Epinions Recent Reviews for darthmary

Twilight: Romeo and Juliet show some teeth

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:14:25 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - First off, I'm not a fan of vampires. The only two literary creations involving the creatures which struck my fancy were Bram Stoker's masterpiece, Dracula and Steven King's more modern epic, Salem's Lot. They just don't strike my fancy...

Australia: Australia, a lot of epics rolled into one

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:44:58 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - It's always a pleasure to look forward to any film directed by Baz Luhrmann, who creates movies which are visually stunning to look at that often carries stories that may or may not live up to that vision. When he's successful as he was in Strictly...

When reading about magic is a gift

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:39:02 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - While growing up, I always smiled when I saw the latest book by Young Adult author Lois Duncan in my Christmas stocking or in a present waiting to be unwrapped. Combining suspense with the supernatural, Duncan's books never disappointed. And years later...

Blindness: Blindness tries hard but ultimately fails

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:15:04 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - Blindness< i>, an example of allegory by film, was a film that left me enjoying its depth of exploration of what amounts to a social psychological experiment one minute and frustrated and repulsed by it the next. I think that's why though it aspired...

Lane shines but Untraceable sinks

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:57:32 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - I have a confession to make when it comes to action-packed thrillers which center around computer technology and that is that I usually wait until the film comes out on DVD to watch it. Why Because DVD players have that most important feature called a...

Nights in Rodanthe: Nights in Rodanthe's leads shine through thin plot

Sun, 5 Oct 2008 02:49:25 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - I’m not all that keen on romance flicks, but I do love movies which feature weather as one of the main characters whether it’s a hurricane, tornado, blizzard or even a swarm of locusts. And Nights in Rodanthe provides a strong dose of...

United 93...Intense but a moving portrait

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 03:55:21 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, four planes were hijacked after taking off from their airports of origin. Three of them hit the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The fourth one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania...

One of Duncan's last is also one of her best

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 03:00:52 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - Growing up, it didn't get much better than curling in a chair with one of Lois Duncan's mystery suspense thrillers. Any one of a dozen that were written by the prolific children's and young adult author before the murder of one of her daughters. At about...

Definitely miss this call

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 17:54:30 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - The evening I saw this movie, the theater wasn't very crowded. That was just as well because the projector broke down during the previews. It was kind of funny because they were showing an endless trail of the latest films honoring the latest trend of...

Juno, not an ode to a Roman goddess but the next best thing

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 04:00:22 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - First of all, Ellen Page is a revelation. No, not during her stint as Kitty Pryde, the mutant who could walk through walls, in the stinker X-Men: The Last Stand, but while starring as a pregnant teen wise beyond her years in this year's indie gem,...

When franchises collide, the splatter makes a mess

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 03:27:22 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - After purchasing a ticket from an employee so turned off by receiving silver dollars in payment that he gave me a senior's discount about 25 years too soon, a decent rendition of the recent marriage between two lucrative franchises would have been icing...

Halloween (2007): Mike Myers, go away, don't come back another day

Sat, 1 Sep 2007 22:18:31 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - The morning of Aug. 31, I woke up and hoped that it was all a dream. That Halloween(1978), the holy grail of the horror genre had been spared from being included in the list of films to be remade. Having sat through a series of tepid retreads...

Where the thin blue line lies

Fri, 9 Feb 2007 20:49:20 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - At one point in this film, Jonathan Neumann, the protagonist, is admonished by his editor that he should eat to live, not live to eat. "Little strokes fell great oaks, I need my energy," Neumann replies back mid-chew. Those words comprise the...

Daughters of Eve or somebody else?

Tue, 6 Feb 2007 22:08:21 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - Growing up, I read every book that Lois Duncan ever wrote, from A Gift of Magic through Gallows Hill and her talent at character development and narration developed along with her career in writing young adult fiction. Daughters of...

The Grim Reaper takes viewers for a ride

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:15:25 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - I was so sure that Final Destination 2 was the last film in the series, until the final scene of that movie, when a day player was blown to bits by the barbecue and one of his bodyparts landed in someone's hamburger. I still have no idea why that...

Kidnapped meets the Breakfast Club

Tue, 7 Feb 2006 14:58:17 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - When I was growing up, one of my favorite young adult authors was Lois Duncan, a writer who effortlessly merged the genres of suspenseful thriller and New Age together and brought them to a teenage audience, long before the Richard Pikes and R.L. Stines...

When a Stranger Calls...Don't call back

Sun, 5 Feb 2006 19:08:27 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - When I was an impressionable 'tween in the 1970s, my sister told me a story about her friend of a friend's cousin, who was babysitting one night and kept getting menacing phone calls. She called the police for help and they told her they would put a...

Close Encounters of the X-men kind

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 21:38:24 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - What if you were suddenly sucked up into the unknown and then returned to your world years later? You might look in the first mirror and see the same face, yet inside, you might realize you were a very different person. Such was the fate of 4400...

Why we should let sleeping demons lie

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 20:04:05 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - There are some people out there who still believe that the house on 112 Ocean Ave. in upscale New York state, really was possessed by the pig with the streak of the devil in him. Then there are those, who read reports that the Lutz family got together...

Poppies, aliens and Leonard, oh my!

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 18:28:39 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - After watching the classic version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers(1956), I am not at all surprised to hear that it inspired a remake 20 years later. But I am disappointed that a movie studio succumbed to the temptation. Why? Because what made the...

Riverside Press-Enterprise: The Washington Times comes to Riverside

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 18:01:11 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - The Press Enterprise has been Riverside's primary source of daily information about who, what, where and when in one of the fastest growing regions in the country. Playing primarily to a conservative audience, the newspaper used to be fairly objective...

Destination reached...Finally

Mon, 29 Dec 2003 20:03:00 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - Final Destination, a movie penned by two X-File writers, was a nice surprise, deftly combining suspense with the supernatural. Its inevitable sequel unhappily mismashes violence with gore and the only element the two films share is their title. Final...

B-Movie Bonanza

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 21:02:14 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - When the credits open in this movie, with John Williams' stirring soundtrack in the background, you are looking at the City of Angels before it crumbles to dust and is washed away by God's wrath...oh wait that's another movie with Charlton Heston in it...

Das Boat merges with The Haunting

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 20:09:19 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - Imagine yourself sitting inside the claustaphobic confines of a WWII submarine, listening as a German U-Boat drops bombs all around you. Life couldn’t get any worse, unless you are on a submarine that is haunted by a pesky ghost, which might be the...

Stand's in the shadow of King's novel

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 20:46:10 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author darthmary - Some truly great books also make great movies. Unfortunately, The Stand is not one of them. After all, how do you cram over 1000 pages of text, into six-and-a-half hours?

Like many fans of Stephen King¡¦s best book, I spent hours imagining how...