The movie starts with the birth of Starfleet’s most infamous captain, James Tiberius Kirk (Chris Pine) and follows his beginnings in Starfleet. Along for the ride are Capt Pike (Bruce Greenwood), Spock (Zachary Quinto of Heroes), Doctor Leonard 'Bones' McCoy (Karl Urban); linguist Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Helmsman Sulu (John Cho) and a 17-year-old Russian navigator named Pavel Chekov (Anton Yelchin). Halfway through the movie, Scotty (Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead) drops in too.

Although Uhura, McCoy and Kirk are still cadets at the academy, they are ordered into space to help man the few ships Starfleet has in Earth orbit to respond to a distress call from the planet Vulcan. When they arrive, they discover it is a trap and all but the Enterprise are destroyed. Pike, Kirk and Sulu launch an attack to save Vulcan and deal with the marauding Romulan Nero (Eric Bana).

Star Trek starts off with a bang and races along right to the end of the movie, without any noticeable lulls. The acting is great, especially Quinto as a young Spock, fighting to suppress his emotions. He loves, fights and rages, all the while trying his utmost to suppress them. Instead of the always logical and almost mechanical Mr. Spock played by Nimoy from the TV series and films, we are greeted with a Spock who must constantly battle his human emotions. It was an incredibly refreshing take on the character. Pine is in fine form as Kirk, the irrepressible and reckless rule breaker. His constant willingness to fight the unwinnable fight is right on par with the original Kirk. The scene when he takes the Kobayashi Maru test is particularly enjoyable. The film has tons of homages to Star Trek lore, with explanations why McCoy is called Bones, rationale why he doesn’t like Spock, Kirk’s willingness to sleep with hot green aliens, and so on. There are tons of great one-liners and jokes as the cadets learn their jobs.

I can definitely see some Star Trek faithful upset at the liberties J.J. Abrams has taken...

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Hugh Jackman stars as James (AKA Wolverine), while Live Schreiber takes over the role of Sabretooth, his brother. Both are endowed with superpowers from a young age, and were born more than a century ago in Canada! After accidently killing a man, the brothers flee their home and family. They wind up fighting in both World Wars and Vietnam, where Sabretooth goes berserk and kills his CO. They are both tried for murder, but the firing squad is incapable of doing the job, due to their quick healing ability. A general, Victor Creed, offers them a job in an elite special ops unit, tackling the dirty jobs regular troops simply can’t. After James tires of the death and killing, he leaves the unit and becomes a lumberjack in the Canadian North. However, his past comes back to haunt him and soon he is on a mission of revenge.

Despite all the negativity about the film online, I thought it was pretty entertaining. It was well-paced, enjoyable to watch and a good all-round movie. As I didn’t know any of Wolverine’s back story to begin with, I wasn’t disappointed as others here were when they watched the bootleg.

While it wasn’t as good as the early X-Men movies, it was a fun popcorn movie. And the best line in the movie?

Creed: “Your country needs you.”

Wolverine: “I’m Canadian.”

That says it all. Canada truly kicks ass!

7 / 10

[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPmbGzQaOCs [/youtube]

http://www.x-menorigins.com/

Watch it here;

http://movies.yahoo.com/premieres/13240 ... ardformat/

Warning – Spoilers ahead.

Robert Downey Jr plays Steve Lopez, a LA Times reporter who’s always on the lookout for an interesting new story. He writes about his injury and treatment after a bicycle accident, life in the bad part of town etc. When he stumbles across Nathaniel (Jamie Foxx) playing flawless Beethoven on a violin with only two strings, he is intrigued. He follows up and discovers that he had gone to Julliard for musical training but dropped out due to his diagnosis of schizophrenia. He begins writing about him and quickly befriends the strange character.

Both Robert Downey Jr and Jamie Foxx play their characters to near perfection and the film takes its time in developing the relationship between the two. They put in powerful performances and this film will be an Oscar contender next year. The best thing about the film is that there is no sugarcoating or quick fix. Lopez and Ayer’s relationship goes through its ups and downs and by the end of the film, Ayers is doing better, but hasn’t suddenly conquered his schizophrenia to rejoin society and begin writing screenplays.

[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrrLJT4YS9I [/youtube]

http://www.soloistmovie.com/

For a movie originally titled, ‘Bromance’, this movie is pretty good. Paul Rudd plays Peter Klaven, a real estate agent living in LA. After he proposes to his girlfriend Zooey, (Rashida Jones), he comes to the realization that he doesn’t have any close male friends who could be his groomsmen, nevermind a best man. With the help of his brother (Andy Samberg), he sets off to meet a best friend.

He quickly discovers how hard it is to meet a nice guy in LA. He winds up on a series of tragic ‘man-dates’ with gay men, senior citizens, and other horror stories. His apparent salvation comes when he holds an open house to sell Lou Ferigno’s Beverly Hills mansion. There he meets Sydney Fife (Jason Segel). They chat and poke fun at someone trying to decide whether the house is a good buy or not. Peter takes a chance and calls up Sydney and they quickly bond in Sydney’s ‘man cave’, a garage filled with TVs, guitars and all sorts of toys for boys. Soon, Peter is having too much fun with Sydney, opting to play Rush songs at Sydney’s instead of watching HBO with his fiancée, which causes conflict.

Paul Rudd and Jason Segel are bang-on in this film and take comedy to some serious new heights. Much of Rudd’s characters humour comes from his awkwardness and goofy speech, making up words like odd words in a lame attempt to fit in. The scenes where Peter tries to meet new guy friends are also really funny (with the poker game being probably the best), as is his epiphany that he lacks any guy friends. Given the content of the film, it’s surprising that Judd Apatow isn’t involved somewhere, as the comedy and humour are similar to Knocked Up / Superbad / etc.

Some of the best scenes in the movie are stolen by supporting actors, like Jon Favreau and Jamie Pressley, who are play one of the nastiest onscreen couples I’ve seen in a long time. One of Zooey’s comments describes them perfectly, “They argue and yell at each other all day long and then spend all night having angry make-up sex. ...

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