So over the past few weeks, while Eli has been napping, Courtney and I have gotten to catch up on a few movies. Here are a few of my thoughts on these flicks:

Zombieland: Really well done and funny zombie movie.  Jesse Eisenberg always seems to be doing a Michael Cera impression, but it works for him, so who am I to complain.  And the amazing cameo by Bill Murray was absolutely fantastic and hysterical, just as you’d hope and know that it would be.

(500) Days of Summer – I thought this was a pretty fun, light-hearted movie, and I dug the out-of-sequence way the story was told.  The kid from 3rd Rock From the Sun turned out alright, and hey, any movie with a musical number set to Hall and Oates is bound to be worth watching in my book.

District 9 – Talk about a movie told in a unique way.  Despite there being a million movies about aliens coming to Earth, this story was totally original, and really well done.  The special effects were very cool, but they were so secondary to the story you almost didn’t notice them.

Watchmen – I never read the comic book, so I didn’t have any expectations going in, but while I enjoyed this movie, it just felt way too damn long.  There was so much backstory and exposition, the main plot just felt sort of lost and bogged down.  Which is a shame, because the main storyline was pretty cool, and it just didn’t have much space to breathe.  I can sort of imagine why the whole thing would have played better as a series (or a giant collection) of comics, as opposed to one massive, nearly 3 hour movie.

Extract – Office Space was brilliant.  Idiocracy was under-rated.  Extract was… disappointing.  I don’t know exactly where Mike Judge went wrong with this one, but this movie just didn’t work.  The plot was all over the place, none of the characters were particularly likable or relatable, and worse, most of the movie just wasn’t all that funny.

Temple Grandin – Sure, it’s a made-for-HBO movie, but it still counts.  This biopic was really well done, and it gave you a great way of looking at the world through the yes of an autistic woman. This movie seems like a shoe-in for a bunch of awards next season, and deservedly so.

Noticeably absent from this round-up: Avatar.  Yeah, I think we are the last two people on Earth who haven’t yet seen James Cameron’s latest.  Anyone wanna babysit for a few hours so we can check it out?