Take Shelter
This film follows a man who starts to have very distinct dreams about a coming apocalypse, and as a result starts to build a storm shelter in his back yard as a sort of Noah's Ark to protect his family, while engaging in increasingly erratic behavior. The interesting thing is that he (Michael Shannon) suspects that he's probably going insane the entire time that he's doing this, and most of the film concerns his struggle with trying to come to terms with what may very well be the onset of schizophrenia. It does a really nice job portraying this, and leaves whether he's actually crazy or not undecided until the very end.
Otherwise, the thing I appreciated about this was that even when Shannon's wife thought he was going insane, she didn't make a big speech, run off crying, or try to make his life any more difficult. No, rather she calmly sat down with him and they tried to work their way through it like, you know, normal people. Sort of the anti-Adrian Balboa. Its sort of sad that this is considered ground-breaking behavior in a film.
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D christmas
While I'm not going to deny that I laughed quite a bit during this film it lacked the, dare I say, focus of the first film in the trilogy which kept it from being more than an moderately entertaining divergence. Still, these are likable characters, and as long as the film focused on them it moves along at a nice pace. The obligatory Neil Patrick Harris cameo was also fun, and I enjoyed the heck out of the waffle-bot, particularly the 'commercial.' Its incredibly crass, but not in a mean-spirited way, and the 3-D adds nothing. So I guess what I'm saying is its not a horrible way to pass 90 minutes.
