Picoreview: Winter Soldier

Picoreview: Captain America: Winter Soldier: I’m not going to go into any detail because this doesn’t open in America until next week, but I was pretty happy with it. There were plenty of outright funny/clever moments, more violence than I expected (I know, it’s about a soldier, but it’s the whole PG-13 drift toward greater violence. I guess I still don’t expect it.), there was at least one good heartbreak moment, and I want my Falcon movie like five minutes ago. What I will say is dear god, Chris Evans’s…

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catching up

1. Chapter seven of MAGIC & MANNERS is live for Patreon patrons! 2. It is *painfully* obvious that the whole weekly post for the GGK Book Club is not working for me as the, er, team leader. I’m terribly sorry, but I just do not, apparently, have the spoons to do a weekly post. From TIGANA (which is April’s book) onward I’m going to do a monthly post immediately after I finish reading the books, which will probably have no rhyme or reason to it as far as dates are…

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Picoreview: A New York Winter’s Tale

Picoreview: A New York Winter’s Tale: That was really pretty awful. Ted had read me a bit of a review which had pretty well panned the film, saying, among other things, that there was too much magic. We went “wtf, it’s a fairy tale, how can there be too much magic?” There was too much magic. I can see where it might have worked in the book (which I may now have to read, just out of curiosity), but on screen it was just Too Much. Too twee, too corny,…

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Picoreview: Shadow Recruit

Picoreview: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit: muuuuuch better than I expected. I mean, it’s a popcorn movie, don’t get me wrong, but I like popcorn movies and this one served up nicely. It turns out I rather like Chris Pine, maybe especially when he’s not being lit by lens flares along his razored cheekbones (I already knew I liked his voice better when I couldn’t see him, thanks to his voicing Jack Frost in Guardians of Easter or whatever that movie was :)), and he was more approachable and endearing as…

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Picoreview: American Hustle

Picoreview: American Hustle: better than I expected, even given all its glowing reviews. Much of that is because I was expecting to hate all the characters but instead found myself enjoying them all to a fair degree. Brad Cooper plays an FBI agent who’s not as smart as he thinks he is; an almost unrecognizeable Christian Bale plays a con artist who *is* as smart–at least about cons—as he thinks he is. I was basically expecting everybody to be about as sympathetic as the characters in August: Osage County, but…

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