Culture

What's the big deal about babies? I'm not especially fond of other people's babies and there's nothing more torturous than baby home movies. Seriously, what's so special about babies? Who gives a rat's ass unless they're your own? I don't get it.
The new documentary Babies cashes in on the cute and, hopefully, shared fact that we are all enchanted by life's beginning and how awesome it is to be born while surrounded by a bunch of shit we can't comprehend. Clearly I was assigned this movie as a cruel joke, but nothing prepared me for how truly bad this flick would be.

Looking back, the summer of 2008 seems like a very different time to that we're living in today. The first Iron Man movie was released pre-recession, before Obama, at the tale end of eight long years of George W Bush. It came out just before The Dark Knight, a film that in comparison looks so serious, pretentious even in its politically aware themes and grave discussion of our decaying morality. Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man makes Christian Bale as Batman look like a real bore. The Iron Man movies are rambunctious, playful fun. Even the sequel's very title, plainly Iron Man 2 with no posturing extrapolation, suggests the frivolity of the franchise.

When a wildly popular novel is adapted for the big screen, there are a few questions guaranteed to come up. For fans of the novel, they first want to know if the movie stays true to the story. Secondly, they are eager to know if the characters are as they imagined while reading the book. Unfortunately, I have not read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, so I cannot answer those questions.
The basis of the film is that 40 years ago, Henrik Vanger's (Sven-Bertil Taube) niece, Harriet, went missing. Henrik believes she was murdered, and by someone in their unpleasant-yet-tight-for-business-purposes family. Investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) comes onto the case per Henrik's request before he fulfills a three-month jail sentence after losing a libel case. Throughout his trial and investigation, Mikael had been tracked by a computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander.

Producer Michael Bay is on a murder spree. He is systematically slaughtering remakes of classic horror/slasher movies from the '70s and '80s, churning them out in slash-bang fashion. He has destroyed what was good about Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Last House on the Left, and Friday the Thirteenth and now, true to form, has lowered A Nightmare on Elm Street to new slice and dice depths of schlock and mediocrity.
Elm Street was created by Wes Craven (Hills Have Eyes, Scream) in 1984, franchised into nine slasher films and also spawned a television show, novels and comic books. In case you're from Mars, here's the plot: a group of teens suddenly share the same nightmare involving a scary guy in a tattered red-and-green-striped sweater and fedora. This serial killer/monster, Freddy Kruger, wielding a glove with knives as fingers is stalking and killing people in their dreams, resulting in their actual deaths. The wisecracking Freddy has a special motivation. His victims are the teenage children of a group of vigilante parents who hunted him down and burned him alive because he was a child molester.