There's a ton of reviews I've been meaning to get to, including the entertaining Iron Man 3, the tedious and cynical Pain and Gain, and the Die Hard knockoff, Olympus Has Fallen; along with a new installment of The Netflix Files. The reason for my absence (besides school and midterms) has to do with the tragic passing of my friend and fangirl Eileen Turri. Eileen was the woman who introduced me to the wonders of Monty Python and the brilliance of British sketch comedy, in addition to being a dear and close friend, and a terrific writer (read what she did with the crazy series that she ran with, The Bentley Chronicles). She was a Star Wars and Harry Potter die-hard and I enjoyed talking movies with her. The big summer movie she was excited about seeing was Star Trek Into Darkness, the sequel to the 2009 reboot of the Trek franchise. Sadly, she won't get that opportunity to watch it. This weekend, I'll be watching J.J. Abram's sequel for the both of us.
And here's (finally) part two of my list of the best from last year, along with the full list at the bottom. 5. The Wind Rises - The worst thing I can honestly say about this gorgeous animated feature is that, at 126 minutes, it wasn't long enough. I could get lost in Hayao Miyazaki's final effort for hours and not get bored. The writer-director-animator is a master of whisking us away to new worlds of his own creation, but how fitting that his last masterwork is where we're rooted into the past as Miyazaki tells the story of real-life Jiro Horikoshi as he lives out his dreams of building airplanes, despite them being used for the Imperial Army back in World War II. Every last frame of this film - from Jiro's dreams with fellow designer Giovanni Caproni and his brief romance with Nahoko, to showing the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1932 and his journey to Nazi Germany several years later - is painstakingly beautiful and artfully crafted to within an inch of his...
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