Eventually, I plan to get Filmstosee up and running again as a proper film review site, but in the meantime, I'm going to use this space for the occasional review. I've been teaching Adobe Flex in SF for the last few days, and as usual spending my evenings in the City seeing movies. Last night I pulled a double feature: Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, and Juno.

AVPR was entertaining. I was nothing more, and nothing less, than you'd expect. It picks up exactly where AVP left off - the Predators are getting ready to return from their hunting of the Aliens on Earth, but one of them got infected, so a baddie bursts out of its chest while in orbit. Predictably, it kills the crew and causes the ship to crash outside of a place claiming to be Gunnison, CO. Of course, it was actually filmed in Canada, and to folks like me who know what Gunnison looks like, well, let's just say that British Columbia is a heck of a lot prettier.

A couple of face huggers escape and carnage ensues. The last Predator on the ship manages to get a message out to the home world before being killed, so one of them comes to try to stop the Aliens. I read an article about the movie in which the producers describe this Predator as being like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, which is accurate.

Of course, a bunch of hapless humans get in the way of the little war. They're led by Steven Pasquale from Rescue Me and Reiko Aylesworth, late of24. As in the last film, it sort of turns into an us vs. them vs. them slaughterfest.

As I said in the beginning, the movie was entertaining. Obviously you shouldn't try to think too hard about it, but it was fun to watch.

Juno, on the other hand, was just plain fantastic. Without a doubt, it's the best movie of 2007.

The movie centers around Juno, played by Ellen Page, a 16-year-old girl in some small town in Minnesota who gets pregnant. What separates Juno from every other teen pregnancy movie, though, is that it doesn't try to be some preachy, cautionary tale. Instead, it deals with real people in a realistic way. Juno is one of the strongest characters I've seen in a movie in awhile. Her father, played by J.K. Simmons, and step-mom, played by Allison Janney, make it clear that while they don't approve of the situation, they still unconditionally love Juno and offer amazing support.

Much of the film centers around Juno decided to give up the baby, and finding what she thinks is the perfect couple in Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman. But as with every other person in the film, they are flawed human beings. Watching the interplay between the two of them - Garner desperately wants a baby, while Bateman isn't sure - and their interactions with Juno provide the film's soul.

Tonight, I rather unfortunately decided to see No Country For Old Men. That should be enough of a clue as to what I thought of it.

First off, I need to say that I am a huge fan of the Coen Brothers. Fargo is one of the best films of all time, likewise O Brother, Where Art Thou. Intolerable Cruelty, their "sell out" Hollywood movie, is likewise great. That said, I'd guess that even DaVinci created crappy works at times, and so I guess I can try to forgive them for this stinker.

The plot follows the misadventures of a Texas nobody, played by Josh Brolin, who stumbles across a drug deal gone bad, finds $2 million, and then is relentlessly hunted by Javier Bardem, a psychopath searching for the money. Tommy Lee Jones plays the small town sheriff is way out of his league trying to deal with the bodies that keep piling up, and Woody Harrelson shows up for about ten minutes of the movie for no reason at all.

Movies, in my eyes, can commit a lot of sins, but the one thing they can never do is bore me. I'm not sure when I saw a movie that bored me as much as this one.