Picoreview: San Andreas: exciting! I saw a review that said “this is a movie about earthquakes having a vendetta against the Rock,” which mostly made me think “Didn’t they see 2012, in which earthquakes were literally chasing John Cusack?” San Andreas was much better than 2012, which is not meant to damn with faint praise, given how utterly awful 2012 was. (I liked 2012, but it was disaster movie porn. It was not good.) But I spent far more of San Andreas on the edge of my seat than I…
Picoreview: Spy: very very funny. Very vulgar. Very kick-ass. Very funny. Two weeks ago I’d had no intention at all of seeing Spy, because the trailer made it look like it was probably all about making mockery of the fat lady. I then read a review from a reviewer whose politics I like (Scott Mendelson; he reviews movies for Forbes and is a left-leaning liberal feminist) which said “despite the trailers that is not what this movie is,” and then I read a few more reviews that all said the…
Picoreview: Tomorrowland: boring. I really wanted to like it, as it had a message I certainly support, and there were a lot of good *pieces*, but overall it failed to click. It did not help that the opening seven or eight hours twenty minutes felt like somebody higher up at Disney had said “The audience is never going to understand this if you don’t explain it to them” and forced the director to put George Clooney on the screen talking directly to the camera, and then when that was a…
Picoreview: Woman in Gold: well worth watching. Woman in Gold is based on the true story of an Austrian Jew whose family artwork was stolen by the Nazi occupation, and her international legal battle, sixty years later, to get it back. Helen Mirren plays Maria Altmann and Ryan Reynolds plays her lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, who comes from a long line of highly distinguished Schoenbergs and who has thus far totally failed to make his mark. And good god, Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black plays the younger Altmann. That woman is…
Picoreview: The DUFF: conflicting. The DUFF is sort of this weird mashup of a high school makeover movie and, like, Juno, or something. DUFF stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, which the main character, played by Mae Whitman (who, at age 26, is a moderately convincing 18 year old), discovers she is one of. Except it appears the only person in her school who actually knows the term is the one who first uses it to describe her, the boy-next-door/jerkface/love interest, played by Robbie Amell (who, at 26, is not…