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Warm Bodies

No movie has any right to be this cute. Seriously.

Also, I know there are only something like five people left in the US that haven’t seen this movie. Mike and I were numbers six and seven. And it sure took our majorly disappointing day and made things feel all good again. R and M are both utterly adorable zombies, and that’s a phrase I never actually thought I would type.

There are zombies, and some brain eating, but it’s really all an occasionally clumsy (but cute) metaphor for feeling, no matter how painful, being better than not feeling. And let’s be honest, we know how the movie will end as soon as it begins, and it really doesn’t matter. The point is that R is adorable and his journey is adorable and okay the skeletal guys are kind of gross but in the end the good guys and zombies win. And I actually did like to see zombies get to have a bit of personality and change. R goes through some fun character development that shows even in how he moves.

Definitely worth seeing.

Also, I feel like I should probably get a nerd demerit for not noticing R and Julie until there was a freaking balcony scene. Forgive me, geeks, for I have sinned. I’ll do ten St. Crispin’s day speeches and recite the what’s in a name verse backwards.

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A Good Day to Die Hard

How could I be this excited about a new Die Hard movie when I didn’t actually bother to see the last one? I’m not sure. But this actually motivates me to want to see Live Free or Die Hard if I can catch it on Netflix or something. So it’s been about eight years since my last McClane infusion; maybe I just needed more.

Anyway, this move was pretty much everything you could expect from a Die Hard movie. Bruce Willis kills a lot of badguys, bleeds all over, says snappy, cynical shit, and is generally a badass. Oh yeah, and a badguy gets thrown off a building because that’s basically a requirement. And the plot is definitely more over the top and ridiculous than the third movie, so there’s that. Russians! Cold War jokes! WMDs and nukes!

The angle I was actually kind of worried about when I saw the trailer was the father/son thing. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pretty much killed that entire trope for me. I wish I could blame it entirely on Shia LaBeouf, but it was probably just an issue of script and too much ridiculous CGI and he was just kind of the cherry on that turd sundae.

Jai Courtney was just fine as McClane’s son. They have a good dynamic, there’s sufficient character development for an action movie, and ultimately I’m just a sucker for father/son bonding that involves assault weapons I guess. I kept looking at Jai Courtney the entire time and trying to figure out where the hell I’d seen him before. A trip to IMDB said – nowhere, actually. I haven’t seen thing one that he’s been in, other than this movie. I think part of my brain was trying to connect him with Liam Hemsworth because they, they’re both white action star kind of guys and have pretty similar jawlines particularly when fuzzed with manly stubble.

If you want to see Bruce Willis and a miscellaneous young action hero blow up stuff and shoot things, it’s a fun movie. Much snappy dialog is exchanged and muscular men break a lot of windows with their bodies.

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Uncategorized

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

This will come as a surprise to no one at this point I’m sure, but Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is a terrible movie. And please note the use of the word terrible as opposed to bad. To a certain extent that I should probably be ashamed to admit, I rather love bad movies. Because bad moves that are gleeful and scenery-chewing in their badness (e.g.: The Man With the Iron Fists and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) are actually very fun.

But no. This movie is terrible in the way Avatar: the Last Airbender was terrible. It is so devoid of joy and life that it actually begins to suck the life from the audience, like some sort of evil, cinematic vampire. The only thing that made Hansel and Gretel at all better than A:tLA was that I didn’t have to listen to my husband’s running list of complaints regarding the poor quality of Katara’s tai chi in this movie. On the other hand, A:tLA also had the (un)intentional hilarity of Aasif Mandvi to enjoy for his brief moments of smirking. No one in Hansel and Gretel was half that lively.

I received a text message in the middle of the movie (don’t worry, my phone was on vibrate) and I got up and left to check it, hoping for good news. All said and done, I probably missed a good 5-7 minutes of the movie and I could not have cared less.

I think it could have been a fun movie if there had been a nod and wink to the audience like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter had given us in abundance. Instead, Hansel and Gretel couldn’t seem to decide what it wanted to be. It was overly serious about a concept that should have been darkly hilarious, needlessly gory, and with anachronism that made the entire thing feel off balance rather than whimsical. I feel like they really tried to get their R-rating, set out for it, and there is absolutely no purpose behind it. I like the word fuck as much as the next person, but frankly there was no point to its addition to the dialog beyond a badly aimed attempt at edginess that the movie did not warrant and should not have needed.

The one and only thing I liked about this movie was Gemma Arterton as Gretel. Not because I was in the least bit convinced by her performance or interested in her character, but because for once there was a woman in an action-y movie that got to be badass without being made simultaneously into a sex-kitten. She never has a love interest. She never gets subjected to sexual assault or humiliated based on her gender. I really liked that. 

But on the other hand, the woodcut-like illustration of the opening titles made me deeply uncomfortable at the beginning, which I think killed any cheap enjoyment I might have garnered from the overly fake gore. Frankly, all I could think of from the beginning was the Burning Times. This is not a mental association that’s a recipe for fun, no matter how deliberately anachronistic the setting becomes later; I started the movie feeling creeped out and the feeling never went away. (I realize this is not a reaction the vast majority of people will have, and I can’t say why it bothered me as much as it did; I certainly didn’t go in expecting to feel that way. But it may explain why I personally just could not find anything even remotely cute in this move.)

I wouldn’t even waste my time netflixing this one unless you’re desperate for some Jeremy Renner and can’t find The Bourne Legacy anywhere.

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movie

Life of Pi

Finally, finally I got to see this movie. I promised myself that I would after I finished writing the introduction to my thesis, but then there was the apartment hunting trip and shitting myself over getting my novella written and whoops Christmas, so it didn’t happen until now.

Worth the wait. And despite the fact that it was released back in November, the theater was still pretty crowded for a noon show.

(Some spoilers.)

Life of Pi is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. Every shot of it was its own paradise, gorgeous and full of color. And the tiger. Holy shit the tiger. CGI has come a long, long way.

Beyond how visually arresting I found the film, there is a lot to love. Suraj Sharma is just fantastic as Pi. And have I mentioned the tiger? Beyond how believable the Richard Parker was, what I loved was that he never stopped being an animal, and a wild animal at that. Pi and Richard Parker achieve an understanding of sorts, but there’s always that gap of understanding between animal and man. The tiger never stops being a wild animal, even at the end when it walks away from Pi and into the jungle without a backward glance.

That was the part of the movie that made me tear up, when the tiger simply walks away and Pi still desperately asserts that he saw the animal’s soul and it wasn’t just his own feelings reflected back at him. So much of the movie is about the gap of understanding between humans, animals, and nature in general.

And then there is the alternate story that Pi offers as to what happened, opening the possibility that the tiger is an aspect of Pi himself. I like unreliable narrator stories when they’re done well, and this one definitely was. In the end, you get to decide for yourself, which story is true. For my part, I think that both are.

In the movie, they say the story will make you believe in God. I knew about that going in and was a bit curious about it, since… well, not a believer, myself. I wondered if it would be preachy, perhaps. It wasn’t; you’d hardly expect a Catholic Hindu Muslim to be grinding an ax for one religion anyway. But beyond that, to me it wasn’t a story about religion or even belief; it was about trying to understand the unknowable, like the tiger, looking into its eyes and never being quite certain if it’s just a reflection or a reality you can’t quite touch.

Some might call that religion. I would just call it life.

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movie

Django Unchained

I can’t think of the last time I saw a move with this much controversy around it, which ranges from Spike Lee’s criticism of the movie making light of the horrors of slavery to conservatives predictably freaking the fuck out about the bit in the movie (and Jamie Foxx later joking about it) where Django points out that getting paid to kill white people sounds like an awesome way to make a living because ow my precious persecution complex. Oh, and people complaining about the use of the N-word in a movie set shortly before the civil war and involving slavery, when obviously no one ever talked like that back then. Though I find Amanda Marcotte’s take on how damn meta the film is very interesting indeed, which goes right along with a lot of what Inglorious Basterds had to say.

But anyway. At this point, the discussion about Django and its meaning beyond a movie is fascinating and way, way beyond me. I don’t feel like I have anything useful I could contribute as an average white female nerd who loves action-y movies, but I sure want to keep reading what other people who have different viewpoints from me have to say.

Now, beyond the socio-political tangle of Django, how is it as a movie?
Well, I loved Inglorious Basterds to an almost ridiculous degree. It was the first Blu-ray I ever bought, before I even grabbed a copy of Thor to replace my regular DVD. I think it’s safe to say that if you loved Inglorious Basterds, you will love Django as well. It’s got a lot of the same things going for it – underdog revenge fantasy where a shitload of people get messily killed and you feel pretty good about cheering for each and every bit of cartoonish blood spatter because damn, those are some awful people getting shot and shot and shot.
Jamie Foxx turns in an incredible performance as the title character. He just radiates indescribable amounts of badass in every second he’s on the screen. Christoph Waltz does an excellent job of being just bent enough that you can almost forget at times that Dr. King Schultz is marvelously insane until he really starts talking. And Leonardo DiCaprio, my god. I don’t even know where to begin. He was so utterly disturbing. Though of course, he couldn’t have managed the depths of gross he reached without Samuel L. Jackson as the head house slave. Their relationship was one of the most messed-up things in an entire movie full of utterly messed-up things. But any time a film hits the really awful relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed when it’s more subtle than a man being torn apart by dogs, it should make you just squirm.
The movie is beautifully shot – some of the locations up in Wyoming are just stunning – but I wouldn’t expect any less from Quentin Tarantino. It’s got that same mixture of discomfort and mayhem and humor that you’d expect as well. And unlike other movies of his (Kill Bill springs instantly to mind) this one doesn’t ever drag or feel as long as its nearly three hour time, in my opinion. Your mileage may vary.
But I’ll say this – it’s worth the price of admission alone for the scene with the proto-Klan bickering about their newly-made masks.
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movie

Les Miserables

Goddamnit, Anne Hathaway. Must you punch me in the heart and make me cry in every one of your scenes?

This movie has some amazing things going for it. Namely, Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman. They really make the movie with beautiful singing and intense emotion. I’ve seen Les Mis on stage before, and Fantine never made me cry like Anne Hathaway did. Her rendition of I Dreamed a Dream was the angriest I’ve ever heard, and she convinced me. (And honestly, it makes sense for Fantine to be angry as well as despairing, because this wasn’t how her life was supposed to be.) And I know a lot of people were side-eyeing the Hugh Jackman thing, apparently unaware of the fact that the man was in musicals on stage for years and even won a Tony. But it shows in this movie, it really does. Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen do a pretty good turn as the scumbag Thenardiers as well, though HBC really just kind of felt like Mrs. Lovett revisited with a bit less cannibalism.

The rest of the movie, I had more reservations about. Russell Crowe does a technically competent job of singing, but he doesn’t seem to emote very well when he does it. Which is too bad, since Javert is a character that takes a lot of conviction in song. There was only one instance in the movie (near the beginning when he fights with Jean Valjean in the hospital) that I really felt anything out of him, and the rest was… pretty flat.

I also honestly did not like the way the movie was shot. I know one of the great things about movies versus stage is that it lets us get right up there with the characters and see into their eyes. Which is great. But it would have been nice if the director had given the characters some goddamn space once in a while. I felt like 90% of the movie was closeups, and it started getting both claustrophobic and annoying after a while. Half the time I completely lost sense of place with the characters because you couldn’t see anything but their face and a colorful blur for the background. I’m sure there were some nice sets and costumes in the movie, but I feel like I didn’t see a hell of a lot of them. The face is important for expression, yes, but how about some arms? Some legs? For all I know, Hugh Jackman was wearing running shorts in half his scenes because we never see him below the shoulders.

Honestly, I prefer the stage production.

Is the movie worth seeing? I’d say yes. Anne Hathaway will ruin Les Mis for every other Fontine. Hugh Jackman is excellent. (You get well acquainted with the inside of his mouth considering the amount of time the camera spends staring down it, but hey, he’s got nice teeth.) Is it worth showing to someone that’s musical phobic that you’d never be able to drag to a stage production? Definitely.

But will the movie make you like Les Mis if you didn’t before? Unless your problem was that Fontine didn’t reach out from the stage and punch you directly in the emotions and you wanted a more intimate relationship with Jean Valjean’s tonsils, probably not. Story and music-wise, it’s just like the stage version. To quote my best friend’s dad: “They sang and they died and they died and they sang and they sang and they sang and they died and they sang.”

Basically that. But it does make a lovely bit of Oscar bait. If Anne Hathaway doesn’t get a nomination out of this, I am going down to the award ceremony and flipping the entire goddamn stage.

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liveblog movie

Liveblog of Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

So apparently this is a thing. Which I have been lucky enough to find on British television at 0200, and how can you say no to cannibal Santa Claus?

We join our show, already in progress. Any mistakes in detail, please forgive because it’s early in the morning and the movie is subtitled in English with dialog in Finnish.

Prior to this, an ugly American archaeologist on top of a mountain found something in a bit of ice and made a stirring speech to an incredibly unimpressed excavation crew in yellow hard hats as two little kids look on. Shortly after one of them, a little boy, looks the most awesome Christmas book ever which involves line drawings of Santa sitting on a pile of skulls.

The little boy is worried and runs around in an ugly red sweater and a pair of navy blue underpants and has an odd conversation with his father, who is butchering a pig as they speak. It’s quite surreal.

And now… go!

0215 There are a lot of very lovely shots of snowmobiles traveling serenely over a snowy landscape back and forth between Cannibal Santa Mountain.

0215 Herd of dead reindeer. Man with ear flap hat and large beard #1: Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas indeed, sir.

0216 Apparently this is the work of Russian wolves, who are badass motherfuckers. Hungry badass motherfuckers, since it’s 433 dead reindeer.

0218 Underwear boy pokes up one of the corpses with a stick to reveal a humanoid footprint. He’s already seen pictures of cannibal Santa walking barefoot through the snow. “He must have been hungry.” YEAH NO SHIT KID. How he is not shitting himself in terror already I do not know.

0222 “The real Santa was different. The Coca-Cola Santa is just a hoax.” That’s kind of beautiful. And accompanied by a picture of evil Santa putting a screaming child into a cauldron.

0223 This kid is an amazing researcher. He has the whole 411 on how evil Santa ended up buried in a giant hill.

0224 Ugly sweater kid is also, I will note, constantly walking around with a hunting rifle longer than he is tall slung across his back. And is now wearing hockey pads. His dad is manly enough to wear a pink floral apron and bake his son cookies. They’re kind of an awesome little family.

0226 For the record, Ugly sweater kid’s name is Pietari. I will probably just call him Ugly Sweater Kid, or USK for short.

0229 The logos for the excavation site look like Christmas wreaths. I find this incredibly amusing. And of course, the crew is American. And a man with thick calves in tights kills them all, sending their hardhats scattering.

0232 USK and his dad have matching guns. I am very amused that USK runs around with this rifle (actually I think it’s a pump-action shotgun? But I fail at guns) and under one arm he has a stuffed animal. Anyway, there was a pig head hanging out as bait and now it’s going. USK and his dad go to investigate, and the dad sees a bloody human hand, then immediately pulls the, “It’s nothing, but you can’t see it.” This never works.

0234 USK’s stuffed animal is named Vuppe by the way.

0235 This movie is giving me a very strange impression of the Finnish. Mostly that they are very stern and shout a lot.

0235 USK’s dad helps another man drag a corpse in a tarp into the slaughterhouse. The other man is dressed like Santa. Maybe this is a Finnish thing too. But apparently he’s not evil cannibal Santa, he’s just someone that accidentally killed a drifter on his property in a wolf pit. This is a horror movie, guys. Never kill the drifter.

0236 Oh, apparently the guy dressed as Santa is playing the part for Christmas. Merry Christmas, USK’s dad – you get a corpse in a tarp.

0237 They’re going to butcher the vagrant, but he’s still breathing. Oooh, I bet that’s cannibal Santa. He can smell USK, who is hanging around outside. And this is not the sort of thing you want your kid to see holy shit what is wrong with these guys.

0239 This movie is making me want to go vegetarian if I ever end up in Finland, you realize. (I kid, I kid.)

0239 So far all the car chases have been very low speed because everything is covered in snow. I find this amusing.

0241 The town has been plagued by a mysterious series of radiator thefts.

0242 USK’s friend seems to have been replaced by some kind of super creepy blackened and shriveled up doll thing. USK greets this with a complete lack of surprise and concern. Maybe this is something that happens often.

0245 Protip: don’t lean in close to the mysterious, stinky, creepy drifter when he’s whispering something. No matter what happens next, you will not like it.

0246 “There’s something weird about him [creepy cannibal Santa].” “He’s a foreigner.” HAH.

0247 USK tries to call all of his friends on the phone and they are all missing. He is still remarkably calm about this.

0248 USK then draws the perfectly logical conclusion that his dad needs to spank him immediately, so that he will be absolved of naughtiness and, I assume, safe from the evil cannibal that just ate all his friends. He’s upset enough now that he’s shed a few tears.

0249 Uh oh, USK goes into the slaughterhouse and evil Santa reacts sort of like a cat hearing a can of tuna being opened. Well, but in slow motion.

2051 They tie up evil cannibal Santa and hang him from the ceiling. He swings slowly back and forth, chains creaking in the most eerie fashion possible, and they just sit there and stare at him, passing a plate of cookies around. What is this even.

0255 So apparently they are going to take evil cannibal Santa back to the excavation site to try to get money for him. Because the Americans want him back for a mysterious reason.

0256 The evil American that wants Santa is tiny and totally looks like Ebenezer Scrooge. If Ebenezer Scrooge had a helicopter. And a fake quasi-American accent.

0257 The cannibal Santa excavation company is named Subzero Inc. FINISH HIM.

0258 They put cannibal Santa in a cage. And for some reason dressed him in the Santa robes.

0259 And then they let USK wander off on his own. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

0259 Uh oh. Apparently the weird drifter guy is actually one of Santa’s elves. The real Santa is still out there. And, “He’s going to find out who’s naughty or nice.”

0300 Santa has an entire army of weird drifters with pickaxes. One of them killes Ebenezer Scrooge. The Finnish men smartly run away and find USK somehow.

0301 Oh there are all the radiators, and even a bunch of stoves. They’re defrosting real Santa, who is still in a block of ice. Aha, and there are all the kids, in burlap bags in front of the ice block.

0302 I am impressed by the ability of these sturdy Finnish men to pick up Stoves which were a second ago shimmering with heat and carry them over to barricade the door.

0302 It’s okay, everyone! USK HAS A PLAN!

0303 “It’s either me or Santa. I suggest Santa.” And then he yanks down a tarp, revealing boxes of explosives. USK you are a badass little motherfucker.

0304 Hahaha they distract the weird drifter elves with cookies!

0305 Suddenly one of the men can pilot a helicopter. They pile all the kids in a net and airlift them. Hilariously, most of the kids are still in the burlap bags, kicking and crying with their faces covered.

0306 USK is just hanging off the side of the net dangling under the helicopter like a little badass.

0309 I’m starting to feel like USK is going to grow up to be Bruce Willis. But Finnish.

0310 He stands bravely in the face of a charging horde of pale, bearded, naked elves. Lookit him go.

0311 The men blow up the hangar (and cannibal Santa) as they drive away. “And happy fucking New Year.” Someone should be putting their sunglasses on as they do so.

0314 So what do they do with the horde of scary bearded men? Wash them off and teach them to be Santas! Then put them in wooden crates as Rare Exports and ship them all across the globe. And now you know where your mall Santas came from.

…well. That sure was a thing. It had some humorous bits to it, but was mostly so understated I couldn’t get into it the way I could with other funny “horror” movies like Dead Snow. Though this was more of a dark action than a horror as well.

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movie

Catching up on movies or: My swanky trans-Atlantic flight

This was one of the most relaxing trans-Atlantic flights I’ve ever been on. The Lufthansa flight to Berlin may still beat it, but that’s mostly because the stewardesses gave me a beer every time the drinks cart went by on that one, so I was feeling pretty good the whole time. This flight on BA, Mike and I were randomly upgraded to the Economy Plus class. We’re guessing it’s because the economy cabin was oversold (it sure looked packed) so we gut bumped up a class.
In my current impoverished state of grad student-ness, I don’t think I could convince myself to cough up an extra $200 on a $1200 flight to get a seat that’s a tiny bit wider and a significant whack of leg room. Once I’m working a real person job, though, I’m thinking a hell to the yeah. I have an outlet. For my laptop. And a foot rest. And a giant TV screen for movies. You’d be amazed how these little comforts add up on a 9 hour flight (or maybe you wouldn’t).
Speaking of movies. These long flights are normally my chance to catch up on movies I wanted to see but didn’t have the time for (often the case this year) or movies that I thought looked amusing but would be damned if I’d pay full price for.
Premium Rush– This was a fun little movie with bike messengers as the heroes trying to keep a delivery from a crooked, malevolent, yet wonderfully inept cop. The movie is not nearly so serious as the preview would have liked you to believe, which I think is for the best. It was just fun and I enjoyed it from the perspective of a cyclist who would never in a million years be that insane. Though I do appreciate that through it all the main characters were wearing their helmets – thanks guys. Also, Joseph Gordon-Levitt has the most adorable little evil giggle, which he uses every time he skunks either the crooked cop or the world’s most unlucky bike cop, and it’s impossible to not giggle along with him. I think my older brother would appreciate the fact that the main character (who is apparently the best bike messenger ever or something) rides a steel-frame single speed. Though he doesn’t have brakes on his, which is a sure sign of insanity if the mischievous giggle didn’t tip you off already. The music for the movie was excellent by the way – it begins and ends with Baba O’Reiley, and I feel like it earns that honor.
Lawless– I have some very uncertain feelings about this one. It was either good, or boring as shit, five minutes at a time. I loved Tom Hardy (Forest) in all his understated, casual menace, and his way of liking the Woman With a Past without ever changing his facial expression or tone; it was all body language and looks. Not so sure about Shia LeBouf, but he did a better job in this than in any other movie he’s ever been in I’ve seen, which if I’m to be honest is not saying a whole lot. I swear I tried to go into this with an open mind, but there was nothing about his performance that convinced me, let alone grabbed me. The special agent from Chicago was appropriately creepy, and the Woman With a Past was a perfect match for Forest, where it was a love affair all in looks. Now, I did appreciate the way violence was handled. Someone got punched hard, they went down, and they bled. Someone got nailed in the side of the head with a shovel? Down and stayed down. Not the usual thing that you see in more action oriented movies. I liked about half the movie in those five minute chunks, the other half I wrote things like this during because it just didn’t have my attention. A lot of those five minutes were the ones where Shia LeBouf was romancing his girl.
Snow White and the Huntsman– I actually had wanted to see this when it came out, but I was just too busy because grad school blah blah whine whine my life is so hard. Anyway, I ended up liking this far, far more than I thought I would. I’m still not entirely convinced by Kristen Stewart as an actress, but there was a fairly minimal number of times where she appeared visibly incoherent and she had some very good scenes. The movie was also just so goddamn pretty. I knew it would be pretty, but I didn’t expect it to be that visually arresting. Charlize Theron just stole the entire show, though. I love Chris Hemsworth, but it was her I ended up watching the movie for. (Poor Chris Hemsworth, getting his thunder [hahaha] stolen by the villain again.) Every moment she was on screen she just had me by the throat, she was so angry and menacing even when she appeared entirely calm. Charlize Theron’s speech about men using women right before she kills the king? She turned it up to eleven there and kept going for the entire movie. I think what amazed me the most about the character – and Theron’s performance, since she sold it mightily – was that there was so much raw pain still in her, a ragged internal wound that she has obviously kept carefully open and bleeding, yet you never had any doubt for one second that this woman was evil. If I were less of a pathetic Tom Hiddleston fangirl, Loki might have some serious competition for my favorite villain ever.
[Obligatory Loki fangirling shut up I know I have a problem.]
Speaking of Loki, I think the reason I like both him and Ravenna so much as characters is because they each have such a clear internal framework of pain and perceived wrong-doing on the part of the world at large that their villainy makes sense. They’re not being evil because nyahahaha evil is fun, they’re evil because they believebone deep that they have been wronged at the world deserveswhatever it is they do. And because they are both played by such good actors, for a few seconds at a time they can even convince you to feel that raw internal wound even as you’re appalled by what they then use it to justify. From the outside moral perspective there is no justification for their horrible acts, but it gives them a very human emotional core that makes them wonderfully complex as characters and so much more than boring one-note villains.
Really, I think Ravenna is where Loki will soon mentally end up once he’s finished completely divorcing himself from reality as we know it. He’s almost there, except for those few flashes of hesitation we so in The Avengers. Which does give me hope that he could still find redemption, which was plainly impossible for Ravenna since she was invested in her own narrative twenty life-times worth.
I think I just blew my own fangirl mind.
[/Obligatory Loki fangirling]
Favorite movie for the flight was definitely Snow White and the Huntsman. If the movie list doesn’t change on the way back, I’m thinking I’ll catch Ruby Sparks (I was super disappointed to miss that one in theaters) and then two out of the three of Men in Black III, The Campaign, and The Watch. If I’m not entirely done with comedies by that point.
Mike, I will note, watched Battleship, and then Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. He actually liked the former better, which shocked me. Though it sounds like it wasn’t gleefully bad in the same way. I don’t think I’m curious enough to make myself watch it though.
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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I wish I could say I came out of this movie with my concerns about the book being split into a trilogy assuaged. I really do.

I’m afraid not.

I’m left wondering why this needed to be a trilogy of nearly three hour movies, and not, say, a two parter. It definitely needed to be longer than a single movie, but right now it feels really stretched out, sometimes palpably dragging. I wasn’t one of the people who thought The Fellowship of the Ring dragged when it came out, but this one had me wondering just how many wooden bridges I really needed to see a pack (a hoard? a buffet?) of dwarves run across. I also wondered why the hell we needed two prologues, one of which (regarding Thorin) would have been better served by being described during the story I think.

There was a lot about the movie that I loved, though. I though Martin Freeman was great as Bilbo. I almost died of squee during the riddles in the dark sequence. While I still have no idea what half the dwarves are named, at least some of them (other than Brooding Dwarf — I mean Thorin) really stand out and have very distinctive personalities so I could keep track of them. And shockingly I was very glad to see some of the additional scenes, such as the conversation between Saruman, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel. That was very cool, and I enjoyed seeing more character development and the foreshadowing of things to come. (Also, anyone else find themselves wondering what might be between Gandalf and Galadriel?)

One small but important thing I’m very excited about is that two of the songs from the book made it in at least. I wish there could have been more of the singing, once they got away from the hobbit hole. Songs are such a major part of the book.

Visually, it was just as pretty as the original (if that’s even the right term) trilogy. I just saw it in normal 24 fps with no 3D, and I thought that was plenty. I don’t do 3D anyway since it gives me headaches, and I’m not sure if a super sharp picture would have helped anything.

I laughed, I enjoyed most of the fight scenes (until they got a little too stretched out), and I’ll be happy to see the next part. I’m looking forward to hearing Benedict Cumberbatch be an evil dragon. I do hope it’s more dragon-y and a less draggy.

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movie

Why haven’t you seen Wreck-It Ralph yet?

If you’re one of the two people in the entire continental United States that hasn’t seen Wreck-It Ralph yet, you really, really should.

It’s definitely the best Disney movie I’ve seen in years. It’s cute, it’s funny, and it’s got a lot of heart, but not in the oh god it’s the after-school-special kind of way. You can tell the angle of approach from the bad guy affirmation of Bad-Anon: I am bad, and that’s good. I’ll never be good, and that’s not bad. There’s no one I’d rather be than me. But I really liked the approach taken; within the world of video games, bad guys are obviously a vital part of the ecosystem, and part of the movie is about the good guys learning that.

I’ve seen it twice already and definitely wouldn’t mind seeing it again. (Only there’s currently a brazillion movies out right now I want to see, holy shit November what’s up with you.) But if you’re a gamer nerd like me, the more times you see it, the more fun video game stuff you can pick out. (There’s a list of video game character cameos over at the Disney Wiki.)

You don’t have to be a big video game nerd to like it. Sure, those of us who have been playing since Atari will get a lot of the cameos and have some good laughs (OMG AERITH LIVES), but the main story takes place in two made-up games (Hero’s Duty and Sugar Rush) and you don’t even really have to be that familiar with first person shooters or racing games to get what’s going on. It’s all very evident from the story. (The script writers, by the way, deserve a hearty handshake.)

I loved all the main characters. Calhoun (voiced by Jane Lynch) is definitely my favorite, though. She has the most tragic back story ever! (I’m thinking this might seem extra hilarious if you have a few RPGs under your belt.) Also Felix sounded so very, very familiar – I had to remind myself later that Jack McBrayer is Kenneth in 30 Rock and yes, Felix sounds just like that, to hilarious effect. Also, Alan Tudyk voices King Candy, which I didn’t even realize until I got to the credits and was like wait a second, that’s Wash?

As a note for people with kids, the movie has a PG rating, and I think it’s mostly inoffensive stuff, cartoonish violence and the like. However, the bit of the movie in Hero’s Duty could be scary for little kids, since it’s got the space-marine-bug-invasion-first-person-shooter thing going on, and at the very end the bad guy looks seriously creepy to the point that my first thought was how much he would probably scare the pants off my niece. So just be aware of that.

There’s also an animated short before the movie called Paperman. It’s probably the cutest short I’ve seen in a while, and it’s about paper airplanes and love.

Nicely done, Disney.