Archive for December, 2007
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
The film opens with shots of desolate, wide-open country in West Texas in June 1980. In a voiceover, the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), tells of the changing times as the region has become increasingly violent. Next, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) escapes police custody by strangling a young officer and steals a car by using a cattle gun to kill the car’s driver.
Meanwhile, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, comes across a collection of corpses and one dying Mexican, the aftermath of a drug deal gone sour. He also finds two million dollars in a suitcase. Moss refuses to help the Mexican, takes the money and leaves, but is later bothered by his conscience and returns with water for the wounded man. During this second visit Moss is ambushed by gunmen and barely escapes with his life, abandoning his car in the process. Moss makes his way to his trailer home, and plans to put his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) on a bus to stay at her mother’s home until the conflict is resolved.
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Thursday, December 20th, 2007
Giselle (Amy Adams) lives in the blissful animated world of Andalasia, where magical beings frolic freely, animals are talkative companions and musical interludes punctuate every interaction. She dreams of her true love and builds a statue wearing a blue jacket to represent him from her dream with the help of her chipmunk friend Pip and other forest animals. She sings about her true love’s kiss, and Prince Edward (James Marsden), a handsome and valiant but dimwitted prince who hears her voice in the forest and rescues her from a troll. Giselle and Edward get engaged, but her fate takes a turn for worse on her wedding day when his stepmother, the villainous Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), throws her through a magic portal to a place where there is no happily ever after in order to keep her step son single and thus remain queen.
But Giselle’s plunge into darkness lands her in a strange new world - the unforgiving live-action world of modern day New York City. As the cruelty of this new place wears down the fairy-tale idealism of the once carefree princess, such as a homeless man stealing her tiara, the frightened Giselle meets divorcee Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey), who takes her into his apartment despite believing that she is a little crazy, and he is nervous for his daughter Morgan. Robert is a divorce lawyer who doesn’t believe in Giselle’s gushings of happily-ever-after and true love’s first kiss. The next morning he becomes aggravated when he and his daughter find Giselle has rats and other vermin cleaning their apartment and that she has constructed a dress using material cut from the curtains. Nancy (Idina Menzel), Robert’s soon-to-be-fiancee, walks in to find Giselle in a towel and leaves assuming the worst. Robert takes her to his office and asks his secretary to find out where Giselle came from, which proves unsuccessful. Giselle starts to sob when she finds out that his client and her husband are getting a divorce, causing Robert’s boss to angrily reprimand him. Robert takes Giselle, and they go outside the building to Central Park.
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Posted in Adventure, Comedy, Family, Fantasy | No Comments »
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
Lyra Belacqua (Richards) is a young orphan girl who lives in a parallel universe in which a person’s soul resides outside the body in the form of an animal called a “daemon.” The land is controlled by the Magisterium, an authoritarian organisation which restricts freedoms in order to impose its own systems of belief upon the populace. A ward of Jordan College, Lyra spends her free time with the local children and her best friend, Roger (Walker). Lyra and the others tell of the “Gobblers,” who they hold responsible for the disappearance of several local children.
When Lyra’s uncle, Lord Asriel (Craig), visits the college, Lyra saves him from assassination at the hands of a Magisterial representative, who wants to prevent Asriel from presenting evidence to the college which indicates the existence of particles called “Dust,” in opposition to official Magisterium doctrine. Asriel obtains funding from the college to mount an expedition to the far north in order to investigate the substance, which he believes originates in a parallel universe to his own, entering the body via a person’s dæmon. Fearing the effects of Dust, the Magisterium is conducting experiments on children in order to find a means of inoculating them against it.
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Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
Robert Neville (Will Smith) is a brilliant scientist, but even he could not contain the terrible virus that was unstoppable, incurable, and man-made. Somehow immune, Neville is now the last human survivor in what is left of New York City and maybe the world. For three years, Neville has faithfully sent out daily radio messages, desperate to find any other survivors who might be out there. But he is not alone. Mutant victims of the plague-The Infected-lurk in the shadows… watching Neville’s every move… waiting for him to make a fatal mistake. Perhaps mankind’s last, best hope, Neville is driven by only one remaining mission: to find a way to reverse the effects of the virus using his own immune blood. But he knows he is outnumbered… and quickly running out of time.
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