The past, present, and future combine in a fantastical story of love, life, and death. A conquistador searches the Mayan jungle for the tree of life, a research doctor searches for a cure for his wife’s cancer, and a spaceman and his big tree speeding toward a faraway nebula.

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Based on the excellent book by Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation takes a meandering, multi threaded look at how the fast food industry affects several facets of American life.

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I watched A Scanner Darkly a while back and thought it would be fun to check out Waking Life which was the first use of the stylized, rotoscope animation. I found it “interesting” but in a weak way, meaning it was fairly entertaining but I wouldn’t recommend it. Maybe a “meh +”.

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The Last Mimzy is a strange movie. It’s for kids, but has a mildly entertaining science fiction center. My biggest complaint is the answer to what the heck is going on is basically blown in the first five minutes. I feel it would have been more suspenseful to withhold the “answer” until the end of the film.

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By this juncture, The Karate Kid series has become (as many series do) cheese-ball and unintentionally funny. There’s a glimmer of the original film’s greatness but many aspects in Part III are decidedly off, round-kicking it into definite so-bad-its-good territory.

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I’m not an Adam Sandler fan, but do find some of his movies entertaining (50 First Dates, The Wedding Singer). Click, however, I didn’t care for. Sandler plays suburban everyman Michael Newman who’s given a magic remote that can control reality. I have a remote control for my DVD player, and I probably should taken a cue from the film and watched Click at 2x speed and with mute on. That would have saved an hour - and the film would have been just as understandable.

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Today, Valley Of The Dolls, based on the book of the same name, comes off as darned campy which wasn’t the original intent. Many of its topics (drug addiction, homosexuality, pornography, and the cruel show business machine) once controversial and shocking, now seem tame. So we have actresses looking dour and pensive regarding matters Lindsay Lohan would consider sobriety. The result is overacting (camp) and at worst, much ado about nothing (boring).

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Here’s a light snack respite from the bad movie celebration for - a new bad movie. Well, not super-bad, just dull and predictably boring. Which is a shame, because one of the film’s highlights is Catherine Zeta-Jones with a dab of tiramisu on her lips. It’s a simple romantic comedy based on the German film Mostly Martha (which I haven’t seen).

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Runaway is a real “meh” movie. It has one thing going for it, a story by Michael Crichton, the same writer responsible for The Andromeda Strain, Westworld, and Jurassic Park. However, the special effects are extremely dated (even for an eighties film), the music is odd, and there are no notable performances.

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After watching Planet of the Apes I added some Charlton Heston films to my Netflix queue, hence this review of 1963’s Diamond Head, set in Hawaii of 1959. I grew up in Honolulu so this film was mix of amusement and annoyance. The film deserves a lot of credit for tackling the testy issue of interracial romance, but otherwise it’s unquestionably dated, and ultimately I only found it entertaining as a film record of late fifties Hawaii.

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