Two Movie Reviews: Minor Spoilers but nothing the Trailers Don't Give Away

Law Abiding Citizen: Gerard Butler plays an ex-spy turned family man whose wife and child are murdered by two psychopaths. Jamie Foxx plays the DA who makes a deal with one of the perpetrators giving him a slap on the wrist in exchange for the death penalty for the other. Butler's character does not take this well to say the least, and 10 years later goes a little crazy to say the least. Foxx's character must try and stop him. The plot gets more and more implausible by the minute, the movie really should have developed Butler's relationship with his wife and child a little bit more (I hated the cold opening), and some of the scenes are kind of choppy, but some of the death scenes are just ridiculously awesome, so on that alone it goes up to a B-. Wouldn't see again, but worth a viewing.

Paranormal Activity: Actually saw this one at home last night (someone in OT found a link to a very clean and solid copy of the movie), alone, at night, with all the lights off. I'm not a big fan of scary movies, but I just had to see what all the hype was about. I must say that most of the movie was just the two main characters discussing what was going on, but all the "night" scenes were fantastically done. The suspense is absolutely amazing, and there are 3 scenes in particular that are just: OMFG WTF did I just see?

There are actually 3 different endings, and the theatre version is by far the best one, and just beyond scared the fucking hell out of me when I watched it. I am almost 0% sure that I would have made it through the movie if I watched it in the theatre, but at home it was manageable. If anybody wants the link just let me know, and I'll send it to you, but overall it wasn't quite as scary as I expected, but it was very well done, especially on the $11,000 budget that they had. The filmmaker was able to invoke real fear, real terror into the viewer without using CGI, blood, guts, gore, or any of those other Hollywood tricks. Fantastic work: B+ overall, for that Budget: A.