If you read my earlier opinion thing on animation, you will know that I mentioned the latest stop animation movie coming to theaters from Portland's Laika Films. The studio responsible for the 2009 Oscar-nominated Caroline returns with Paranorman. Paranorman is a weird film in the sense of the quirky characters and aesthetics, but also from the fact that it’s hard to pinpoint who this movie is really for. While a great movie, it is a little too full of bluntly placed moral lessons for adults, yet too strong in content for children. Rated PG-13, Paranorman uses strong language like “jackass”, and then hits you with an anti-bullying message that would make Saved By The Bell proud.

In the movie, Norman is bullied at school and is a real loner as result of him being able to talk to the dead. Norman’s excommunicated uncle (who is considered crazy for also being able to talk to the dead) entrusts Norman to save the town from an ancient curse. Along with strong language from the charming and spunky (and deceased) granny, Paranorman makes a few sexual jokes. Most work well, and make the movie better, but the morals could have been toned down. Without giving too much away: the moral of the story is literally spelled out for the audience in a rather cool ending.

The Bourne Legacy is classified as a “movie” by technicality only. You see, most narrative films need a beginning, middle, and end, and some kind of overarching story to it. With The Bourne Legacy, it seems as though the filmmakers got halfway through this process and then just gave up; there isn’t much of a story to begin with, and they forgot to give an ending to the shell of a story they did create.\

This is coming from a guy who has not seen any of the movies from the original trilogy. With that said, any movie should really be able to stand on its own, especially one that is serving as a reboot to the franchise and trying to distance itself from the massive shadow the beloved originals cast. The story pretty much is that the CIA pull the plug on the project that has made the main character Aaron Cross (played by Hawkeye) into a drug-addicted super soldier. Instead of switching the pill as they do with all the other agents involved in the project (dubbed “Project Outcome”), they decide it would make more sense or just be more fun to blow the fucking shit out of Aaron and the other agent he is with. This of course goes horribly wrong, and Aaron escapes. For the rest of the film, he and a project doctor he rescues try to stay alive and get to the project lab on the other side of the world. The idea is that they can rid Aaron of his drug dependency in this lab.

What you think of a movie has a lot to do with the expectations that you set before you even hit play, or before the previews start to roll. The marketing behind the movie is a big contributor to this expectation, along with your personal opinion of the genre and actors, among other things. As a viewer, I find that my expectations for a movie have way too much bearing on what I think of the movie. This isn’t saying that if a movie is really good and I’m in a bad mood, I will miss the fact that it is a good movie. As far as my personal enjoyment though, it’s way too critical an issue for comfort. This also causes some really bad second viewings, which is actually what brought this rather depressing realization about myself to mind.

I just re-watched Hereafter (finishing not ten minutes before typing this sentence) and it made me realize I must have been in a really good mood when I first watched this movie. It’s not that it's a bad movie; in fact, I would put it in the 3 or 4 star rating if I had to write a review for the site. (Due to the fact that I like to have a reason or point to my writing, and Hereafter is a couple years old now and neither terrible nor amazing, this is the closest thing to a review you are going to get anytime soon.) Anyway, with Hereafter I only ended up caring about half the movie. Plain as bread characters tended to drag down a cool and unique take on pretty morbid material, with some good talent attached: Matt Damon starred and Clint Eastwood directed (this movie is racism-free). Going into it, I must have been in a pretty good mood, and wasn’t expecting too much, not really aware of what Eastwood could do behind a camera. A four star rating is decent for any movie, but I remember walking away thinking it was the best thing I had watched in awhile.