Movie Tracking
Apr. 1st, 2014 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llcoolvadMARCH MOVIES
11. Cold Comes the Night, Redbox. Gritty low-budget noir. A single mom runs a pay-by-the-hour motel in somewhere dreary. Child Protective Services thinks that's maybe not the best environment to raise a child in. Single mom doesn't have enough money to walk away from the no-tell. Then, suddenly, blindish Bryan Cranston, inexplicably playing an ethnically untraceable accent, decides to stop at the motel and there's violence and betrayal and mayhem.
12. Oldboy, Redbox. Joe Doucette is a pretty vile guy, and one night he's kidnapped and then kept captive in for 20 years in a fake hotel room with cheesy tv, booze, and junk food. Then suddenly he's out and he has to figure out who kidnapped him and why. Not great, but certainly interesting. And the themes end up being pretty dark.
13. Thor: The Dark World, Redbox. Fun! I am a big fan of all the Marvel movies, so I am not really the best judge. But how can you not like a movie where Tom Hiddleston gets to camp it up and play both the bad guy AND the hero? I'd watch Tom Hiddleston eat his lunch. But really everyone was pretty excellent. Fun fact: Redbox didn't get enough copies of this title, so it is out of stock everywhere. I found one in nearby town, and while I ran in to get it out of the Redbox machine, I paused in the fire lane at Stop & Shop for like 30 seconds and got a parking ticket. So I'm not sure that it was worth $40. But there you go.
14. American Hustle, Redbox. Excellent. Christian Bale is my favorite part. He's just flawless. Bradley Cooper is great, too. Really, there's nothing to complain about at all. They're all excellent, and the movie is a fun scam. I love capers, and this is a pretty complex and yet bumbling caper. Highly recommended.
15. Odd Thomas, Redbox. MUCH better than it had any right to be. Really enjoyed this. I'd read the first handful of books, and had no idea there was a movie. And it was good! The basic plot is the main character, Odd (played by Chekov from the Trek reboot, but minus the heavy Russkie accent), can see dead people. And they try to tell him things. And he tries to fix things for them. Very quirky, interesting cast, funny, but also filled with violence and horror. Pretty much captures the book's tone.
16. The Departed, Cable. I've seen this several times already, but this version had pop-up factoids about the movie, which added a bit of interestingness. It's perhaps my favorite Boston movie. A few terrible accents (Sheen, Nicholson), but everyone's performance is just so good and the plot is great and it's all just great. Major props to Leo here. He's just so good. Did I mention that it's good? Because it is.
17. The Counselor, Redbox. Interesting. Not sure if I liked it. Very appealingly filmed, gorgeously rich sets/scenes, Ridley Scott directs, Fassbinder and Javier Bardem star, Cormac McCarthy wrote it. Should be good, right? And a lot of it was interesting, but some of it was trying way too hard (like basically all of the dialog). A lot of obsession with sex across all the characters that seems unlikely, considering how much they all get. There is a delightful pair of cheetahs in the movie that I worried about from the first second I saw them on screen. I hate that. But Brad Pitt dies in a spectacularly foreshadowed way, so that part was fun. And since there's no one to like at all in the whole movie, except possibly Penelope Cruz, it's pretty satisfying to see what happenes to everyone, except possibly Penelope Cruz.
18. Dallas Buyers Club, Redbox. Powerful. Great performances, fascinating story, relentlessly sad. Watching that time in so-recent history, where people were just dropping like flies and no one had any answers, was very sad.
19. Extract, Netflix DVD. So I decided to cancel the DVD side of my Netflix, and I returned the movie I've had out for months (dumb) and forgot to actually stop the DVDs coming. Somehow this was at the top of my DVD queue. So I watched it, since it's Mike Judge. But perhaps I have aged out of the Mike Judge audience? Because it's a comedy, and I didn't laugh much. And I'm a Jason Bateman fan! There were a few funny bits at the end. I liked Judge's cameo (totally knew it was him because of the voice). The neighbor was amusing. But overall I gotta give it a meh. It's certainly no Office Space. And Ben Affleck was really meh.
20. Non-Stop, Theater. "Taken" on a plane. Except the entire time Liam Neeson plays an antihero instead of a hero. But it's a decent little thriller, if forgettable. Lots of red herrings, but ultimately the whodunnit and why part is completely unimportant.
11. Cold Comes the Night, Redbox. Gritty low-budget noir. A single mom runs a pay-by-the-hour motel in somewhere dreary. Child Protective Services thinks that's maybe not the best environment to raise a child in. Single mom doesn't have enough money to walk away from the no-tell. Then, suddenly, blindish Bryan Cranston, inexplicably playing an ethnically untraceable accent, decides to stop at the motel and there's violence and betrayal and mayhem.
12. Oldboy, Redbox. Joe Doucette is a pretty vile guy, and one night he's kidnapped and then kept captive in for 20 years in a fake hotel room with cheesy tv, booze, and junk food. Then suddenly he's out and he has to figure out who kidnapped him and why. Not great, but certainly interesting. And the themes end up being pretty dark.
13. Thor: The Dark World, Redbox. Fun! I am a big fan of all the Marvel movies, so I am not really the best judge. But how can you not like a movie where Tom Hiddleston gets to camp it up and play both the bad guy AND the hero? I'd watch Tom Hiddleston eat his lunch. But really everyone was pretty excellent. Fun fact: Redbox didn't get enough copies of this title, so it is out of stock everywhere. I found one in nearby town, and while I ran in to get it out of the Redbox machine, I paused in the fire lane at Stop & Shop for like 30 seconds and got a parking ticket. So I'm not sure that it was worth $40. But there you go.
14. American Hustle, Redbox. Excellent. Christian Bale is my favorite part. He's just flawless. Bradley Cooper is great, too. Really, there's nothing to complain about at all. They're all excellent, and the movie is a fun scam. I love capers, and this is a pretty complex and yet bumbling caper. Highly recommended.
15. Odd Thomas, Redbox. MUCH better than it had any right to be. Really enjoyed this. I'd read the first handful of books, and had no idea there was a movie. And it was good! The basic plot is the main character, Odd (played by Chekov from the Trek reboot, but minus the heavy Russkie accent), can see dead people. And they try to tell him things. And he tries to fix things for them. Very quirky, interesting cast, funny, but also filled with violence and horror. Pretty much captures the book's tone.
16. The Departed, Cable. I've seen this several times already, but this version had pop-up factoids about the movie, which added a bit of interestingness. It's perhaps my favorite Boston movie. A few terrible accents (Sheen, Nicholson), but everyone's performance is just so good and the plot is great and it's all just great. Major props to Leo here. He's just so good. Did I mention that it's good? Because it is.
17. The Counselor, Redbox. Interesting. Not sure if I liked it. Very appealingly filmed, gorgeously rich sets/scenes, Ridley Scott directs, Fassbinder and Javier Bardem star, Cormac McCarthy wrote it. Should be good, right? And a lot of it was interesting, but some of it was trying way too hard (like basically all of the dialog). A lot of obsession with sex across all the characters that seems unlikely, considering how much they all get. There is a delightful pair of cheetahs in the movie that I worried about from the first second I saw them on screen. I hate that. But Brad Pitt dies in a spectacularly foreshadowed way, so that part was fun. And since there's no one to like at all in the whole movie, except possibly Penelope Cruz, it's pretty satisfying to see what happenes to everyone, except possibly Penelope Cruz.
18. Dallas Buyers Club, Redbox. Powerful. Great performances, fascinating story, relentlessly sad. Watching that time in so-recent history, where people were just dropping like flies and no one had any answers, was very sad.
19. Extract, Netflix DVD. So I decided to cancel the DVD side of my Netflix, and I returned the movie I've had out for months (dumb) and forgot to actually stop the DVDs coming. Somehow this was at the top of my DVD queue. So I watched it, since it's Mike Judge. But perhaps I have aged out of the Mike Judge audience? Because it's a comedy, and I didn't laugh much. And I'm a Jason Bateman fan! There were a few funny bits at the end. I liked Judge's cameo (totally knew it was him because of the voice). The neighbor was amusing. But overall I gotta give it a meh. It's certainly no Office Space. And Ben Affleck was really meh.
20. Non-Stop, Theater. "Taken" on a plane. Except the entire time Liam Neeson plays an antihero instead of a hero. But it's a decent little thriller, if forgettable. Lots of red herrings, but ultimately the whodunnit and why part is completely unimportant.
