If you had to rate your appearance on a scale from one to ten, what would you rate yourself? Dealing with your appearance as being a four or an eight can be tricky, but even trickier is thinking that you can only date someone two points higher than you or less. She’s out of My League is all about the one in a billion chance when a solid ten dates a weak five.

Every comedy that has come out in the past couple of years has either been a great success or a huge flop. But even though She’s out of My League wasn’t a huge box office success or a success with the critics, I still think it’s one of the better comedy movies out there. Whether it was the funny lines, situational humor or even just awkward banter, I found myself laughing out loud throughout most of the movie. This movie is like Step Brothers in the fact that it’s just a conversational movie; it’s not the same type of humor in any sense, but many of the better parts come from Kirk (Jay Baruchel) just hanging out with his friends.

But this movie isn’t perfect; the storyline is the same as every other romantic comedy out there and therefore is extremely predictable. Many of the small parts were poorly cast, especially Marnie as Lindsay Sloane, who played her part of the annoying ex-girlfriend a little too well and a little too annoyingly. Also, in many parts you could tell the actors and writers were trying way too hard just to get a laugh.

Kirk is a below-average guy. He has below-average looks, a below-average job and really just a below-average life. Luckily, he finds a woman’s cell phone and she’s so grateful to get it back, she invites him out. Molly (Alice Eve) is successful, rich and one of the most attractive girls alive, but she decides to play it safe and date a guy who won’t treat her poorly, which is where Kirk comes in. Through a mess of family and friends, Kirk and Molly have to go through a lot of trouble just to be together. And with everyone telling him they don’t belong together, Kirk finds himself doubting the relationship due to his self-consciousness issues.

One of the criticisms of She’s out of My League is the use of vulgarity throughout the film. Well, to critique the critics, the film is rated R; what did they expect? Even if it wasn’t, with the way our society has been accustomed to sex, alcohol and profanity, there’s nothing people haven’t heard or seen. If you flip through the radio you’ll hear songs about alcohol or drugs that are worse than anything you’ll see in this movie. And profanity has even become second-nature in the USA today. Honestly, I’ve heard more vulgar things come out of a nine year old at McDonalds than from She’s out of My League.

She’s out of My League doesn’t break any barriers in the comedic world. It doesn’t give insight to relationships or how to fix your life; but it is a truly funny movie and these days that’s hard to find. And what I do find to be special about this movie is that it’s a great date movie but also a movie to just watch with your friends. She’s out of My League won’t change your life, but it will give you some great quotes that will keep you laughing for a very long time.

“I’ve been considering things starting with the letter M”: magnificent, marvelous, magical, merry, majestic, meritorious. Johnny Depp seems to be fascinated with M words and constantly repeats this line in Alice in Wonderland while playing the Mad Hatter. Yet, none of these M words seem to describe the movie.

The only good thought I had coming out of the movie was that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Now I will admit, I thought it would be one of the worst movies I had ever seen, but early in life I learned that some of my favorite movies were the ones I thought would be terrible. So I tried to keep an open mind and I was waiting to be surprised; unfortunately, I’m still waiting.

However, it’s the first movie in 2010 to gross more than $200 million, so I can only assume that people are still fascinated with the new line of 3-D movies that are out, as well as it being a remake of a children’s movie. But the 3-D aspect of Alice in Wonderland is unnecessary and in my opinion makes the movie worse. Also, it’s not a children’s movie anymore and at many times it’s actually a little disturbing; I know of adults who are creeped out just by the previews.

Alice, Mia Wasikowska, is proposed to and runs away to escape only to find herself falling in the rabbit hole to bring her to Wonderland. The Mad Hatter finds her eventually and asks for her help in defeating the Red Queen, who has brought evil times upon Wonderland and stolen the crown.

In the children’s movie, Alice is just an average little girl, but in the new movie she seems rather eerie and bizarre. Wasikowska does a good job of capturing the weirdness of Wonderland, but I’m not sure that it’s a good thing. Had she appeared normal or even acted normal for a while, it would’ve brought tremendous balance to the film that it otherwise lacked.

The overall theme of the movie is to believe in the impossible and follow your dreams. In my opinion, it’s great for a blockbuster movie to have a theme; the only problem is that when I walked out of the theater, my impression wasn’t one of optimism and hope but just of how strange the movie was. It wasn’t until I sat down and thought about the movie that the theme showed its true colors.

Also, something that still boggles me is that I can not place Alice in Wonderland in a genre. It isn’t a children’s movie or a comedy or an action flick or even a psychedelic drama, though that’s the closest I can come. I can honestly say that I do not recommend this movie to anyone. If you’re a fan of the original, you won’t be impressed. If you’re a fan of the recent blockbuster 3-D movies, you won’t be impressed. However, if you like a whole lot of nonsense without a good storyline, you may just enjoy this remake of what could have been a great movie.

The Bible is the most widely read book, as well as the best-selling book, in the world. But imagine a world where the complete opposite is true, and not only have a scarce number of people read the Bible, but even fewer know it’s still in existence. The Book of Eli depicts this world.

The Book of Eli follows the main character Eli, played by Denzel Washington, on a journey west. Why is he going west? God told him to go west. Eli lives in a world after the apocalypse has occurred, where food and water are people’s main concern. And although he should be more worried about staying alive, Eli is following his blind faith.

However, Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman, wants to use the Bible for his own destructive purposes to help take over what’s left of the world. So Eli is left to face Carnegie and his band of thugs alone. That is, until he meets Solara (Mila Kunis), who knew nothing about the Bible but is so interested in it, she follows him to escape her hometown.

I’ve always known Washington was a great actor, but in this movie, he is truly glorious. He plays the character Eli so well, it’s difficult to imagine anyone playing it better.

I don’t have one bad thing to say about The Book of Eli. Between the great cast, awesome script, and breathtaking storyline, this movie is truly epic. To start off the 2010 season, this film sets a tone and a very high standard other movies will have trouble following.

Through an amazing yet slightly gory venture, The Book of Eli is one of the most eye-opening movies I have ever seen. To me, movies these days are so concerned with being mainstream, but this had a theme – an actual theme that mattered in the grand scheme of things. Whether you’re religious or not, this movie puts things into a perspective that can’t help but blow your mind. On a religious level, it helps to teach about faith as well as the teachings of the Bible. And on a secular level, this movie shows which things really matter in the world and how people should act toward one another.

The Book of Eli helps bring in the New Year and gives people a better outlook on life. With so many things going wrong in the world today, this movie might just be what you need.

Everybody’s Fine is now one of my top five holiday movies of all time, and I take my holiday movies very seriously. The storyline was utterly perfect and had me enthralled the entire time. I also couldn’t have asked for a better cast with better chemistry.

The truth of the matter is, no matter how much we all like to pretend everything’s perfect around Christmas, things seldom are. This movie captures the pure essence of family life during the holidays. Everybody’s Fine truly cuts deep into the soul and has you remembering just how lucky we are to have each other in the first place.

The film follows Robert De Niro on his quest to visit his grown sons and daughters. They were all supposed to come visit him in the beginning of December, but all ended up blowing him off. De Niro decides that with his wife gone, he needs to take it upon himself to visit everyone and make sure the family stays in touch. However, due to a complicated medical condition and poor circumstances, his trip is not what he expects at all.

When I saw this movie, a medley of emotions overwhelmed me. I was always in the midst of compassion, depression, heartwarming happiness or just laughing extremely hard. These emotions will bring out a lot in you and I can totally see how people could call it a tearjerker because you will want to cry.

I highly recommend Everybody’s Fine for everyone, not just as a great holiday movie, but as a great movie in general. In the past year, there have been extremely few movies that really made a great impression on me. This is one of those. Bring your family or bring your friends because I promise you, this is a movie worth seeing.

When I received my ticket for Brothers, I was expecting a movie that would push the limits of movies about war, have my head spinning with betrayal and war and even have some romance twisted by the evil of death. When I walked out of the theater, my head was spinning from disappointment. To have such a great premise, only to have the final product come out as bad as it did was truly frustrating.

I love war movies and I love movies with romance. When I heard there was a movie with both, I got my hopes up, only to be crushed. Unfortunately, the director, Jim Sheridan, must have thought that if he was going to push one limit, he shouldn’t push any other. As for the romance, there was nothing to even talk about; there was not really any love connection in the movie. Even the married couple in the movie didn’t seem married to me.

The depiction of the war in the movie was mentally disturbing and frightening, which is an important message and very true, but it helped to distort the rest of the movie. By “distort,” I mean that the portrayal of war was so accurate and good, it helped to show how off-key the rest of the movie was.

In my opinion, my first impression was that the acting was abysmal. But then, I thought about how much I love the three main actors: Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman and Tobey Maguire. All three are amazing actors. I began to think of their performances and I realized none of them had a chance to prove themselves. The best performance was by Maguire because he had about a minute of actual character.

Brothers could have been so much better. The idea behind it was great; it has great actors; and they did a lot of promotion for the movie. However, due to the terrible writing, the awful storyline and the lack of depth, the movie came up way short of my expectations. I support everything this movie is about, but I will never support this movie.

When I saw Paranormal Activity, I should’ve brought a change of pants.  Whether or not you’re into scary movies, into low-budget films, or really any movie, this box-office winner is a must-see.

I saw Paranormal Activity before a lot of the hype began about it. I had heard from about five people that it was the scariest movie ever, and a couple of people told me they cried. This should be known: I don’t get scared during horror movies. That being said, I was expecting a letdown and a pretty mediocre movie at best. What I saw was one of the most suspenseful movies I’ve ever seen with a couple purely terrifying moments.

I totally see how this movie could make someone cry; it is mentally exhausting. There are few still-frame shots that give your brain a chance to focus. You’re expecting something scary to happen, and most of the time, this is when things are the least frightening. A door might creak or something might move on its own, and these events tear down everything you thought about what was going to happen next. The movie, however, was nothing compared to getting out of the theater in pitch black. I couldn’t get to sleep for hours upon hours.

The next day, I had an epiphany: Paranormal Activity wasn’t that scary. I went to the theater hearing rumors about how true the movie was and how most of the footage was real. But, when I looked on the Internet, to my dismay, I found out everything was fake. Also, everyone who saw it after me, who had all heard an entire week of how horrifyingly shocking and mind-blowing the movie was, thought it was anywhere from awful to just slightly good.

I know I sound incredibly hypocritical saying that I was terrified and that the movie wasn’t that scary, but it’s true. If I had expected the movie to be scarier, I wouldn’t have been scared. And that’s why I say it’s a must-see. I have heard so many different opinions about the movie, about how scared some people were and about how some people just wanted to leave; I’ve realized this is just a movie different from what everyone expects.

Forget what you’ve heard, because that might ruin the movie for you. Everyone should see this movie, and make their opinion of it.

Where the Wild Things Are, director Spike Jonze’s take on Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, is anything but a children’s movie.  And it was never supposed to be a children’s movie, either.  As Jonze put it, he didn’t set out to make a children’s movie; he set out to make a movie about childhood.  And boy, did he succeed.

It’s clear from the get-go that Wild Things isn’t your average movie – there are no beginning credits.  Before you even fully realize that the movie has begun, Max is barreling down the stairs in his wolf-suit, hot on the trail of the family dog.  The camera-work is spastic and unpredictable.  And when the title card finally does appear, it looks like it was scribbled down in a hurry by a 5-year-old.  Actually, it probably was.

Max’s life is a rollercoaster.  His parents are divorced.  His teenage sister can’t be bothered to speak to him.  His science teacher is filling his brain with theories about the death of the Sun and the subsequent darkness that will permanently envelop the Earth.  And when it all finally reaches the breaking point one night, just before the family sits down for dinner, Max bites his mother in a fit of animalistic rage and flees into the nearby forest.

And he finds a boat.  And he sails to an island, where he finds … well, I’m sure you know where I’m headed with this.

The Wild Things are majestic.  On the screen, they’re played by actors in giant animatronic suits, created by none other than Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (the Muppets).  The monsters’ voices, however, were done by a separate group of actors, who acted out the entire movie, body motions and all, on a foam-covered sound-stage.  It is from the latter group of actors that the Wild Things’ facial expressions come from, having been painstakingly computerized onto the giant heads of the suited actors.  The results are stunning and quite possibly the most convincing special effects I’ve ever seen.

The cast is great, too.  You might recognize the voice of Carol, the head Wild Thing, as HBO’s Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini).  And Max, played by the fittingly named Max Records, gives a startling performance way beyond his years – he was only 9 when filming began.  Ironically, it might be Records’ lack of any acting experience whatsoever that gives his character – and therefore the entire movie – the relatability that makes Wild Things a masterpiece.

The entire movie feels simultaneously comforting and extremely unsettling.  The Wild Things leap from one emotion to the next, alternating between cuddly and frightening.  Gandolfini’s Carol is the prime example of this phenomenon. Upon Max’s arrival, he seems like the jolliest beast of the bunch. But by the end of the movie, he’s ripping off the limbs of his fellow Wild Things.

And that brings up an interesting point.  Just because this movie was adapted from a classic, beloved children’s picture book doesn’t mean that parents should automatically assume it’s a perfect movie to take their kids to.  There are a lot of dark and heavy overtones to the Wild Things and Max’s interaction with them, and while it’s not a particularly violent movie, there are certainly a couple of scenes that may be a bit of a shock to those expecting 90 minutes of innocent, Disney-esque fluff.

This is definitely not a movie for everyone.  The plot isn’t very fleshed out, the symbolism is vague, and the ending is somewhat abrupt.  But none of that matters.  Jonze has crafted an intensely emotional movie that can be interpreted however his viewers choose to interpret it.  Where the Wild Things Are is the ultimate movie about the emotional struggles of childhood and learning how to function as a singular part of this chaotic world.

There’s nothing inglorious about the new movie Inglourious Basterds. I’ve never seen a movie with such a creative plot, such huge twists, such amazing acting … and Brad Pitt.

Director Quentin Tarantino molded and shaped this movie into one of the greatest of its genre of all time; but Basterds includes so many different genres, it’s hard to choose a specific one. Including the action, the humor, the weird romance, the drama and even the historical fiction aspect, the movie touches on everything that makes the movie so dynamic.

To be honest, Inglourious Basterds wasn’t what I expected at all. I was hoping that the movie would just be Pitt fighting the Nazis and totally winning World War II all by himself. But what I got was a great cast, each contributing a huge amount to the credibility of the movie and overall performance.

The movie follows Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt) and Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) in their separate escapades of killing Germans, which inevitably ends up as the same plan. At the same time, Nazi Col. Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz) is ingeniously looking to carry out his own plans and foil Raine and his accomplices, which gives way to some very dramatic twists. Since it is an action movie, it does have some gruesome scenes and even some very melancholy scenes, but Tarantino ties everything together incredibly well.

Whether Pitt has you laughing your butt off, the action is making your adrenaline pump, or Tarantino’s plot is knocking your socks off, this movie will amaze you. If you think you can make it through some intense gore in the movie, I highly recommend Inglourious Basterds.

Sean Penn, known for his assaults on paparazzi and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, deserved every bit of his Best Leading Actor win at the Oscars this year. It doesn’t matter if you’re Republican, Democrat, liberal, or conservative … this movie is an extremely important, historical must-see.

Milk is about the homosexual politician Harvey Milk. Before your political views influence your opinion on this film, please consider this: as far as politics go, I lean to the left. I watched this movie with my mother, who leans to the right. We both loved this film equally.

Penn’s portrayal of Milk is endearing. No matter where you stand or how much you disagree with Milk’s views on gay rights, it’s nearly impossible to not care about him The movie follows Milk, starting at his 40th birthday in 1972. He is a strong activist for gay rights and decides that he could be a stronger influence if he dives into the political campaigns of San Francisco.

Once Milk is elected into office, winning a supervisor seat, he becomes the first openly homosexual man to be in such a position. This leads to several conflicts with other office members including Dan White (Josh Brolin), who obviously holds some resentment for Milk.

The movie presents an all-star cast including James Franco as Scott Smith and Emile Hirsch as Cleve Jones. Milk won two Oscars and was nominated for six, including Best Picture.