Machete - 8.5/10: Pretty damn awesome. Tonnes of over the top action and violence with fun characters and some hot girls. The crowd was very much into it and was laughing along at all the great lines, which enhanced the enjoyment. Lots of fun with this one.
The Last Exorcism - 4.5/10: One of the main things you need for this type of "found footage" film to work is a sense of believability from all of the characters. Unfortunately, the main character never really sold it to me, so they kind of lost me right away. It did have ok sequences and it took a turn I did not expect at all (still debating whether it was good or bad, but it was certainly interesting). Could have been much, much better and was not scary in the slightest.
The American - 7.5/10: I actually quite enjoyed this even though nothing really happens in the film. It is really just a ~2 hour character study on Clooney's assassin for hire, but it does not really do anything to develop the character, or even give you background on him. It is slow and somewhat plodding, but I liked the pacing and spending time with Clooney's constant paranoia as the his world seems to closing in on him. It kind of felt like an old French or Italian film. I imagine a lot of people will be bored with this film (the friend I saw it with was kind of bored), but it was a nice contrast for me right after I had watched Machete.
Youth In Revolt - 6/10: Pretty middle of the road from a comedy standpoint, but I kind of liked it from a coming of age standpoint. Cera is fine (I'm not one of those guys that hates him) but the rest of the cast was pretty strong. Writing could have been a bit better, but I thought it looked nice and had some fun sequences. I never really laughed out loud or anything, but I found it amusing overall.
The Hills Have Eyes (2006) - 6.5/10: The remake of Craven's original horror flick about forgotten mutants, created by nuclear testing, in the New Mexico desert. Not really all that scary, but I think this was a decent reboot of the original. The family dynamic was good and most of the acting was serviceable to decent. A horror film like this is all about setting; establishing the feeling of isolation and desperation and the isolation was certainly conveyed to me. There is also one set piece that is pretty awesome; couple of cheezy parts too, but I liked it.
Firefly (complete series) - 8.5/10: Good stuff. As any good series should do, it really gets you into the characters; characters you like, ones you are frustrated with, and ones you love to hate. I'm probably one of the few here that have not seen this, so there is not too much else to say, but I liked it more and more as it went on. The last episode "Objects In Space" was freaking awesome (Early the bounty hunter was fantastic) and I was sad to see it end. So many things I wanted to see developed, like the shepherd's story as he obviously had a lot of secrets that could have been unearthed, but what can you do when you are a slave to the network you're on. I'll have to re-watch some of the episodes with Whedon's commentary.
Serenity - 7.5/10: After finishing the series this morning I decided I absolutely had to watch Serenity today to see how everything concluded. Took me about 4 stores, but I finally found the Blu-ray and I'm glad I did. This does a good job of completing the arc of River's story and giving us the entire closing pieces for all of the characters, even though none of it was all that surprising. For the two hours he had, Whedon was able to cram as much as he could, so I'm pretty well satisfied with it and it was nice to see the extra budget on this as the effects were noticeably better. Couple of weird things, like it seemed they completely reverted the Doctor & River's relationship with the Captain from the end of the series, plus a few other nitpicking things, but overall it was a nice topper on the series. A shame it did not do better as it would be awesome to see more of these films, I guess there is just not a big enough market for this kind of stuff.
KT