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…
Tag: picoreviews
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,…
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…
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…
Picoreview: August: Osage County
Picoreview: August: Osage County is a story about a wildly dysfunctional family, with an absolutely dreadful matriarch played by Meryl Streep and–primarily, although really not at all singularly–her personal war with her oldest daughter, played by Julia Roberts. The real skill of the performances is that although many of the characters are just awful people, they’re all *understandable*. At moments they’re all even sympathetic, which, given how dreadful most of them are, is pretty impressive. There are possibly no mis-steps with the casting (I don’t personally like Dermot Mulroney or…