St. Vincent

I thought this movie was great!  While I didn’t really know what to expect with Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, and Naomi Watts as the main characters, I was pleasantly surprised.  Murray plays a grumpy, older man that is all alone with not much money, who drinks a lot, and doesn’t seem to have much of a future for himself.  He’s just kind of “existing” until a newly single mom and her son move in next door and it starts to change his life and kind of mess with his normal routine.  Along the way, we’re able to see there is much more to Murray’s character than it seems and there might be reasons why he is the way he is.  Whether they realize it or not, they’re all needing someone and are able to fill some of the gaps in their lives, no matter how strange it all might seem from the outside.  The story was almost deceptively simple - it can be as moving as someone will allow it to be for them.  If you let it in, it'll get to you... 

Lucy

I had high hopes for this movie.  Sadly, I was very disappointed!  Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, a woman who after being abducted, has been surgically implanted with a bag of something called CPH4 that she is being forced to smuggle.  When the bag starts leaking inside her body, she becomes “infected” with the drug.  Once in her system, it starts making her brain work at levels above normal capacity and it just keeps increasing and increasing what her mind is capable of processing.  I thought everything started off well and was making sense, but at some point, it all just became ridiculous!  I was expecting something like the move Limitless - not for her to turn into someone that almost had "superpowers" just because she could use all of her brain power.  I get that she had changed into something so advanced that our logic can’t even comprehend it all, but that just wasn’t what I was looking for, I guess.  It really did seem almost ludicrous to me!

John Wick

I liked this movie alright, but wouldn’t really need to see it again.  It was OK in a video game, shoot ‘em up kind of way.  It actually reminded me of a video game with how much shooting and killing there was scene after scene through the whole film.  Keanu Reeves plays an ex-hitman that has changed and removed himself from that way of life and gotten married and started his life over.  After some tragedies occur, something finally puts him over the edge and brings out his inner hitman again and it is “on” from there!  His skills are legendary in the underworld he came from and he is pretty much unstoppable.   Once that switch has been flipped, there is no going back and you had better not cross him!