I do not think there could be a more nostalgic movie for me than THE WIZARD [1989].  I have not watched it since it came out now almost 25 years ago.  For me, it held up perfectly and was much better than expected it to be to my now 38-year old eyes.  The biggest surprise was that it was a road movie to California, perhaps an omen?

Fred Savage of The Wonder Years fame (a large source of the nostalgia) plays middle brother Corey, who has a troubled younger brother, Jimmy, who was just put into a home by his step-mother.  There is a mystery surrounding how Jimmy came to be like he is and how Corey and his dad and their step-mom and Corey’s older brother are all related and came to live apart.  This complex of a backstory for the characters was also unexpected in this movie.  I did not remember at all it was a road movie either.  Corey springs Jimmy from the home and head to a bus station where they meet another apparent runaway, Haley.

They discover Jimmy has a real talent for video games, Haley calls him a wizard.  She suggests that Jimmy enter a huge video game contest in L.A. with a $50,000 first prize.  The trouble is they are broke and in Nevada.  Haley agrees to help them get to L.A. with her street smarts in exchange for half the prize money.  In pursuit of the runaways are Corey’s dad and older brother, as well as a vulgar private investigator hired by the step-mom.

This alone would have made it a good movie, but my real nostalgia for this movie, and what I really remembered about it was — the debut of what I still consider to be the most anticipated video game of all time — Super Mario Bros 3.  Remember this movie came out in 1989.  No Internet, no easy way to communicate with people across the country, especially if you were a kid.  There was just Nintendo Power magazine, your friends, and TV commercials to build the hype for the game.  I can remember looking forward to it pretty much more than anything from back then.  The game was not released yet, so the movie was the first peaks at the game.

Jimmy of course makes it to the video game competition and to the finals, against a rival we meet earlier, Lucas, well played by an older and obviously richer kid.  The host says they will compete on a game they never played before.  I of course knew what was coming, but still got a chill when the stage curtain raised and the splash screen for Super Mario Bros 3 came up.

I believe SIDE EFFECTS [2013] is the first 2013 release movie I have seen. I went in as usual knowing very little about the movie, actually believing it was going to be sci-fi, which may have contributed to me not caring much for the movie, especially the first third. It is actually a psychological thriller based around psychiatry and prescription drugs.

I am totally against the whole prescription drug industrial complex and just the thought of it sickens me, along with how any bad feelings get drugs prescribed to help. I just think, what did people do a 100 years ago? I think so much of society taking prescription drugs is itself a side effect of the futureless existence modern life presents.

Anyway, the actual movie SIDE EFFECTS directed by Steven Soderbergh is something had I known more about I probably never would have watched since there are no lessons, no good characters to identify with, just a perverse look into people gaming the legal system using psychiatry for their own selfish benefit.

Jude Law is a psychiatrist with a new patient played by Rooney Mara whose husband was just released from prison for inside trading. So why would she then deliberately drive her car into a wall? The answer to that question is only revealed much later on through various plot twists that are kind of hard to follow, especially when you do not care. At least they ignite viewer interest a little as throughout the first act I was thinking I really do not want to just watch a movie about a depressed person.

For such a messy business involving two psychiatrists, untold prescription drugs, and a suspicious patient, the ending gets tidied up a bit too much.

I have shaken Keanu Reeve’s hand.  I have never thought derisively about his acting as so many others do.  I can dig his style and appreciate it for what it is.  He is in classic form in POINT BREAK [1991], a movie the guys were talking about regularly lately on the DP Show and since HBO was running it, and I had not seen it so long I could not remember, I thought it was a good time to revisit this classic of a sort.

I was surprised to find out that POINT BREAK was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who is now famous for THE HURT LOCKER and ZERO DARK THIRTY.  If you remember POINT BREAK as being a hokey Keanu action vehicle, I would recommend watching it again because you can see Bigelow’s directing flair in this early work of hers.  The action scenes are intense and the pacing is very good.  You may find the characters to be unintentionally funny viewed with 2013 eyes, but Keanu and Swayze do go all in on their performances as respectively an undercover FBI agent and surfer zen master bank robber.

In between typical action movie beats like the two out of line agents being chewed out by their boss scene, there is an intense robbery scene, a great foot chase scene literally through an L.A. neighborhood as well as two skydiving scenes.  On top of all that there is a decent romance between Keanu and Lori Petty.

No doubt there is some unintentionally funny dialogue delivered like only Keanu can, some real classics like, “looking for something brooa,” “via con dios,” and “you’ve got to go down,” but I think that is all part of the appeal of POINT BREAK which has one of the all-time great action movie endings.

Sometimes I watch just the movie I need to for the emotional state I am in. Such was the case with the time of watching CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE. [2011] tonight. This movie is a lot more than what the cast list says and what the two sentence plot description is. It is very Hollywood and very real and very surprising, and thus a very good movie.

Steve Carell gets told in the opening scene while at dinner with his wife that she wants to not be married to him anymore. He does not fight, he gives up, literally jumping out of a moving car. For some reason he starts hanging out in this cool bar where Ryan Gosling is the Man. (just had deja vu) Carell’s out loud whining about his wife leaving him and cheating on him is getting so bad it is cramping Gosling’s style, so he decides to transform Carell into himself, i.e. dressing cool and knowing how to talk, or rather not talk, to women in order to take them home at the end of the night.

Here the viewer might start to think they have the movie figured out and that is all there is to these characters, but the movie is not on retread plot rails and in fact has one of the best twists I have ever seen in a movie, so much so I always gasped.

Every character is madly in love with another character in an unrequited way and how all those passions get resolved makes for an extremely entertaining and surprisingly emotion final act. This movie will need to be retroactively added to my 10 best list for 2011.