Tag: movie mondays

Picoreview: Seventh Son

April 13, 2015

Picoreview: Seventh Son: I can’t tell if that was subjectively bad or objectively bad. The problem is that I’ve read the source books, but not for quite a while, and they’re a terrible adaptation of the source books but because my memory of them isn’t clear I spent a great deal of the movie going, “Wait, is that…did that…was that…okay, that’s DEFINITELY not from the books…,” which left me uncertain at the end if I’d seen your bog-standard bad fantasy film, in which case, for a bog-standard bad fantasy film…

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Picoreview: Insurgent

April 6, 2015

Picoreview: Insurgent: A lot better than Divergent. This is damning with faint praise, as I thought Divergent was pretty awful, or possibly even worse than “pretty awful” in that you could see where it could possibly be good but MOSTLY what you saw was how it Wasn’t Hunger Games. Insurgent didn’t have as much of that This Is What It’s Failing To Be feeling to it, so that helped a lot. It’s–pretty predictable, although there were a couple of nice twists, particularly with an unexpected action at the end that…

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Picoreview: Cinderella

March 30, 2015

Picoreview: Cinderella: Surprisingly good. Surprisingly dark! And that dress, wow. Cate Blanchett is, of course, splendid as the Wicked Stepmother, who was–in Ever After they managed to make the stepmother a more interesting than simply evil character, and Disney stepped up the game again with her. In everything save her treatment of Cinderella, I frankly admired her. She wasn’t good, but she was willing to use what she had to get what she needed, and…yeah. Pretty terrific characterisation for what could easily be a cut-out villain. Lily James was lovely…

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Picoreview: Step Up 2: The Streets

March 23, 2015

Picoreview: Step Up 2: The Streets: As good as your average dance movie, which means less good than Step Up, but possibly good enough to explain why there ended up being FIVE Step Up movies. It turns out this is the first one I’d seen in the theatres, and I don’t think the dancing is quite as good in it as in the first film. A lot of it seems less…controlled, although that may be deliberate, because that’s kind of the thing the main character lacks, so it may be…

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