Reviews from a Refrigerator Box

Exciting news! Reviews from a Refrigerator Box is moving to its very own website! Celebration and fireworks, wooooooo!



It's at www.refrigeratorbox.org (somebody else was using the .com version). So from now on, all my movie reviews will be posted over there. Excuse the crappy header and persistantly purple color scheme, the template is a work in progress.

Why move? Well, for one thing I don't get any money from this blog. Livejournal gets the money from the ads. On my own site, I get my own ads and the approximately half a penny per click they generate (every little bit helps!) ... though the ads aren't up yet either (like I said: work in progress).

Also, now that I have my own site I can include fun things like polls and actually be able to check if anyone's reading. My more professional site also includes a more professional work ethic: I plan to have one hilarious post per day on some movie related topic (though still only one long-ass photo movie review... those things take forever). Who knows - if I actually start making money, I might upgrade to TWO or more photo movie reviews per week!

This week was my friend Angella’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Angella!) on Tuesday so I allowed myself to be coaxed out to the theaters instead of hiding at home with my DVDs and a copy of the bank statement from my trip to Europe. In our town, Tuesdays are cheap days (only $5.99), so Tuesdays are now also known as The Only Day I Will Go To The Theater (“Tuesday” is shorter). Lucky for me Angella chose to see Letters to Juliet, which was the best option I could have hoped for seeing as how Gunless had already gone and I’d already seen Iron Man 2. (Furry Vengance.... shudder.)

The blurb for Letters to Juliet, if I got to write it (and I do, at least on THIS website), would go something like this:

A fact checker gets a shot at writing and true love too when she travels to Verona and replies to a fifty year old letter to Juliet, bringing the woman and her handsome grandson down from Britain to reconnect with her old love.

It sounds like an interesting setup, if you like that sort of thing. But would it turn out to be just another lazy Turbo Romantic Comedy, where everything whisks by so fast you barely have time to eat your popcorn? ( Click here to find out. )

Sorry guys, but this week's movie review is going to be a little later than usual because I'll be spending the long weekend camping with my Girl Guides.



We're heading out to Camp Carter with the Boy Scouts (who are just regular Scouts now, since girls are allowed in), Cubs, Venturers, Pathfinders, and Brownies for four days of... something? Games? The Scouts are planning everything so I really have no idea. All we have to do is show up and make sure none of our girls get eaten by bears.



Anyway the reason I'm mentioning this is because we're not coming back until Monday, so I'll be posting the review then. Apologies to any of you who sit anxiously by the computer on Sunday waiting for me to post. (Except not really - you should probably use this opportunity to get out more.)

So, you remember that "recession" thing, right? The one where everyone stopped making so much money and had to cut back on fun stuff? Well, if you're disappointed I'm not reviewing a theatrical film and looking to lay blame, lay it on the recession. I actually have to PAY for my tickets, remember? Anyway, so today's film is Love Happens, which was released last year but is not a remake of the film of the same name from ten years ago that you've probably never heard of but will come across if you IMDB the title.

THIS Love Happens stars Aaron Eckhart and Jennifer Aniston goes something like this: A new relationship with an eccentric florist forces a psychologist who leads seminars in grieving to finally come to terms with his own loss.

Sounds depressing, right? And maybe also a little boring and formulaic? Yeah, it did to me too when I read the blurb, but these two actors have a decent track record for picking movies so I gave it a shot and liked it.

( Click here to see why I would call it interesting, hopeful, and only semi-formulaic. )

*** AN INTERESTING SIDE-REQUEST - I'm going to be starting up a real website of my own for these reviews to hopefully make a little money and be able to do more content. Any idea what I should call it (aside from my own name)?

I'll admit it: when Iron Man came out in 2008, I pretty much had to be dragged to it by my much-more-enthusiastic-for-comic-book-movies brother. The trailer hadn't made it look particularly interesting or different, and I was skeptical about their casting choice for Iron Man. Robert Downey Jr.?? Wasn't he one of those guys who got famous, took up drugs, and fell off the end of the earth?? But I went anyway and I loved it. It was action packed, Robert Downey Jr. did a fantastic job, and it was unexpectedly funny, which endeared me to it instantly. Needless to say I jumped on tickets for the Thursday night midnight premiere of Iron Man 2 like a fat kid on a Smartie. The basic story for the film went something like this:

A slowly dying Tony Stark must pull himself out of his downward spiral of partying and eschewing his responsibilities to stop the military, his competitors in the arms business, and a bitter Russian physicist, who have teamed up to steal the iron suit technology.

I seem to be in the minority here among both critics and normal people but I loved Iron Man 2 less than Iron Man. (I'm used to it - the same thing happened with Batman Begins/Dark Knight) I think part of it is my instinctive loyalty to whatever I see first, but it's more than that.

( Click here for further analysis into my twisted black-sheep psyche. )

For all intents and purposes, the terms "middle school" and "junior high" are interchangeable to North Americans, as which one your kid will attend between elementary school and high school varies between states, provinces, and sometimes even school districts. However, if you see the synopsis for Diary of a Wimpy Kid:

A boy with an inflated opinion of himself but no real social skills attempts, through any means necessary, to become popular during his first year of middle school.

...and think "oh, my son/daughter/niece/nephew/ward/charge/etc is in junior high, I should take him/her to see this move and then he/she will be impressed with how well I understand him/her and it will foster a new spirit of openness in our relationship" you are in fact cementing your status (forever) as a clueless adult to which no information on life should ever be imparted (ever).

You see, the difference between middle school (which usually consists of Grades 6-8) and junior high (Grades 7-9) is only a year, it's a huge year in the development of a child. (FYI, even if your kid actually is in middle school he/she probably still won't be impressed if you deign to suggest that this might be a good movie to see.)

( Click here and let me save you from a hideous social gaffe. )

When someone in Hollywood has an idea that makes dollar signs pop up in the heads of studio executives, you can bet that it will only take a few days before someone from another studio "coincidentally" has the same idea. Giving two people the same idea and sequestering them in separate rooms to write the script will result in two different storylines, so the movies actually end up being quite different when you watch them, but that doesn't stop the promo blurbs and trailers from looking damn near identical.

Remember The Year of Two Asteroid Movies (Deep Impact and Armageddon) and The Year of Two Volcano Movies (Volcano and Dante's Peak)? Well this year is the year of not two but THREE identical spec ops action movies: The Losers, The A-Team, and The Expendables. The premise goes something like this:

A handful of operatives known as the best in their field find themselves betrayed and facing impossible odds of survival as they attempt to perform ridiculous feats of physics-defying action to get their lives back and stop a bad guy from doing something really bad.

As far as telling them apart goes, The A-Team is the one with Liam Neeson and Bradley Cooper and that guy who looks like Mr. T. A tank falls from an airplane in the trailer. The Expendables is the one with Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone, and Jet Li that has Arnold Schwarzenegger in the trailer. The Losers is the one with the guy who played The Comedian in Watchmen and that blue girl from Avatar. In the trailer, the guy who plays Human Torch in the Fantastic 4 movies pretends to shoot security guards with his fingers.

It is this last one that we concern ourselves with today. ( Read more - there's pictures! )

My recent travels in Britain and the Netherlands have got me thinking of future travels, which of course lead me to think of Australia (specifically of going there) because I'm a tiny bit obsessed. Canada and Australia have reciprocal year-long work/travel visa arrangements, so I started looking at what exactly moving to Australia for a year would involve. Expat blogs are a great source of such information and after wading through about 4,000 freeloader-tour-of-Oz "look how much beer I drank" type and 2,000 me-and-my-new-Aussie-spouse "what is this football thing anyway?" type blogs, I finally found a very informative one written by a schoolteacher from Ontario.

One of the more fascinating practical points she outlines in her guide to moving to Melbourne is that most Australian apartments don't come with refrigerators (or stoves, but that's a whole other issue...). This seems, to my Canadian mind, to defeat the entire purpose of renting an apartment. If you asked the average Canadian to list the advantages of renting over buying, they would say something like this:

1. Don't have to haul refrigerator across town and up stairs.
2. Don't have to beg/cajole friends into helping move refrigerator across town and up stairs.
3. Don't have to buy refrigerator.

Which leads me to the conclusion that Aussies either really love manual labor or they haven't properly thought the system through. Don't strain your brains, everyone. I've done it for you. ( Click here for system analysis: with diagrams! )

While I am inclined to like Sam Worthington (you'll remember that he's on the list), I am not inclined to like Greek mythology or indeed any story that features a lot of swords and dust and men wearing skirts, so I hesitated over Clash of the Titans. But the nature of the list meant I had to go, so I did. Twice. Once in 3-D and once in regular D. I wouldn't have PAID for it twice, but the second time my Dad treated me.

If you haven't already seen Clash of the Titans or the atrocious 1980s film of the same name that it's based on, the basic story is this:

When gods Zeus (Liam Neeson) and Hades (Ralph Fiennes) send a huge monster to punish mankind for its ingratitude, Perseus (Sam Worthington), a mortal son of Zeus who wants nothing to do with the gods, turns out to be the only one who can stop it.

You see, the Gods need mankind's prayers. Mankind is not happy, so they're not offering many. In a stroke of pure genius, Zeus (who sparkles like the Cylons from the old Battlestar Galactica)and Hades (who looks like Voldemort) decide that the best way to reinvigorate their gratitude is to send the Kraken to wipe out their city. (I don't know about you, but nothing makes me more grateful than having huge fangy monsters sent to kill me).

( Click here to hear some of the gods' other really great ideas )

Since its inception, Dreamworks, as an animation studio, has trailed behind its primary competitor, Pixar. In pair-up after pair-up, Pixar's are always the funny, warm-hearted, timeless classics, and Dreamworks' are the pop-culture hobbled toilet humor fests with the depth of a teaspoon. Dreamworks has collaborated with other studios to produce Pixar-comparable films (such as Chicken Run and Flushed Away, which were done in conjunction with British animation studio Aardman.) But it's not until now that I've really felt Dreamworks has made a truly stellar film all on its own.

How to Train Your Dragon is that film. It's rare find among family films: a movie that kids will love but that parents won't want to drill through their own heads to escape (as if you need an example, but: Chipmunks 2: The Squeakuel). In fact, there were plenty of adults in the theater, myself included, that had come out to see it on our own, without even using a young cousin as an excuse. The story goes something like this:

When Hiccup, a young Viking without much skill for fighting, brings down a type of dragon so rare that no one's ever seen one, he finds himself making friends with it rather than fighting to the death with it in the Viking tradition.

( Click here to learn why you, too, should see it, and pay more for the 3-D version. )