salsoulscomedy

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Running Down a Dream is a great documentary for fans of the band. It has interviews with Petty and all of the key band members past and present, producers, family and others around the band. Great stories from them are mixed with past recordings of them when they were younger and lots of more recent live performances at various concerts.

It covers the entire history of the band up until the time the documentary was made (2007). I loved the documentary as a big fan of the group.

The only downside is that for non fans and even for more casual fans the doc has an incredibly long run time of about four hours. For me it flew by but the others got a bit bored. Maybe a version with less performances would have been a good idea to keep the great history and story in a more compact run time. They play almost entire songs during the doc so if you're not into that particular song you might be looking for the fast forward button.

I know a lot of people bash this movie, and it is nothing special, but we thought it was a charming and (at least occasionally) very funny movie to "waste" an hour and a half on. I didn't even know John Hughes did this one until I visited this page! But I'm not surprised because, like many of John Hughes's other movies, this big screen adaptation of Dennis the Menace is funny, well written and on top of that it also has a lot of "heart" to boot.

Christopher Lloyd being in the movie was a nice surprise and he does a very good job as the comic criminal foil to Dennis. I felt bad for him even while laughing at his pain. (He is basically like the wet bandits characters from the Home Alone series Hughes also did, though the first Home Alone is better than this.) Walter Matthau is fantastic as always in the role of a bitter, sourpuss type of old man neighbour, who Dennis is always annoying and damaging the property of.

It's predictable and not very serious but there are lots of good family friendly laughs with a good story and performances, and it hits the spot.

It even has a big, stinky flower!

The performance in this movie is really the big reason to watch it because she does a great job portraying a younger Queen Elizabeth. I was fascinated by that if not by the story going on around her, or other characters involved in her life. This performance was well deserving of the Academy Award for Best Actress in that year but the movie itself was nothing to write home about, aside from that phenomenal acting job. Just a basic historical drama.

That said there's nothing wrong with it and I would recommend watching it. It's just not the kind of movie where all the pieces are great and add up to an "epic" film. It's all well done and the acting is fine, it's just that the titular performance makes this movie rise up above what it would have been without her, which would have been just another average historical drama.