Dim Sum Funeral This was supposed to be a comedy. It’s about a Chinese mother who dies and her Americanized Chinese children are forced to spend 7 days together setting up and conducting a ritual Chinese funeral. Talia Shire played a Jewish woman who was a friend and caregiver for the family so knew the children and mother really well. I felt like she was there in an effort to get Godfather fans and Rocky fans to watch the movie, otherwise, her role didn’t serve a lot of purpose. The dialog might as well have been in Chinese, a soap opera, where it’s hard to understand why the actors are so wound up about stuff.

UP The animated Pixar feature with Ed Asner as an old guy who hooks a bunch of helium balloons to his house in an effort to move it to South America. I liked it a lot, it had a good plot and a nice ending. I don’t know if children would like it a lot because it seemed to be about old people’s dreams more than kids, plus it didn’t seem like there were any potential tie-ins for toys that could come in McDonalds Happy Meals except mean looking dogs.

Bruno I think I’ve seen Borat, the previous movie with this same actor, and don’t remember it being as nasty-naked-gay as this movie. It caught me off guard. When it was over I was surprised I’d watched the whole thing. It had some funny moments, and I was trying to figure out if the angry people were acting or were truly angry. I think they were truly angry. I wouldn’t want to watch this movie with my inlaws, my sweet granny, or the Bible study class.

Adam According to TV, one in every 90 children born in America today has autism, and Asperger’s Syndrome appears to be the socially-acceptable form of autism because they can more or less interact with people, not sit in the corner banging their head on the wall and screaming every time the doorbell rings. There was that Asperger’s gal on America’s Next Top Model a couple of seasons ago, and The Amazing Race just had a guy with it this season. This movie was about a guy who has Aspergers and how he coped/didn’t cope with life after his dad died and left him alone. It’s a love story because he got his downstairs neighbor (single chick) to help him. I felt like it was one of those situations where the screenwriter/director has a relative with the condition, and this is his way of making the world aware that we’re going to meet warm, interesting, although complicated people who just happen to autistic. It was pretty good, but I don’t need to see it again.

Taking Woodstock This is about how Woodstock, yes, that Woodstock, came to be located where it was, a behind-the-scenes look. It was good, and I mosloved seeing all the vintage automobiles. There must have been some CGI going on there, because surely they couldn’t have found that many old pickups and station wagons and etceteras to recreate gridlock on a highway with hundreds of cars stretching into the distance. Imelda Staunton was really good as the old Jewish mother running a motel.

Postgrad This movie was described as a recent college graduate must live at home with her quirky family. Gee, sounds like about 1000 other movies, doesn’t it? It was the kind of movie where Alan Arkin would play the dad, except now he’s too old, so he’d have to be the granddad, ala Little Miss Sunshine, but never mind, he’s not in it. Nope, the dad is Michael Keaton. Forget he was ever Batman, he did a good job here. As the opening credits rolled and I saw Carol Burnett is in the movie. I thought Oh HELL No! Do not tell me that we are expected to believe those two are married. No, big sigh of relief, Carol is the quirky grandma, and there is a quirky mother, played by Jane Lynch, the actress who played Julia Child’s big tall sister in Julie and Julia.

This woman has truly stupendous thunder thighs, which is all right, because she’s the quirky mom, not some glamorous mom, and besides the camera adds poundage, and maybe she was wearing a fat suit when she played Julia's sister, but I don't think she was in this movie. The quirky little brother was played by Bobby Coleman, a little kid I’ve seen before, who sort of resembles a young Mick Jagger and is the perfect choice for this role of quirky little brother who might be a little disturbed but will grow out of it.. Carol Burnett was great, and all the actors did a good job; I didn’t get that feeling that they were aware they were making a movie that I sometimes get. I would watch this movie again.

The Taking of Pelham 123 Pure action movie, and very good for suspense, and we’re never going to ride the New York Subway after seeing it, not that we were pining to. This is a remake of the same title that came out in 1973, but I don’t know if I ever saw the first one. John Travolta was excellent, and a real change from previous roles as the mastermind of a hostages for ransom plot that involved stockmarket manipulation to give it that up-to-date feeling.

World’s Greatest Dad Here is the Netflix plot summary. “After his son (Daryl Sabara) dies in an awkward freak accident, high school poetry teacher Lance (Robin Williams) ghostwrites a suicide note to spare the family embarrassment. But when the note becomes an unexpected hit, Lance sees a chance to resurrect his writing career. In a bid for literary fame, Lance writes his son's journal and passes it off as his own.” The awkward freak accident was this obnoxious, sex-obsessed teenager accidentally hung himself while masturbating. His dad rearranged the scene to make it look like he hung himself on purpose. I liked this movie a lot. I kept reminding myself that there is nothing funny about suicide, but it was funny to see how things started rolling, and I liked the ending.

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard This is a fictionalization of one of my all-time favorites: Slasher, that 2004 documentary about the hired gun car salesman who travels around the country to troubled car dealerships orchestrating a weekend sell-off of used cars using questionable tactics. This new movie doesn’t measure up to the original, and is a waste of time and money.

A Perfect Getaway Somehow, although it didn’t star Vince Vaughan or any other comedy actors, I decided maybe this was a funny movie about a honeymoon. Wrong. It is what I would call a chainsaw movie without the chainsaws. It’s about creepy serial killers who seek out honeymooning couples and murder them, then take on their personas to look for more victims. They hike off into a remote part of Hawaii and the fun starts there. Not that I’d planned on it, but I’m not going to hike to any remote beaches any time soon.

Star Trek What I can’t believe is that with all the previous Star Trek movies and so on, this moive title wasn't taken. It is a 2009 pre-quel to the television series. I guess all the other movies had more words in the title to set them apart. I understood right away that I was seeing Capt. Kirk’s daddy at the beginning, because he said his name was George Kirk. I enjoyed this movie because although I am not a Trekky, through osmosis I somehow absorbed enough Star Trek info over the past few decades that I knew what was going on and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Watching the ending credits we found out that Deep Roy is in this movie – we’re pretty sure that’s what it said. He was the actor who played ‘the’ Oompaloompa in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory where instead of having a lot of different actors, they used CGI to clone the image of this little man doing everything. We think he played the endearing little Hobbit character in this Star Trek movie, whom we were glad to see at the end didn’t get left behind at the Starfleet outpost on some frozen planet.

Last and not least:

Julie and Julia I was ready to hate this movie because I liked the book it was based upon so much; I didn’t think a movie could do it justice, but I liked it a lot, and watched it twice. It is the story about a blogger who decided to work her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year so she would have something to blog about. The story parallels Julia Child’s own story about how she took up cooking and the trials of getting something published.

Especially evocative to me was when Julia finally met for the first time a woman she had been corresponding with for eight years – it was like meeting a blogging friend in this day and age. One thing I was afraid of was that Meryl Streep was probably going to fall off the box they were surely going to stand her on so she’d look tall, and although we very seldom saw her feet, when we did catch at glimpse of feet the shoes were really clunky with thick soles and/or high heels. As it was, I don’t believe Julia Child was quite that over the top, weaving around and waving her arms and that fake voice, but it didn’t get in the way of the story.