Caleb's Social Corner

   Solely, I remember this movie came out when it was my birthday, and it had one of the sweetest trailers I had ever seen.  Did it disappoint?  Let's see!    Now be warned, I HAVE NOT READ THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, so my opinions expressed heresay may not gel with yours in the least.  If so, educate me on the graphic novel because I have heard it is a landmark achievement.    The story in extreme briefness is about the cold war in the 1980s and how we are on the verge of war.  A group of old superheroes overcome the law and their past to unite and find the person who is trying to kill them all.  Interesting?  Very.   That being said, this movie is correlative to that of a Cloud Atlas.  There are so many different storylines going on,  yet they start at end with all the characters coming together.   Let me give credit where credit is due.  Visually as in every Zack Snyder film, the visuals are crisp and pr...

    Holy cow. I mean, wow.  Really wow. Too bad her ex-husband James Cameron can't direct movies like this.  The Greatest Man Hunt of All Time gets told in one of, if not THE, best movie of the year, Zero Dark Thirty.   Let me just say this first of all: This one heck of a movie kids.  Not just a war movie, but a masterclass on every level from acting through Jessica Chastain, and the deadly combination of screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow.   The film is about the man hunt of Osama Bin Laden all through the Middle East, focusing on the efforts of Maya, a CIA agent who works day and night to try and find Bin Laden.  The film follows her journey from the first days of torturing prisoners for information, to the final call on Bin Laden's whereabouts that could make or end her career(which makes it because we know the ending).    We see the wheelings and dealings people had to make to move the missions forward, and how t...

   Love is no walk in the park.  Love is hard, grueling, heart wrenching, and destructive at times.   But that one moment where it works, that one night where the magic is real, it makes it all worth while. Love is shown in this more realistic take in Derek Cianfrance's film, Blue Valentine.    Blue Valentine goes away from Hollywood love stories, the a typical cliches of finding true love, red hearts and butterflies and roses, to a emotionally brutal, flat colored tale of a struggling love that is failing. The story follows a couple, played by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams,  from when they first meet to years later in their marriage.  We see their love move from that puppy dog stage from dating, to this almost stale, angry stage in the film.  We see their fighting affection for their child, and all the difficulties they have overcome, and all the ones that are going on in their marriage.    The film has an incredibly bl...

"True courage is not knowing when to take a life, but when to spare one", Gandalf quietly says to Bilbo Baggins as he hands him Bilbo's first sword in Peter Jackson's return to Middle Earth. The movie is The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.    I really had no expectation for the film or any real vigor to go and see it, but as a fan and student of films why not go see the latest from arguably one of the best directors in the modern era.    After all the hype, the changing of directors, and extensive waiting period, Peter Jackson delivers a fun, thrilling, beautiful, and CGI happy return to New Zealand, I mean, Middle Earth.   The story is previous to the LOTR trilogy, so if you want to go see this movie and haven't seen any of those, you in all probability will be lost.    It begins explaining how the dwarf city of Erebor was lost to a dragon, and how the dwarves have been looking for a home since. We then go and follow Bilbo Baggins writing his book ...

   It's funny how literally all people who are geniuses, tycoons, true innovators all have their eccentricities.          How they can have so much brain power, but are lacking in another area. This was no exception for the great Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese's biopic, The Aviator.    The story follows a young and wealthy man who is making a picture about airplanes named Howard Hughes.  He needs more, more, more to make this picture come to fruition in his mind.  The film is eventually finished, but he can't settle.  He wants a reshoot. He wants the talking picture. This man made go big or go home a life motto.    As the film moves along, we transfer from this to his love and obsession with aviation.  With his team, they create the fastest plane ever built at the time and they build TWA.  But others are standing in his way.    Pan Am Airlines partners with a US Senator named Brewster in orde...

   Remember that moment as a kid when you saw that first magic trick, before all the cynicism trying to prove the magician’s trick wasn’t real? It was incredible! For that brief moment in time, magic was real. The romanticism of the world was really something.  The world was such a cool place, something that was so awesome.  This is how the girl, Alice, feels in Sylvain Chomet’s animated film, The Illusionist.    The film is about a magician who travels the British Isles, doing shows for any kind of money he can find.  This job so to speak, lands him in Scotland where he meets a young girl, Alice. She is captivated my his magic, and cannot believe what he can do.  One day she comes in, and he takes something she gives him, and whoof, something new has appeared.  Eventually, he does this with her shoes, getting her a brand new pair.  Taken by this magician, she wants to leave with him to travel the world and see mor...

      “Adult supervision is required”, quotes Calvin Candie in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, this year’s baddest ass movie and one of 2012’s best.       Being a huge Tarantino fan, I was stoked to see how he would work his lyrical and violent genius into a spaghetti western. He did not disappoint.       The story, in brief, is about a bounty hunter Dr. King Schulz, who is going after his biggest bounty, but needs a slave to identify the men.  That slave is Django.  He frees Django and they find these men, The Brittle Brothers, and kill them.  But rather than letting Django go, Schulz feels he is responsible and should help Django find his wife.  So he and Django go through the country finding the bounties until they find Django’s wife at a plantation in Mississippi called Candie Land. She is there, but the question is, can they get her out with keeping themselves alive?  I won’t giv...