Ian T. McFarland

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
  • IMDB: link

Being a Harry Potter fan and a film snob is not easy. Though Chris Columbus’ films were decent, the only adaptation that really worked was 2004’s The Prisoner of Azkaban. With that single concession, we the faithful have just had to sit around and take it from Warner Bros. as they haphazardly adapted the books into competent but lacking films.

On various occasions, I admit, I day-dreamt of getting that phone call offering me the job of directing the next HP feature – which I’d nail and rock the pants off of, obviously. But having just seen The Half-Blood Prince, I’m shocked but very pleased to say that my services were not at all needed on this sixth movie.

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Spirited Silliness

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Spirit
  • IMDb: link

There’s not much to the movie, and that’s just how it should be.  Basically, The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) is vigilante that never seems to die.  The same thing could be said of his arch-nemesis, The Octopus (played by none other than Samuel L. Jackson).  The two have locked heads with each other for the foreseeable past – the good guy fighting for the city, and the bad guy fighting to keep selling drugs.  More stuff happens, like the Spirit’s former flame coming back to town, and something to do with eternity is also mentioned; but there’s not much to figure out in this movie.

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‘Bedtime Stories’ Makes You Fall Asleep

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Bedtime Stories
  • IMDB: link

Did you ever wonder what would happen if Adam Sandler all the sudden gained the ability to magically make anything happen just by telling a story about it happening?  Neither did I, but I guess that’s what we pay Walt Disney Studios for.

So Adam Sandler starts telling his niece and nephew bedtime stories and quickly realizes that, well, these stories come true.  The stories are always about Sandler’s character of Skeeter; so the next day, he finds select elements from the story incorporating themselves into his life.  All the sudden he can control his own life!  (And no, this bears no resemblance to any movies Sandler has put out over the past three years.)  This is all great, but oh no!  All of the sudden bad guys are going to demolish the kids’ school to build a new luxery hotel!  Now, by the film’s climax, Uncle Skeeter has to stop this the only way he knows how: a motorcycle race (totally not shitting you there).

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Pounding It In

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Seven Pounds
  • IMDB: link

On top of director Gabriele Muccino‘s English-language debut, The Pursuit of Happyness, the Italian filmmaker has shown a strength for heart-gushing material with his newest film, Seven Pounds.  As a filmmaker, that he can make movie capable of affecting the audience without pulling any cheap tricks is perhaps the strongest quality any director could hope for; but Seven Pounds proves that too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing.

It’s not easy to summarize the plot of Seven Pounds, due to a well-executed story line that feeds you bit by bit of information until you finally discover the motive for the subject of this character study, Will Smith‘s Ben Thomas.  From the beginning, all we can tell is that Thomas is an IRS auditor who is using his power to help people in ways that only he is willing to help them.

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Role Models

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Role Models
  • IMDB: link

David Wain, an alum of basic cable sketch comedies The State and Stella, has always understood the clichéd studio picture.  His latest two pictures, Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten, have more closely resembled parodies of the trite mainstream lightweight drama than they have functioned as their own picture.  So then what, we may ask, is Wain doing directing a big-budget comedy from Universal Pictures?  The notion almost seems hypocritical; but luckily Wain proves that his comedy chops isn’t restricted to Indie material.

In Role Models, friendly co-workers Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott) are forced into a month of community service after a traffic accident left their monster truck perched atop a High School mascot’s statue.  The judge decides the two’s service will be for Sturdy Wings, a sort of Big Brothers Big Sisters service that links adults to kids with adult role models.

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