Brent Nyitray
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Let the mutherfuker burn!
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Kevin S. Willis
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ScottC
yellojktRosanne and I try to see one movie a month without our twin granddaughters, who will be 3 on January 23rd. Further, we each agree to let the other go see movies one of us would not see on a bet. Here, in order, are the movies we have seen together as a couple since January, 2011, with my brief notes.
I hope it is useful for y’all and would like similar feedback on the movies we missed, for the purpose of Netflicking them at home.
We both would recommend all but one.
“The Social Network” B+. Of current interest.
“Winter’s Bone” A. Suspenseful and spare with a great lead.
“Nora’s Will” A. How a funeral movie should be. From MX.
“The Ghost Writer” B. Very suspenseful and well acted.
“The Kings Speech” A- or B+. Well acted. Dramatic tension in a small place. An Aussie accented Edward was a stretch, however.
“Inside Job” A-. Much more compelling than any Michael Moore documentary because it is not ham handed.
“Kids Are All Right” B. Good chick flick, but tries too hard.
“Incendies” A. Suspenseful and terrifying. Canadian.
“Page One: Inside the New York Times” Documentary. Skip it.
“Bridesmaids” B or B+. Funny chick flick.
“The Debt” B. Good suspense, good acting. I was granted this as a date movie in trade for “Bridesmaids”. Aside from the NYT documentary, “BM” was my least favorite and this is Rosanne’s least favorite, but we agree that both are worth a look.
“Midnight in Paris” B. Fantasy romance comedy chick flick.
“The Descendants” A. Works on three levels.
“We Bought A Zoo” B. Not in the class of “Descendants”. But by no means a waste. Bit of a chick flick, I think.
“The Artist” B+. Brilliantly executed gimmick. Won’t survive as a TV rental. See it in the theater.
Filed under: movies |
All Things in Moderation 
Out of that list, I have seen just one – Bridesmaids which I would also rate a B+. In the past year, I have seen Rise of the Planet of the Apes (B…better than I thought it would be – like how it related to original), Mr. Poppers Penguins (B…cute), Alpha and Omega (B-…borders on too cute), Soul Surfer (A-…fairly well made, religious people in it remind me of religious people i know – not crazy or stereotypes), Crazy Stupid Love (B+…Steve Carrel), Rio (B-…it was ok but not more) and Captain America (A-…earnest superhero movie that was good for kids and kept me interested). This represents a good year seeing movies for me – I simply can’t afford them. Obviously mostly tilted towards my kids, those movies are rated on a slightly different scale. All my kids movies (excluding Pixar, were there any in the list) are rated on a curve compared to the abominable 3D extravaganza they made me sit through a few years ago by the name of Shark Boy and Lava Girl….gawd that was painful. If I can somewhat enjoy the movie it gets a B. The adult fare is what it is.
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My kids enjoyed Shar Boy and Lava Girl, and that’s the movie that introduced Taylor Lautner to the world. It’s funny watching him in that and then seeing one of those Twilight movies. I definitely give Captain America an A+. I’d like to see more WWII Cap movies, but it looks like Cap II is going to be set in the present. I suspect it will be based on the Winter Soldier story in the comic books, where Bucky–who appears to die in the movie–comes back as a super soldier himself. I thought Rise of the Planet of the Apes was an A+, too. Loved the news and newspaper references to Charlton Heston’s space mission in the original . . . those are some folks who, unlike Tim Burton, truly got the original series. And Andy Serkis’s performance as Caesar was top-notch. Very good stuff. I also highly recommend X-Men, First Class. One of the better X-Men movies, actually. Looking forward to The Hobbit, The Avengers, Prometheus (Alien prequel by original Alien helmer, Ridley Scott) and Men In Black III.
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What’s a movie?
I did watch Cars a couple weeks ago, when Beth bought it for the kids. We haven’t been out to a movie in ages…
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I enjoyed Cars, which was Pixar’s take on Doc Hollywood. Paul Newman was great as the Hudson Hornet. Cars 2 was the rare Pixar sequel that did not beat the original, but it was all right. I really enjoyed Tangled, Disney’s most recent computer animated film. It was very good. Just went to see Beauty and the Beast in 3d, and the 3D conversion was very good. Very fun to watch movies you are familiar with, but converted to 3d. For some reason, 3D is always less impressive in films that I’m seeing for 3d for the first time.
I can definitely recommend The Social Network. I’ve seen the Kids are Alright, which could be retitled This Movie is Okay. I definitely found Bridesmaids supremely enjoyable.
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Dave!, before I get “Apes”, is it made somehow plausible that a relatively small # of apes can take over?
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Scott has it right wrt the scope of the movie. If you are familiar with the original Planet of the Apes, it makes a lot of sense and is a pretty well done and smart “prequel”. I was prepared not to like it (and only watched it because my 9 year old really wanted to). As I said, better than I thought it would be. I am not one to watch movies for the special effects but they were really good in this movie.
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You’re a pretty easy grader since everything is an A or a B. The only two films I’ve seen recently in the theaters are the latest Mission Impossible and Sherlock Holmes. They are pretty much the same movie set 125 years apart only Sherlock has cooler gadgets.
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We preselected based on positive reviews from reviewers we trusted. We hate wasting our dates on bad films. Ordinary is OK, but several of these were up for various awards. There were several others that we simply had no chance to see, and that is what I am hoping y’all will suggest and help us “winnow”.
I appreciate the reviews of action flicks [for me] and kid stuff [for when we Netflix with the twins], as well.
Thanks.
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I just watched all of Battlestar Galactica on Netflix, and Caprica. They did a little preview for the never-to-be 2nd season of Caprica, and it looked like it was going to be great. I really wished they had done at least the 2nd season of Caprica. If you like religion-infused scifi, Battlestar Galactica is the way to go. The first 3 seasons of Eureka are also on Netflix, another SyFy series I recommend if you haven’t seen it. And, of course, I believe the entire run of Lost is on Netflix, which I loved. If you haven’t watched Transcendent Man, a documentary about Ray Kurzweil, I recommend it. Limitless is on Netflix, and it was a fun flick. I enjoyed Hot Tub Time Machine, but I’m a child of the 80s. I’m planning on watching the 1st season of the BBC update to Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock, on Netflix sometime soon. It gets raves.
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Rosanne just looked over the list and reminded me that I forgot “Moneyball”.
A-. A mostly true story about inside baseball that my wife, not a fan, still really liked.
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Moneyball is excellent. Everything I know about baseball, football, or finance, I learned from Michael Lewis.
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I also enjoyed Moneyball. Great performances all around.
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The best movie I’ve seen in quite awhile is “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. If you’ve read the book you’ll know there’s a violent rape scene though so prepare yourself or stay away.
We took our grandkids to see “The Adventures of Tin Tin” a couple of weeks ago and we all enjoyed it. I wouldn’t waste the money on the 3D version though if you have a choice.
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“Violent rape scene” is about all I need to read to decide, positive reviews aside, it’s not for me. Nothing I’ve read about it makes me want to see it, and I think I’ve seen every one of Fincher’s other movies. But I’m going to pass on Dragon Tatoo.
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I was completely underwhelmed by Bridesmaids. I mostly attribute it to the high expectations I had going in, but I didn’t laugh out loud more than once or twice. Or maybe I just dislike women. I really liked Social Network, particularly the smart ass responses by Zuckerberg in the various deposition scenes. I also enjoyed King’s Speech. My wife and I rarely go to the movies. We usualy wait until it comes out on Apple TV and watch at home. I have a big TV and some pretty good speakers and it costs a lot less. I did watch Country Strong on Starz a month or two ago and thought it was OK. The music in the moview was really good, especialy the songs not sung by Gwenyth Paltrow.
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Sorry, no help from okieland. I haven’t seen a movie in a theater since Rocky Horror Picture Show. That’s not too very much of an exaggeration. I much prefer to read and imagine things myself.
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RHPC is always good.
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Mark:
Dave!, before I get “Apes”, is it made somehow plausible that a relatively small # of apes can take over?
I don’t want to spoil the movie, but the apes don’t actually take over at the end. What is made plausible is that a small number of apes can wreak havoc in one city and ultimately escape from human control, thus setting the stage, presumably in some future movie, for an ape take-over.
BTW, I liked it.
I just watched Moneyball last night. Thought it was good, but it wasn’t the book, which I thought was fantastic.
I also saw the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo over the weekend. Definitely not for the kiddies. Pretty true to the book, and the original Swedish movie. Don’t see it, though, with someone who is squeamish about sexual violence. There are a couple of pretty tough scenes. On the other hand, Rooney Mara is smokin’ hot.
Some Netflix movies (either instant watch or DVD order) that I would definitely recommend if you haven’t already seen them:
Conspiracy, about the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis settled on the Final Solution.
Let the Right One In, a Swedish sort-of-horror movie about the odd relationship between a bullied school boy and the young girl who befriends him, and turns out to be a vampire. Don’t let the description put you off. I found it to be oddly intriguing. If you don’t like subtitles, there’s an American re-make called Let Me In. But I liked the Swedish version better.
Deep Water, a documentary about an around the world, single man sailboat race in 1968 sponsored by The Sunday Times in Britain, and the efforts of a novice sailor to accomplish the feat and find himself in, well, deep water. I’d never heard about this story, and found it very interesting.
Sophie Scholl: the Final Days, a true story about the last six days of Sophie Scholl’s life. Scholl was an anti-Nazi activist and founder of the underground White Rose movement in Nazi Germany, who got caught distributing anti-Nazi leaflets and was executed. Subtitles.
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Apes is as plausible a scifi movie as I can imagine. All very well executed. Tough to buy James Franco as a brilliant scientist, but still, a great cast–Brian Cox, John Lithgow–and great performance capture with the apes . . . not to be missed.
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Lithgow as good in this movie as any I can remember him in…which in thinking about it is quite a few..
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Having read “Tattoo” and seen the Swedish movie it is on my guy schedule – going with a neighbor.
Dara, my youngest, the chemist and pharm student, thought Craig was an upgrade over the Swedish Blomquist. But she thought this Salander was more robotic than necessary. She also had both read the book and watched the Swedish film, and your two recommendations just reinforce my desire for the first time in my life to read a novel and watch two different movie versions of it in a 3 year time frame.
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I have heard that the First “Tattoo” book is tough to get through. My wife couldn’t get through it and that is not usually the case. I’ll have to think about reading it though.
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I haven’t seen the Swedish version but I do love Daniel Craig. I don’t know why, he’s not particularly handsome in the traditional sense, but he has replaced Brad Pitt in my affections…. 😉 And I thought Salander was played just right based upon the character in the book.
ash, if she couldn’t get through the book, I wouldn’t take her to see the movie, it was even more difficult as they depicted the rape scene very realistically. My husband had a tough time watching it, although afterwards he said it was one of the better movies we’ve seen in awhile.
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I listened to “Moneyball” as an audiobook and was not disappointed by the movie’s “shortcomings”. I tried to think how I would have reinterpreted the book significantly differently than the director, and all I could come up with was that Brad Pitt is too damn small. 🙂
There was plenty of emphasis on how Billy sacrificed Stanford for a baseball bonus when he did not believe it was what he really wanted, pushed hard by adults in his life and scouts. From both the book and the movie I never understood why he was not still FB scholarship material when he had his second thoughts about baseball. Pro baseball does not DQ one from NCAA FB.
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I have seen “Conspiracy”. Compelling, I agree.
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Mark:
P tried to think how I would have reinterpreted the book significantly differently than the director…
A lot of the book would have been difficult to include in the movie. But I thought there were two significant story lines from the book that were either entirely left out of, or only passingly touched on in, the movie, which I thought should have been more emphasized. First, I thought Bill James and the history/development of his Baseball Abstract deserved more than a passing mention. And while the movie spend some time dwelling on Beane’s disappointing career, the book spend considerable time contrasting his career with others who came up at the same time, like Lenny Dykstra, and delved into why it was exactly that the two had such drastically different career trajectories. Specifically, Beane’s psychological reaction to an instance of failure as a player, compared to that of, say, Dykstra, was an important part of the book and tried to get at exactly why Dykstra ultimately succeeded (in baseball, if not elsewhere) where Beane, clearly an equal if not better athlete, did not.
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Yes – I agree. The Beane-Dykstra contrast was a revelation in the book and could have been in the movie, too. Thanks for reminding me.
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Kevin:
enjoyed Cars, which was Pixar’s take on Doc Hollywood.
Minus, of course, the lake scene.
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No Julie Warner emerging from the lake, that’s true. But it does have it’s own homage–Sally driving in slo-mo with the waterfall as a backdrop, and Lightning McQueen’s reaction. The folks who did that movie were clearly fans of Doc Hollywood. 😉
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Kevin- I asked this a few weeks ago, but I don’t recall a response. Have you read or heard about Lev Grossman’s books The Magicians and The Magician King? Based on what I know about you, I think you would like them both.
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I saw the Artist and I’m a fan of the silents as well as the transitional movies through 1934. They made the movie acceptable by not doing a lot of emotive scenes that would call for pantomime. Some aspects that today’s audiences would be troubled to see. It was a _Star Is Born_ type of movie as well with some of the plot from _Singing In the Rain_. So it was really nothing new other than the gimick that caught the Golden Globe voters the right way. The main actor though was very good, but best actor?
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