Hilaribad

This was so bad I can't even tell you what happened after people fell into the well, looking for some ... well, ruins, I guess. The acting was so terrible and the lines so non-digestible that I was distracted by other things for the 25 minutes or so I could stay with the film. Dumb teenagers? Check. Beer? Check. Sexual innuendo? Check. Getting slashed up in bed? No, that's another movie.

I think if you are interested in Mayan ruins or archaelogy, your best bet for a film on this subject might be a National Geographic documentary.

A fundamentalist Christian family changes its composition after a near-death experience. The results of this event are handled with shock value and faltering attempts at dark comedy -- which don't work well but do make you squeamish when people are walking around naked for no reason. Examination of problematic beliefs is good; liberation from those problems is good; using the body rather than the soul, as a tool to examine that liberation, is shallow.

I'm a big fan of anything cheesy, b-rated, and set in the old days when there were smoking guns, bad guys, and hypnotic music. See Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!.

Or see the powerful duo of Grindhouse that is Planet Terror and Death Proof.

Are you a fan of Anthropomorphic animals?  Kung Fu?  Jack Black?  Movies?  If you answered yes to any of these then you have found your movie.  As he's done a few times previously (School of Rock, Be Kind, Rewind) Jack Black sheds his standard array of stoner jokes to put in a quality effort as the down-trodden panda turned hero his this excellent family film. 

I caught this on late night cable at a hotel in Kamloops, British Columbia last Christmas holiday. Morgan promptly rolled over in bed muttering something about pretentious and arty, and fell asleep, but as tired as I was, I ended up staying up to watch the whole movie, which mesmerized me at every turn.

Wow, I thought this was an excellent movie. Yes, I'm biased that it was directed by Guillermo del Toro, well a little. I don't remember liking Hellboy or even seeing it. But I loved his movie El Espinazo del Diablo (Devil's Backbone). Both it and Labyrinth take place post-Spanish civil war, and both movies involve supernatural things that children are experiencing--both stories with an escape as well as possibly a learning experience and/or transformation of character.

The only good thing about Bosque de Sombras, filmed in Navarra, Spain, was the scenery. The free rental (yay for working at a major video rental store) was worth seeing the beautiful dense forests and mountains and rivers of the Basque region, which is actually an amazing part of Spain, inhabited by one of the few isolated and long-lived, admirable peoples of the world: the Basques.