those of us who remember that day, the violence will be mostly in your memories – not on the screen. He does show us the towers burning, and we hear about the Pentagon being hit, but the focus is really on what is happening on flight 93 and with the military, ATC and FAA workers trying to deal with the unfolding tragedy. I found myself tearing up at times that I wouldn’t have expected – and not tearing up during the scenes you would expect to elicit the most emotion.

Really, truly – no matter where you stand politically, you should see this film.

When I say to GO see this, that is exactly what I mean – in a theater with a crowd of people. The experience is compelling. I have never been in a theater that was so quiet through an entire movie – not even candy wrappers crinkling. When the film ended and the lights came up, you could see in the faces of the other patrons the fear and the sorrow and the pride and the questions…

Rotten Tomatoes: Critics 91%; Users 89%

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5626 W Bell Rd, Glendale, AZ

I went to this club expecting it to be something else, La Grocerie to be exact. And I thought it was… until I got home and looked at my receipt for their address. New owners or just a new name? I’m not sure, but it was a similar experience to my last visit.

I get the impression that they thought I was a food critic of some sort (I guess, since I am writing a review, I am) – I was dining alone, I asked some very specific questions about their menu, I solicited my servers opinion on two of the dishes, I let her know I planned on having dessert, and asked her to leave the wine list so I could pick the perfect wine to go with something chocolate. Then I took pictures of my food and was writing notes on my MDA. All in all, pretty suspicious looking. Sorry the pics are dark and blurry, but the restaurant is dark – go figure.

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