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…
Category: Movies
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…
Picoreview: Frozen
Picoreview: Frozen: conflicting. There are a lot of things I didn’t like about this movie. The music is possibly the worst I’ve ever heard in a Disney film. Usually their songs tend to fit into the narrative pretty well; this really felt like the songs were being forced to fit into spaces unnaturally, and that these characters would prefer to be speaking. There were any number of times that I found myself thinking how much I would like to have seen it done in hand-drawn animation. There were moments where…
Picoreview: The Desolation of Smaug
Picoreview: The Desolation of Smaug: It is my personal hope that there will be a 2 hour Director’s Cut of The Hobbit that only has, you know. The stuff in the book. We re-watched An Unexpected Journey last night, which is frankly a long, long movie in which almost nothing happens. Smaug possibly, if you look at it sideways, has more happen, but (major structural spoilers ahoy)