Picoreview: Ghost in the Shell: I think it’s probably the kind if thing you’re going to like if you’re going to like it and the kind of thing you’re not going to like if you’re not going to like it. I apparently decided the hill to die on was “female-led films need to do well at the box office” rather than “whitewashing is evil” and went to see it last night. Having only seen the anime once, and not having particularly cared for it and remembering almost nothing about it…
Picoreview: Beauty and the Beast: exceeded my expectations by a considerable margin. (Also, irrelevantly, I was sitting between two little girls who sang all the songs they knew, and an older woman who kept wiping her eyes, both of which I found pretty charming. :)) The showing I went to go see originally was sold out, which meant I basically spent four hours wandering vaguely around downtown Drogheda (spoiler: it hasn’t got 4 hours worth of entertainment in it) so I could go to the next one. I was pretty…
Picoreview: Logan: worth going to in the middle of the night, which I did. :) (I had to, see, or I wasn’t gonna get to see it until THURSDAY, and that would be just AWFUL. So I got a 10:30pm ticket for last night (I guess they can get away with it because it ends on opening day that way), and took a nap yesterday evening, thus ensuring I didn’t WANT to get up and go to a movie, but I’d bought the ticket and so up I got and…
Picoreview: La La Land: either too much reality or too much fantasy, but either way, a total failure to succeed. La La Land is billed as “the kind of movie Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.” This is not accurate. This is the kind of movie Hollywood never made. It is not a slick, charming Hollywood movie musical. Neither is it a Hollywood style dreams-meet-reality drama. It attempts to be both, and succeeds at neither. I’m not much of a Ryan Gosling fan. I understand he’s apparently an extremely nice person, which…
Picoreview: Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them: really not very good. It started out slowly and took far too long to end. There were tedious bits in between occasionally interrupted by charm, but the charm was rarely presented by Eddie Redmayne’s Newt, who, as the lead, literally had a line about how people didn’t really like him very much. But that was okay, because Katherine Waterson, as the other lead, was also almost entirely unlikeable. (Wait…) To make it worse, though, the second leads, *particularly* Alison Sudol (playing Waterson’s…