MOVIE REVIEW - Brick Mansions

I didn't even know that Brick Mansions existed until a few weeks after I heard that Paul Walker had passed, so I was very glad to see that there was at least one more movie aside from Fast 7 that we'd get to see him in.  I was lucky enough to score a free screening of it last night, and had a hard time keeping my expectations in check... the last action movie I saw was The Raid 2: Berandal and that thing was amazing!  I seriously had to try very hard to wipe that movie from my recent memory so I could enjoy Brick Mansions.  

This film is the American remake of a French film (District 13) famous for it's use of parkour (a.k.a. free-running or street-ninja... -ing).  I've had D13 in my Netflix Queue for over a year now and I just have never gotten around to watching it.  As if the Paul Walker factor wasn't enough to get me to go see the remake, they got the actor from the French original to play the same part in the remake as the Paul Walker's reluctant "convict" partner.  That is major cool points in my book if you are doing an American remake of a foreign film.

MOVIE REVIEW - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

After the disappointing Iron Man 3 and the only halfway satisfying Thor: The Dark World, to say that I was skeptical about Captain America: The Winter Soldier being a good movie would be an understatement.  The Avengers knocked it out of the park and each Marvel movie that has come out since has had the impossible task of living up to it.  The hype surrounding this movie was off the charts.  Some called it Avengers 1.5, others said that it could stand among the ranks of great political thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate and even others have called it the best Marvel movie ever made.  I wouldn't quite go as far as to agree with the last one, but Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the first Marvel movie since The Avengers that has finally lived up to its hype.

MOVIE REVIEW - Noah

The first time I heard that a Noah movie was being made, I could have honestly cared less.  I grew up Catholic and the story of Noah, while impactful, really didn't seem all that exciting to me as a movie.  Regardless, building a boat for an hour and a half, shoving two of every animal on it and then surviving the biggest rainstorm in history should be pretty cut and dry for a movie studio, right?

Enter director Darren Aronofsky, director of such trip fest movies as Pi, The Fountain, Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream.  He took the Biblical story of Noah and turned it into something actually kinda fun to watch.  I saw it with a friend and found myself turning to him multiple times and saying, "What the hell?" ... but in a good way.  The basic Biblical story of Noah is there; a man who is charged by God to build a boat big enough for his family and two of every animal to survive the great flood meant to wipe the current evil off the face of the Earth.  That is pretty much all about Aronofsky's Noah that is Biblical.  Everything else in the movie is from the mind of a very creative, yet extremely weird director.