

Wilmington By Mike WilmingtonWilmington@moviecitynews.com
MW on Movies: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Paranormal Activity 2, and CIFF Wrap-Up

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Three Stars) Sweden; Daniel Alfredson, 2009 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third of the Steig Larsson “Girl” movie adaptations — about a leftist Swedish investigative reporter named Mikael Blomkvist, a dragon-tattooed Lesbian computer hacker/investigator named Lisbeth Salander, and the rat’s nest of government corruption, private…
Read the full article »MW on Movies: Hereafter

Eastwood is 80. Most of the evidence is in. Frankly, if he were as bad as his blasters seem to think, some perhaps still taking their cues from the late, renowned and brilliant Eastwood-hater Pauline Kael, he would probably have gone the way of all old macho-hunk stars and be costarring this year in The Expendables.
Read the full article »MW on DVDs: Disneynature Oceans, The Maltese Falcon, The Exorcist, Visions of Europe, Predators … and more

PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW DisneyNature: Oceans (Blu-ray & DVD) (Four Stars) France-U.S.; Jacques Perrin/Jacques Cluzaud, 2009 A real gem, from France, where they love to watch the world through a camera eye. Made by Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, the two directors of the magnificent birds-in-flight documentary Winged Migration, here’s an equally magnificent view…
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Chicago International Film Festival, Red, Conviction … and more

And listen, if I have to read one more review about how this is a movie especially for AARP members, or the geriatric set, or card-carrying Medicare moviegoers, or old folks, I think I’ll throw my walker at them. Give me a break. What do these clowns want, a life spent perusing nothing but Jesse Eisenberg, Michael Cera, or Hannah Montana movies?
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: How to Train Your Dragon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Darjeeling Limited, The Films of Nikita Mikhalkov, The Hangover, The Human Centipede and more …

The opening, for me at least, would have been better with something quieter before the storm — however virtuosic that dragon-storm, however riveting that warfare. The movie could have used a lot more initial contrast between the dreamy predispositions of Hiccup, and those bloody dragon assaults that come blasting at us right from the start.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Secretariat, Life As We Know It, Buried, You Again, and Let Me In

Secretariat (Three and a Half Stars) U. S.; Randall Wallace, 2010 If you’ve got a great story, in life or in movies, the best thing to do is usually to let it fill your heart, tell it clearly, keep it straight and pure, and don’t load it up with agendas and tack-ons. The new movie…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: The Thin Red Line, Mid-August Lunch, Grindhouse, The Twilight Zone, A Nightmare on Elm Street … and more

PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC The Thin Red Line (Two Discs) (Four Stars) U.S.; Terrence Malick, 1998 (Criterion Collection). Let‘s talk about a really great American movie that has been somewhat underrated and neglected, and shouldn’t be any more, not after this superb new Criterion two-disc release. The movie is Terrence Malick‘s 1998 film of…
Read the full article »MW on Movies: The Social Network

But, in the top fillip of The Social Network’s many, many ironies, we see that maybe Mark and his fellow web movers and shakers — and the whole new social-communal wrinkle that they‘ve been chosen to dramatically represent — don’t really “need” things like empathy, sympathy, what we’d call humanity.
Read the full article »