Josh Roseman
(not the trombonist; the other one)

Play Dead is the story of the survivors of a zombie apocalypse in Miami, Florida. A short film made on-location, it follows this unlikely group of survivors as they escape the zombies, band together, and seek out a place where they can ride out the chaos until it ends.

Oh, yeah, and these survivors? They’re all dogs.

Griff the Invisible is about a young man named Griff who lives alone in Melbourne, Australia, has very defined habits, feeds stray cats, and works in the shipping department of what I believe is an import-export firm called WW Enterprises. He’s overshadowed by his brother Tim, bullied by his co-worker Tony, and pitied by his Gary, his boss. But at night, Griff becomes a Batman-like superhero who wears a black suit with a golden G-shaped logo on the chest. He fights evildoers, watches the area, and accepts missions from the police commissioner.

Or does he?

I honestly don’t think Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a bad film… but then, I’m biased, because I’m a huge fan of the TV show. If I wasn’t a fan of the show, I think I’d rate the movie much lower — I never really felt the tension, I didn’t buy the love story, and I didn’t feel any empathy toward the main characters. I just wasn’t invested in the movie beyond “hey, what was Buffy like in the filmed universe?” While I think it was a decent, fun film (for the most part), it suffered in many places and, honestly, I’m not sure that the audience was ready for a true Joss Whedon Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.

What do you do after your 1986 movie achieves cult status? Well, if you’re lucky, you get to make a sequel. When that sequel bombs, you get to make another sequel. If the third film bombs, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to get your intellectual property turned into a TV series that gets passable ratings and hangs around for six years — long enough to justify a fourth film in the series.

In other words… someone made Highlander: Endgame, the fourth movie in the series. And I watched it. More than once.

As of this writing, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series has made her the best-selling Kindle author of all time. That’s quite an accomplishment. But even before that happened, it was inevitable that the Hunger Games phenomenon would become a film. After all, with the end of both Harry Potter and Twilight on the horizon, studios were looking for their next big book-to-movie hit.

Well, they found it, and on March 23, The Hunger Games was released to American audiences.

I vaguely remember seeing Return to Oz in theaters as a child and deciding that the movie was good, but scary. As an adult, I’m quite surprised at how creepy and disturbing the film’s imagery was. In Oz alone, we have the insane behavior of the Wheelers, the mirror-palace where Mombi resides, and even the Gump, who should’ve quit while he was a head.

Overall, I found The Secret World of Arrietty to be a good film for kids. It’s not too violent, there’s no on-screen death, the subject matter is age-appropriate, and the good guys win (mostly because there really aren’t any bad guys of note other than Hara, and she’s not too malicious). The ending is a little sad, and I felt like it could use a little more than what we got, but my daughter was fine with it. She told me afterward that she enjoyed the film, and wanted me to get it on Netflix.