"Going the Distance" (2010)

Starring Drew Barrymore, Justin Long and Christina Applegate
Written by Geoff LaTulippe
Directed by Nanette Burstein
Rated R - Language, nudity, sexuality
Running Time: 102 minutes

Erin (Drew Barrymore) is a woman who feels lost.  She knows what she wants to do with her life, but seems unable to make it happen.  She's 31, going back to college to realize her dream of writing for a newspaper and interning for the summer at a paper in New York City.  In her final weeks in New York, she meets and begins a relationship with Garrett (Justin Long).

At first, their relationship is just casual, but by the end of six weeks when Erin is moving back to San Francisco, they discover that it's difficult to say goodbye.  The two then decide to carry on a long-distance relationship with the understanding that Erin will attempt to get a job and move back to New York when she finishes her studies.  In the meantime, the two text and talk on the phone or via the internet constantly, falling more and more in love with each other as time goes on. 

As the two visit back and forth, the strain of maintaining a long-distance relationship grows worse.  When it starts to look like Erin won't be getting a job in New York City after all, things between the two come to a head as neither is willing to make the sacrifices necessary to move toward the other. 

"The Fighter" (2010)

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale and Amy Adams
Written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson
Directed by David O. Russell
Rated R - Strong language, drug content, violence and sexuality
Running Time: 115 minutes

Mark Wahlberg stars as Lowell boxer "Irish" Micky Ward, trained by his brother Dicky Ecklund (Christian Bale) and managed by his mother Alice (Melissa Leo).  Micky's problem isn't that he's a bad fighter, but that he's constantly put in bad situations and makes the wrong moves because of his devotion to his family.  He's got a daughter that he rarely sees, and pins all his hopes on a relationship with her on winning a fight in Atlantic City that will give him his biggest pay day yet.  Unfortunately, Micky's opponent in this fight weighs 20 pounds more than he does, and Micky is thoroughly trounced.

Micky begins to date a bartender named Charlene (Amy Adams) who convinces him that his problem is his mother and his brother.  Dicky is a drug user, spending most of his time in a crack house with a bunch of lowlifes and being followed around by an HBO documentary crew looking into his far-fallen hero.  Dicky seems to operate under some kind of delusion that the documentary is about his own comeback, but is instead a look at crack addicts.

'Flashpoint' Season Two (2009)

Starring Hugh Dillon, Enrico Colantoni and Amy Jo Johnson
Created by Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern

Sergeant Greg Parker (Enrico Colantoni) and the Toronto Strategic Response Unit (SRU) are back for another batch of hostage situations, bomb threats and wild shooters in this second season of the Canadian police procedural "Flashpoint."

The team breaks in a new member, Donna Sabine (Jessica Steen), while Jules Callaghan (Amy Jo Johnson) recovers from her wounds sustained in the season one finale.  This season, team will encounter homeless men taking a CEO hostage, Russian thieves, baby-stealing teens, bullied students pushed too far, and a woman dying of a degenerative disease with nothing left to lose.  They'll use all their skills and equipment to make sure that everyone makes it out alive, but sometimes that just isn't possible; some people are just intent on violence... and not every member of the team will make it out alive.

The second season of "Flashpoint" trumps the first in almost every way, but not quite.  There are some format and cast changes that can make the season feel slightly inconsistent.  Johnson's absence, due to her pregnancy, makes for some decent changes in the cast chemistry, but it's too bad Steen doesn't stick around for the rest of the season.  A recurring character, Amanda Luria (Ruth Marshall), the team's forensic psychologist who helps develop profiles of the suspects, doesn't appear... her role is mostly split up amongst other characters, including an expanded role for the SRU's dispatcher.

'Flashpoint' Season One (2008)

Starring Enrico Colantoni, Hugh Dillon and Amy Jo Johnson
Created by Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern

"Flashpoint" is a Canadian TV series that has the honor of being one of the few Canadian series to air on American primetime.  It focuses on a fictional elite police unit known as the Strategic Response Unit (SRU).  The SRU is called in to deal with hostage situations, bomb scares and other situations which require special tactics or equipment beyond normal police.

Team leader Sergeant Greg Parker (Enrico Colantoni, late of the excellent "Veronica Mars") heads up the SRU, which also includes snipers Ed Lane (Hugh Dillon), Jules Callaghan (Amy Jo Johnson) and rookie Sam Braddock (David Paetkau), as well as demolitions expert 'Spike' Scarlatti (Sergio Di Zio), entry and less-lethal specialist 'Wordy' Wordsworth (Michael Cram).

In the pilot episode, the team deals with a hostage situation in a crowded square which ends in the sudden death of the suspect.  The fallout of this incident will echo through the rest of the season for Lane, who fires the shot that kills a distraught immigrant.  Though most of the episodes stand alone, this incident comes up again and again as Lane deals with the emotional fallout, as well as the legal as the unit is later sued for wrongful death, and then comes face-to-face with the immigrant's son, who was an elite sniper in his home country.

"Dr. No" (1962)

Starring Sean Connery, Joseph Wiseman and Ursula Andress
Written by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood and Berkely Mather
Directed by Terence Young
Rated: PG - violence, sexual themes
Running Time: 110 minutes

"Bond.  James Bond."  In 1962, EON Productions brought Ian Fleming's suave secret agent to the big screen, the start of a series of thrillers and action pictures that would dominate the box office for the next fifty years. 

After a British agent named Strangways is murdered in Jamaica, MI6 sends its best agent, James Bond (Sean Connery) to investigate.  He arrives in Jamaica and immediately finds himself in a place more dangerous than he first thought.  Bond is followed by a mysterious stranger in sunglasses, as well as a female photographer.  As he digs into the facts surrounding Strangways murder, attempts are made on his own life before he makes contact with CIA agent Felix Leiter (Jack Lord) and a local fisherman named Quarrel (John Kitzmiller) who tell him about a local island owned by a Chinese scientist called Doctor Julius No (Joseph Wiseman).

Bond travels to Dr. No's island with Quarrel, who warns him that the island is protected by an evil dragon.  There, the two find a young woman named Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress), before they are captured by No's security forces.  Bond discovers that No intends on sabotaging the American space program using an atomic-powered radio beam, and must find a way to stop him and escape the island with Honey.

'Farscape' Season One (1999)

Starring Ben Browder, Claudia Black and Anthony Simcoe
Created by Rockne S. O'Bannon

After being thoroughly disappointed by the godawful "Babylon 5," I knew there was another series I had been wanting to dive into and explore and that was the Australian sci-fi show "Farscape."  Like "Babylon 5," I have seen a handful of episodes and am generally aware of the characters and situations.

John Crichton (Ben Browder) is an astronaut flying an experimental shuttle named Farscape 1 when he's suddenly sucked into a wormhole and blown halfway across the universe.  He exits in the midst of a battle between a military force ironically called the Peacekeepers and a living starship called a leviathan.  The leviathan, named Moya, is a prison transport and the prisoners aboard are staging a daring escape attempt.  Crichton's ship collides with a Peacekeeper ship, killing the other pilot.  Crichton is brought aboard Moya and meets the strange beings that live there: Ka D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe), a perpetually angry Luxon warrior, Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan (Virginia Hey) a peaceful blue-skinned Dhelvian priestess with a dark past, and Dominar Rygel XVI (voiced by Jonathan Hardy) the diminutive and deposed ruler of the Hynerian Empire.  Moya is controlled symbiotically by Pilot (voiced by Lani Tupu), a multi-armed creature connected to Moya's nervous system.

"Sucker Punch" (2011)

Starring Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone
Written by Zack Snyder and Steve Shibuya
Directed by Zack Snyder
Rated PG-13 - Sexual themes, violence and language
Running Time: 110 minutes

"Sucker Punch" is almost unreviewable.  On the one hand, it's a gorgeous bit of filmmaking from a director who is known for creating awesome, comic book-inspired imagery.  On the other, the story is so thin and one-note that it might have been better served being released as a series of bizarre, thematically-connected music videos - since that's essentially what each and every single one of the increasingly absurd action sequences play as.

The story begins as a young woman nicknamed "Baby Doll" (Emily Browning) discovers that her mother has just died.  Her stepfather, enraged that the will leaves everything to Baby Doll and her younger sister, attacks the two girls.  Baby Doll defends herself with a gun, but misses and accidentally kills the younger sister.  She's quickly arrested, and the stepfather pins the killing on Baby Doll and has her committed to a local mental hospital.  There, he bribes an orderly named Blue (Oscar Jones) to fake the signature of the hospital's leading doctor, Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino) to get Baby Doll lobotomized by the end of the week.