Picoreview: La La Land

Picoreview: La La Land: either too much reality or too much fantasy, but either way, a total failure to succeed. La La Land is billed as “the kind of movie Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.” This is not accurate. This is the kind of movie Hollywood never made. It is not a slick, charming Hollywood movie musical. Neither is it a Hollywood style dreams-meet-reality drama. It attempts to be both, and succeeds at neither. I’m not much of a Ryan Gosling fan. I understand he’s apparently an extremely nice person, which…

Continue Reading

Picoreview: Fantastic Beasts

Picoreview: Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them: really not very good. It started out slowly and took far too long to end. There were tedious bits in between occasionally interrupted by charm, but the charm was rarely presented by Eddie Redmayne’s Newt, who, as the lead, literally had a line about how people didn’t really like him very much. But that was okay, because Katherine Waterson, as the other lead, was also almost entirely unlikeable. (Wait…) To make it worse, though, the second leads, *particularly* Alison Sudol (playing Waterson’s…

Continue Reading

Picoreview: Ghostbusters

Picoreview: Ghostbusters: Honestly I thought it was pretty bad. By about 2/3rds of the way through I was wishing I’d gone to see Jason Bourne. I mean, there were a few laughs and stuff, but I wasn’t enthralled by Holtzmann, which, after the buildup I expected to be, and just…yeah. I mean, it was okay, but mostly meh. Then the whole climactic battle came and I felt it finally all pulled together into something I wanted to watch. More comments behind the cut but it’s I feel it very important…

Continue Reading

ST:TOS: Man Trap & Charlie X

At the beginning of July all the Star Trek episodes became available on Netflix. I let out a squee heard ’round the world (it was, too, thanks to Twitter), because I’ve been wanting to watch it with Indy; I was a little younger than he was when I watched pretty well the entire original series (the, er, only series, at that point), and I think it’s a pretty great age to be introduced to Trek. The non-Kirk pilot is not included, and the episodes are presented by air date rather…

Continue Reading

Picoreview: The Legend of Tarzan

Picoreview: The Legend of Tarzan: Unexpectedly good! Now, I grant you that it’s possible my expectations going in were *so low* that anything that didn’t make me hide behind my hands and moan with the horror of it all was going to be unexpectedly good, but honestly, I really enjoyed it. I would watch more of those, and not just because Alexander Skarsgård spends a gratifyingly large percentage of the film with his shirt off (although sweet mistress of the moon, that doesn’t hurt. he’s really beautiful in this movie.).…

Continue Reading