Reviews

I saw the trailer for The Roommate before I entered the cinema and expected a typical college/thriller movie, and I was right. While the premise of The Roommate isn’t very common, the typical elements of a movie in the same genre are there, babes, frat parties, booze, murder, sex, and so on. Don’t expect anything groundbreaking and you should be decently entertained.

The Roommate tells the story of a college freshman, Sara Matthews (Minka Kelly, who somehow reminds me of Jessica Alba) who gets a crazed, obsessive stalker for a roommate named Rebecca (Leighton Meester). At first, things are all fine and dandy, until Rebecca starts to fall for Sara and her obsession grows out of hand.

The cast play their roles well, with Leighton Meester standing out as the crazed roommate – she’s actually believable as the crazed psycho bitch she portrays in the movie. There’s really nothing to complain about, and the onscreen babes are definitely serious eye candy. Especially Nina Dobrev’s three-minute cameo.

If you’re wondering about watching this movie in the cinema, it’s not a bad choice as a last resort but you’re better off waiting for it to arrive on HBO sometime down the road. The Roommate gets 5/10.

I heard good things about Source Code before stepping into the cinema, including its 90+% score on Rotten Tomatoes during its opening week, so I was expecting good things from the movie. Boy I wasn’t let down.

Jake Gyllenhaall stars as Colter Stevens, a soldier who is thrown into an experimental project, Source Code, which puts him into another man’s body to relive the last 8 minutes of the man’s life. In the 8 minutes he spends in the body, he is supposed to figure out who the bomber of a train is in order to prevent a much larger bomb from going off in the city that day.

From the get go, you should know that this is a science fiction movie, and a “time travelling” one at that – so expect obvious flaws and plot holes. It’s never easy to write stories about parallel lives and going back in time without making any mistakes, but Source Code does a pretty good job of covering it up with an entertaining cast, light hearted gags, and romance.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a convincing soldier who happens to be caught in someone’s body and portrays his character’s emotions really well, especially in the scene about the phone call to his dad. Michelle Monaghan plays Christina Warren, Colter’s love interest in the movie, and does a pretty good job at it – you can’t help but fall in love with her as well. Russel Peters cameos in the movie as a standup comedian and even gets a chance to perform on the moving train. Nothing to complain about here, there’s eye candy for people of both sexes.

The movie ends on a high note, like a typical Hollywood ending, but it somehow doesn’t cheapen the whole experience. You feel for Colter, and really root for him to get the girl. You might walk out feeling a bit confused, and as you start to dissect the plot, you’ll start to be unimpressed. But taking it at face value and with a little thought – just a little and you’ll find that Source Code is one of the best movies you’ll catch this year. Source Code gets 8/10.

Every major holiday you can expect movies to pop up to cash in on the festivities, and this Easter, we have the 3D animated/live action movie: Hop. I had no idea what to expect besides rabbits after looking at the standee, so I went into the cinema with no expectations at all.

Hop is about EB (Russel Brand), a rabbit that’s next in line to be the Easter bunny. Deciding that he enjoys drumming much more than hiding eggs in the gardens of humans, he decides to flee Easter Island and hide out in Hollywood. There he encounters Fred O’Hare (James Marsden), a man who’s basically nowhere in his life and trying to get back on the right track. Together they embark on a journey to grow up and realize their dreams.

Hop is a movie for families and kids. The jokes aren’t edgy (though Russel Brand as EB does pretty well) and despite the cast, you’re not going to have any Sex Drive/Forgetting Sarah Marshall humor here. It’s been taken down to grade school level. Children are going to love the cute characters in the movie, and adults, well adults don’t really have much to look forward to except wholesome fun. You can expect something similar to Alvin & The Chipmunks – just a whole lot less annoying. And you get Kaley Cuoco gracing the screen with her presence. Mmhmm.

The movie is nothing to shout about, and might even be a little boring for some people, but if you gotta take a younger sibling to a movie to shut them up for 1.5 hours, you can’t go wrong. Hop gets 5/10.