This weekend we had the opportunity to watch a bunch of movies. These are the ones that weren't my favorites. Some were okay, some were less than okay, one I couldn't bear to watch all of.

The blurbs in quotes are from Netflix.

The Killing of John Lennon (2006): "Lifting dialogue directly from notorious assassin Mark David Chapman's real-life journal, director Andrew Piddington paints a chilling portrait of the man who infamously shot John Lennon outside his New York City apartment building in 1980. The film chronicles Chapman's trek from his home on the islands of Hawaii to Lennon's home on the island of Manhattan, where he made history by murdering a living legend."

I thought it was very well done. I couldn't help wondering what some pharmaceutical intervention might have done to help him, but I'm sure there are a lot more like him out there. This isn't worth spending a lot of money to rent, but I'd watch it again if it came on cable.

27 Dresses (2007): About a woman who is tired of being the bridesmaid all her life. This is a cute movie. I enjoyed seeing the 27 dresses being modeled. Yes, it is a fluffy girly movie, but I liked it better than a lot of them - the conflict and carrying on seemed founded on valid reasons to get hysterical and emoional, unlike some movies.

Beowulf (2007): I knew this movie was animation, but I liked it better than I expected. Usually in animated movies like Shreck (which may be really cute and funny, but I can't stand to watch it), I feel the characters are over-acting, or the animation tries to be too much like the real character - something I can't quite put my finger on. For some reason in this Beowulf movie the animated characters didn't closely resemble anyone I had ever seen, and although I remotely sensed the person behind the character in a couple of instances, I wasn't sitting there through the movie saying 'and there's John Malkovich.' Maybe this was partly because I didn't pay attention to the cast credits at the beginning (if there were any) so I didn't have any expectations.

Walking Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)"John C. Reilly stars as fictional pop star Dewey Cox in this parody of the increasingly predictable rags-to-riches music biopic." This movie was funny. I wouldn't pay a lot to rent it or see it in a theater, but it was okay, making fun of the various movies about the lives of such movie stars as Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash. Mr. Troutbend even thought it was funny. My favorite part was the songs that were written for Dewey Cox to sing - there were a lot of them, parodies of real songs, a little off color, as was a lot of the action, but the fact that they kept coming up with a different one every few minutes was funny.

Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007): "Johnny Depp (in an Oscar-nominated role) reteams with director Tim Burton for this adaptation of the hit Broadway musical about the Demon Barber of Fleet Street."

This is a musical - there is more singing than talking. It started off okay with Johnny Depp and Helen Bonham Carter singing together, but there were some discordant moments, and then this blonde chick came on and it was like cats in distress. Her singing truly sucked, and then some other broad started up in a sort of duet that sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard, and that was it for me. Too bad, it might have been a good movie, and I think Johnny Depp was probably good in it, but a person can only take so much bad Chinese theater.

Hitman (2007)"When a highly trained gun-for-hire known only as Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant) gets entangled in a political takeover, he finds himself hunted by both Interpol and the Russian military." This is an action thriller that we watched because it is Mr. Troutbend's favorite genre. The story is based on a video game, which might tell you something about the depth of the plot.

Outlaw (2007)"...a disgruntled ex-soldier who forms a modern-day renegade team of angry, like-minded citizens to serve up vigilante justice to drug dealers and corrupt government officials. But when their identity is compromised, they find themselves on the receiving end of outlaw violence." Set in England, with an all-English cast, this movie didn't turn out like I'd expected in the first 30 minutes. It started out like the A-Team: a group of men with various talents coming together to defeat the bad guys where the law was powerless to do so. It deteriorated into all of the A-Team guys getting killed, and in fact having a big shoot-out with the British police and killing some of them, so you knew it wasn't going to end up good. Basically, it was hard to find any heros in the story, so it was confusing and unsatisfying.

Margot at the Wedding (2007):"When acid-tongued writer Margot (Nicole Kidman) arrives to attend estranged sister Pauline's (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding, she quickly takes a disliking to Pauline's artist fiancé (Jack Black)." Let me say this first: I like Jack Black; I think he's funny and steals the show in any movie he's in, no matter how small the part. In fact, I like his smaller parts better because if he has a big part he doesn't do a good job of stealing the spotlight from himself. He plays a medium part in this one, and was one reason I didn't hate this movie. It was one of those movies that seem to be made up of little stories strung together. I had a feeling if it was based on a book the book might be really good, about the relationship between adult siblings in a dysfunctional family (aren't they all, to some degree?) If it comes on free preview of the movie channel week from your cable provider, take a look at it. It's possible you'll identify with some of the anecdotes from your own upbringing.

AtonementThis movie was nominated for Best Picture, so I guess people thought it was pretty good. I wasn't that impressed. It was 'okay' but the premise of the plot was thin - an impressionable adolescent wrongfully accuses a young man of a crime, and the ensuing prosecution and jail time ends up keeping him and her sister apart, preventing them from ever having their time together. It is set in World War II England, one key element being the retreat at Dunkirk, France, which we don't see much about in movies except that time in Mrs. Miniver starring Greer Garson where they make reference to civilians mobilizing in their small boats to rescue the soldiers stranded on the Dunkirk beach by approaching Nazi armies. The ending kind of brought it together - summed up what was so bad about it all with the hindsight of 40 or 50 years. If they had left that part off, I'd have felt it was a total waste of time. One thing I hated was the flashbacks - they showed you something from one person's point of view, and shortly re-showed the same scene from someone else's point of view.

I Am Legend (2007): "A terrible virus has spread across the planet and turned the human race into bloodthirsty monsters. Mankind's only hope for survival is scientist Robert Neville (Will Smith), the one person left unaffected by the epidemic." This was good until the ceiing in our hotel room started leaking from people taking a jacuzzi bath at 3:30 pm (their second one that day) and we had to call maintenance. Maintenance decided to move the people upstairs to a different room and called the front desk, which (thinking it was us who was moving) shut off our movies right in the middle of this one, so we don't know how it ended. There were so many others to watch, and this one was so gritty I couldn't bear to re-watch the first hour to get to where we left off, we never got around to finishing it.