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Download now to find out what we have to say about Avatar’s success, plot devices we HATE in movies, and actors/movies that came along at the right time. We hit on a lot of other topics throughout, but these were the topics that sort of tied the thing together. Somehow we managed to not hit on any sort of best of 2009 or decade lists, but you can expect to see these show up in written form on the site soon enough.

P.S. - I listened to it today and realized I was extra salty in this edition for some reason. We don’t edit anything, so whatever was said is what shows up for better or worse. So my apologies in advance if anyone takes offence!

Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments below.

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2009 / 118 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale J. Nauertz

A man and a woman meet (covertly). They check into a hotel room, glancing over their shoulders to assure that no one they know has seen them. Once inside that room, after indulging in some sexual hanky-panky, the woman expresses her concern over what the two of them are doing. She is worried about being caught. She is guilty over cuckolding another woman. The man tells her that she needn’t worry, that his marriage is a mess/sham, that the moments he spends with his mistress are the best moments of his miserable life. We’ve seen this scene a hundred times if we’ve seen it once. In this case, however, the other woman and the adulterous man were married for almost twenty years and have been divorced for ten.

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2009 / 162 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Jason Jones

It’s been 12 years since “Titanic” sailed into cinematic history with $1.8 billion in global box office receipts and 11 Oscars in tow. On that fateful night at the Academy Awards, director James Cameron proclaimed himself to be the “King of the World” thanks to his film’s impressive accomplishments. Soon after, he vanished underwater to make a couple of documentaries and left film geeks around the world wondering when he would surface long enough to bring a true narrative to theaters again.

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2009 / 158 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale J. Nauertz

According to the Mayan calendar, the world has an expiration date and that date is 12-21-2012, a little over three years from now. So, what can we expect on that foreboding date? Roland Emmerich, the same helpful documentarian who illustrated what we could expect from Global Warming in “The Day After Tomorrow” (apparently waves, snow and tornadoes) and told us how the Pyramids were built in both “10,000 BC” and “Stargate” has answered that question for us in his informative new film, “2012″. Apparently, there will be earthquakes, waves (again) and gigantic volcanoes. I’m not sure exactly what we’re supposed to do in order to prepare for this cluster of mega-cataclysms, but it appears that we should have spent more time and effort finding habitable planets and building spaceships to get to them. Unless we make major advances in space travel in the next three years, it seems we’re pretty well screwed.

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Those of you who’ve been coming to this site for a while know the drill: every year I make a list of movies (usually ten) that I am interested in seeing for the remainder of the year. When I first began to compile this list, I had trouble limiting myself to only ten. Now I struggle to find ten intriguing films that are coming before the end of the calendar year. Is this because I am getting more choosy in my advancing years…or is it because Hollywood is becoming less and less able to produce stimulating product? It’s probably a little of both but, seriously, there isn’t a whole hell of a lot to get excited about between now and the end of December, no matter how forgiving a cinema enthusiast one may be. I have included the release date (remember, these slippery little buggers are always subject to change) and trailer link (whenever available) to each movie listed below for your convenience.

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2009 / 153 Minutes / R
By Dale J. Nauertz

In at least one podcast, I speculated that Quentin Tarantino has disappeared up his own ass. This disturbing trend started with “Kill Bill Vol. 2″, a movie I still loved by the way. It was highly entertaining, but while Quentin usually fills his movies with talk, the quality of the talk seemed to be dropping a bit. Though Tarantino’s dialogue largely retained the snap and crackle upon which his reputation was originally built, it seemed that he was too in love with the sound of his own words to excise any of them. This problem worsened in Quentin’s next film: “Death Proof”. While I still enjoyed the film (it’s pretty dull until the last forty-five minutes or so), the crackling Tarantino banter had instead been replaced by endless film fanatic prattle. The things that the characters in “Death Proof” were saying never seemed like anything the characters in “Death Proof” would say, they only sounded like something Quentin Tarantino would say (how many young women do you know who sit around bars discussing obscure pop songs and old movies…I know none). The movie seemed self-involved, self-important and, worst of all, mostly boring.

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John Hughes never directed a “Godfather” or a “2001″. He never won an Academy Award. But he did give us “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and, sometimes, that’s even better. All he did was inspire a generation of moviegoers by giving them characters and situations they could identify with. Movies like “Sixteen Candles” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” may not have the gritty verisimilitude of films like “Kids” or “Bully” but the worlds they create, though not as allegedly realistic, feel more like the authentic teenage experience than many that have tried harder to capture that difficult period of life. I was among that generation (having done a lot of my growing up in the 80’s) and I cannot tell you if the jokes and themes of movies like “Sixteen Candles” or “The Breakfast Club” resonate with other generations as they did with me, but I CAN tell you that I loved these movies, and that they just felt a bit more realistic, a bit meatier, than other teenage comedies of the time…or even those that came after.

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Download now to find out what we have to say about this Summer’s movies. Which ones we have seen, plan to see, and avoid at all costs. Perhaps more interesting to our long time listeners will be our discussion of the movies that turned us into the film geeks we are today. Our selections just may shock you.

As usual there is the randomness that you have come to expect from this podcast. Somehow we managed to also squeeze in a discussion of the current issues facing the publishing industry and our thoughts on the best car chases of all time.

Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments below.

[iTunes] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in iTunes (MP3).
[RSS] Add the A Fistful of Reviews Podcast feed to your RSS aggregator and have the show delivered automatically (MP3).
[MP3] Download the show in MP3 format.

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2009 / 126 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale J. Nauertz

“Star Trek” was once an eternal commodity. Though originally cancelled, it had lived on to become a movie, another TV show (”Star Trek: Next Generation”), a prequel (”Star Trek: Enterprise”) and pretty much everything else. But, in recent years, it had grown stodgy, stale and, if my memory of “Star Trek: Nemesis” serves, kind of ludicrous. Though it once achieved a mass market appeal, it had recently returned to the margins. It was beloved by the geeks and science teachers that had loved it in the first place, but few others. “Lord of the Rings” once lingered in this pop culture ghetto, until a nerd from New Zealand filled it with bad-ass special effects and sword fights and made the world fall in love with it . Before 2000, I only knew a handful of people who knew who the hell Frodo Baggins was, now EVERYONE does.

Well, “Star Trek” fans, your day has come. Prepare for everyone to care about warp drives and Prime Directives because J.J. Abrams has rebooted the “Star Trek” franchise and brought about your worst nightmare: “Star Trek” is finally cool. The end is nigh, people, start stocking up on canned food and shotguns.

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