The Cinematic Review-verse

Chris Pratt's latest voice-acting venture as the leading lazy cat we know and love as Garfield was very humorous, and it had a few good twists to add more to the one-dimensional character. In addition to said twists, there were funny characters voiced by Samuel L. Jackson and Ving Rhames. 'The Garfield Movie' began showing Garfield's abandonment as a kitten, adopted by Jon Arbuckle (voiced by Nicholas Hoult, Beast from 'X-Men: First Class'), and modernizing his slacker behavior with food drone delivery and Netflix. But his routine, mundane albeit happy life took a change for the worse and better when his birth father, Vic, voiced by Jackson, gets into some trouble and needs his son's help. The film began as funny with Garfield's usual overeating lasagna and allusion to past Garfield media, such as his birthplace in Mamma Leoni's restaurant and former voice actor Lorenzo Music. Between the poignant piano music score by John Debney and Garfield trying ...

Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise in 'Rain Man', directed by Barry Levinson. Copyright 1988, United Artists. On Sunday night, I watched Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise in the Academy Award-winning 'Rain Man'. To those who are unfamiliar, Tom Cruise plays Charlie Babbitt, a troubled, shady Lamborghini dealer who's hoping for some inheritance money from his recently deceased, estranged father to pay the bills. But he gets more than he bargained for when he discovers the trustee of said money is his unknown brother, Raymond, played by Dustin Hoffman, an autistic savant with unique memorization skills, but often troubled mannerisms in socializing. Hoping to get Raymond to give him half his father's money, Charlie attempts to whisk him away to Los Angeles. But when he is forced to drive Raymond from Ohio instead of flying, a bond begins to grow between the brothers. At first, I didn't like Charlie's exasperated and greedy attitude toward Raymond. I also couldn'...

Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino from 'Romy and Michele's High School Reunion. Photo courtesy of Dazed. Good evening. So, on Saturday night, I finally watched 'Romy and Michele's High School Reunion' starring Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow. The ladies played two late twenty-somethings returning to Arizona for their high school reunion. 10 years prior, they were "outcasts". And 10 years later, Romy works as a cashier at a Jaguar dealership while Michele is unemployed. On the good side, Michele is quirky yet offbeat like Kudrow's Phoebe Buffay from 'Friends.' So they make up some lies and dress like businesswomen to fool the crowd. That's where I finally got the quote "Um, I invented Post-its" which I see at my movie theater. But in the end, they dressed as their usual selves, won over their former classmates, and opened their own boutique. What was great about the movie was the humor with the women trying to come up in their adulting jou...

  Good morning, people.  On Thursday, May 16, I saw 'The Fall Guy' starring Ryan Gosling (also a producer) and Emily Blunt. Based on a show from the early 1980s starring Lee Majors, Gosling played Colt Seavers, a stuntman. Though he had a tough injury that put his job on hold, he got back, but here's the twist: While covering for an actor played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Colt accidentally gets mixed up with some of the actor's enemies and ends up on a 'Central Intelligence' type adventure around Australia. If that's not enough, he's got to patch up some broken romance with Emily Blunt's character, Jody. Jody has more drama than that with a major directorial film debut job and an overbearing producer, played by Hannah Waddingham, pressuring her to make a hit. The excellent parts came when Gosling's fight scenes reminded me of 'Central Intelligence', 'Scott Pilgrim', and 'Fast and the Furious'. Not only that, I enjoyed how th...