Anne Pick

If I had it my way, I would go my entire life without seeing Gwyneth Paltrow's skull sawed open and the skin on her head peeled back. But this is what happens as doctors performed an autopsy on her Contagion character, Beth Emhoff. It's the kind of moment where you put your hand up in front of your face to block the disgusting sight, but still kind of peek around your fingers so you don't miss what's going on in the movie. Contagion, which has been marketed as an action/thriller about a global disease pandemic, kind of misses its target audience, aside from revealing the inside of Paltrow's forehead.
Here's how Beth ends up getting her skull chopped in half: she returns home to Chicago after spending time in Hong Kong for business and what she thinks is jet lag ends up sending her into seizures and taking her life within merely a few days, along with that of her young son. The unknown disease spreads fast, as these things tend to do in the movies, and soon reaches epidemic proportions. Meanwhile, at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) contracts a team of highly skilled doctors to identify the disease, identify the first patient and develop a vaccination.

My love for Paul Rudd started at a young age when I saw him in Clueless. He's got a certain kind of every-man charisma that makes him relatable in just about any role he takes on. If you take a look back at his career, you'll notice he doesn't really do fantasy or sci-fi. Rudd has made a career out of finding comedy in reality, which for me personally is the best kind of humor. Yes, of course, he's swayed into the gross-out comedy genre at times, but Rudd hits his stride when he's honest and relatable – just as he is as Ned Rochlin in Our Idiot Brother.
The film begins with Ned, the so-called idiot brother in reference, selling pot to a uniformed police officer. After returning from jail, Ned has been kicked to the curb by his former girlfriend Janet (played by Kathryn Hahn, who I've been mistaking for Saturday Night Live alumna Ana Gastyer for years). Ned decides to couch hop between his sisters' homes in New York while trying to get back on his feet.

In 2010 the Deschutes Country Library chose Kathryn Stockett's New York Times best selling debut novel, The Help, as the “Novel Idea… Read Together” program's book for the year. The program, which just wrapped it's eighth year, started based on the question, “What would happen if everyone in Deschutes County read the same book?” The Help's theme of racial segregation in the 1960s made the 2010 title even more interesting and important to read together because in the novel, just as in life at the time, the characters couldn't read the same books. Yes, they could read the same titles, but before the Civil Rights Movement really kicked into high gear, blacks and whites couldn't check out books from the same libraries or do a number of other things in the same facilities.

Yawwwnnnnnn! That was the sounds of the extremely tired body-switching plot convention that has come to us yet again, this time in The Change-Up. You would think after Freaky Friday, Big, 17 Again, 13 Going on 30 and The Hot Chick (OK, I'll stop) that Hollywood would realize that we've finally seen it all in this exhausted genre. I guess this time their excuse for adding another title to the bunch comes from the two body-switching characters being adult males, rather than an adult and a child.
You know the routine: Mitch (Reynolds) makes his “living” as an out-of-work actor who sits around and smokes weed all day. Dave (Jason Bateman) shines as the overachieving husband/father/grossly-talented lawyer. One night, while drunkenly peeing into a fountain together, the two simultaneously proclaim, “I wish I had your life!” Then thunder strikes, the city goes dark and, presto-chango, those two fools have switched bodies.

After watching Friends With Benefits I walked down the street and rented No Strings Attached. I needed a refresher on what exactly happens in that movie. If you've seen the trailers for both, or as you can easily deduce from their titles that these are basically the same movie – just released six months apart. Upon second viewing, No Strings Attached doesn't live up to my slightly over-hyped review, and solidifies my initial judgment that Friends with Benefits wins the contest for 2011's best friends-who-think-they'll-stay-friends-after-sleeping-together movie.
In what are essentially the same movie, both films center around the idea of two super-hot singles having casual sex, while trying to stay just friends. Ha, good one. Each films feature a ballerina from Black Swan, and in Friends with Benefits head-hunter Jamie (Mila Kunis) recruits Dylan (Justin Timberlake) for an art director position at GQ and when he moves to New York for the job the two become BFF.

We've all been there. Even if you haven't been sexually harassed, or belittled by an evil narcissist who likes the sound of his own voice, or pushed around by your boss' coked-out son, we've all had at least one boss who has made our working lives hell. Because of this, the revenge-fueled escapism of Horrible Bosses works. When paired with an all-star cast of Hollywood's funniest people, it works well. Horrible Bosses joins Bridesmaids and Paul as three of the funniest movies I've seen all year.

Documentaries are most successful, or perhaps most gripping, when the story has a well-developed and intriguing character. Viewers connect with these real people, and what you're watching is more or less their actual lives. Buck, which won the Audience Award for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival, follows the life of cowboy Buck Brannaman, who overcame an abusive childhood and went on to become an inspirational horse trainer.
Buck leads a fairly unconventional lifestyle in that he's on the road nine months out of the year conducting four-day horse clinics across the country. On the surface, he embodies the stoic ideal of the all-American cowboy that those of us outside of the horse community didn't know still existed anywhere but in the movies. Buck isn't all chaps, cowboy boots and horse training – he watches Oprah, too.

From the trademark Windsor typeface on the title cards to the incredibly neurotic leading man, Midnight in Paris is distinctly Woody Allen. Not only that, but it's, arguably, his best work in years. Allen remains one of filmmaking's most successful and true-to-form auteurs, but it could be argued that since leaving his home city of New York, Allen hasn't been at his finest. Midnight in Paris, however, brings us back to classic Allen, while giving fantastical whimsy a fresh spin.
Gil (Owen Wilson), a screenwriter, and his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), join her parents for a pre-wedding vacation to Paris. Gil has fallen under the intoxicating spell of the city, and wants to pen his first novel there. Inez, on the other hand, would rather hang out with her intellectually elitist friends who also happen to be in Paris at the time. One night while walking home alone, Gil travels back in time at the strike of midnight. Gil yearns for the Paris of the roaring '20s and gets the opportunity to be on a first name basis with some of the era's biggest names in art and literature, including Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Salvador Dali.

Before watching Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I had never had the pleasure, or displeasure, depending on your opinion, of seeing a film directed by Werner Herzog. I was well aware of his contributions to cinema and have heard amazing things about his Grizzly Man doc. To prep me for my viewing of his most recent film I did, however, watch a YouTube video called Werner Herzog Reads Where's Waldo (Google it!). After this hilarious introduction, I felt prepared to view Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
For Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog gained access and permission to film in the Chauvet Cave in southern France, from the French minister of culture. The caves, which were first explored at the end of 1994, feature the oldest known pictorial drawings by humankind. In order to preserve the drawings and the caves' pristine condition, the filmmakers were highly restricted and Herzog could only have three other people with him in the cave.