Picoreview: Tomorrowland: boring. I really wanted to like it, as it had a message I certainly support, and there were a lot of good *pieces*, but overall it failed to click. It did not help that the opening seven or eight hours twenty minutes felt like somebody higher up at Disney had said “The audience is never going to understand this if you don’t explain it to them” and forced the director to put George Clooney on the screen talking directly to the camera, and then when that was a…
Tag: movie mondays
Picoreview: Woman in Gold
Picoreview: Woman in Gold: well worth watching. Woman in Gold is based on the true story of an Austrian Jew whose family artwork was stolen by the Nazi occupation, and her international legal battle, sixty years later, to get it back. Helen Mirren plays Maria Altmann and Ryan Reynolds plays her lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, who comes from a long line of highly distinguished Schoenbergs and who has thus far totally failed to make his mark. And good god, Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black plays the younger Altmann. That woman is…
Picoreview: The DUFF
Picoreview: The DUFF: conflicting. The DUFF is sort of this weird mashup of a high school makeover movie and, like, Juno, or something. DUFF stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, which the main character, played by Mae Whitman (who, at age 26, is a moderately convincing 18 year old), discovers she is one of. Except it appears the only person in her school who actually knows the term is the one who first uses it to describe her, the boy-next-door/jerkface/love interest, played by Robbie Amell (who, at 26, is not…
Picoreview: A Little Chaos
Picoreview: A Little Chaos: Entirely fictional, but charming. I mean, entirely fictional: Kate Winslet’s character is an invention, no one like her existed at all, and…I wish they wouldn’t do that. It’s like Disney’s Pocahontas: why drop a couple of historical names on top of characters who live lives completely unlike the real story? The answer, obviously, is because people recognise names like Pocahontas and Versailles and King Louis, which establishes the story, but…look, Belle was not an entirely accurate telling of Dido Elizabeth Belle, but it gets her story…
Picoreview: Fast & Furious 7
Picoreview: Fast & Furious 7: broke my heart. I knew it was going to; the goddamn trailers were making me tear up even as I recognized that they were specifically choreographed to. I had no attachment at all to Paul Walker–I think the only thing I’ve seen him in is the F&F movies–but I was shocked by his death because, well. It was shocking. And so messed up, that he’s best known for these fast car movies and then died in a horrific car wreck. So FF7 was always going…