Wife (watching “Fifty Shades of Grey” trailer after reading humorous Dave Barry article about it): “This looks terrible.”
Me: “Let me see.”
(takes laptop to watch trailer)
Me: “Yeah, it does look terrible.”
(stops video, surreptitiously starts “American Psycho” trailer instead)
Me: “Here, you can have it back.”
(returns laptop to wife with “American Psycho” trailer playing)
Wife (puzzled): “Wait, is this the same movie?”
Me: “More or less.”
So this week we watched “Gran Torino“, one of Clint Eastwood’s late-career movies that doesn’t go the way you think it’s going to go. In this film, Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a recently-widowed Korean war veteran living in a neighborhood that has become rather dilapidated, and also largely ethnic Hmong, including a thuggish street gang whose members like to cram, clown-car style, into a rather junky little beater with an ugly spoiler and a hood that’s not the same color as the body. Walt’s prized Gran Torino catches the gang’s eye as a much more suitable ride. Hilarity does not ensue.
So I recently watched “28 Weeks Later“, the sequel to Danny Boyle’s classic “28 Days Later“, the film that helped to usher in the “fast zombie”* boomlet of the early 2000s. Like its predecessor, “28 Weeks Later” boasts a very strong cast (including Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle, Harold Perrineau, and Jeremy Renner) and it delivers the apocalyptic mayhem, but unfortunately it suffers from the fact that the characters behave in incredibly stupid ways. If you imagine that they took Season 3 Andrea from “The Walking Dead” and put her in charge of a military operation to repopulate Britain after it was devastated by the rage virus from the first film, you’re not far off.
Because my wife studiously ignored the presence of this movie in the house, I can’t use the usual rating system of how long it took her to fall asleep. Therefore, I’m going to dust off the “badmovies.org” style of bullet-pointed summary, which I think was last used in my infamous pan of “August Rush“, to illustrate some of the important things “28 Weeks Later” taught us. Needless to say, there will be …
So, it’s been a while since I posted a “movie review”. The reason for the dearth of recent writeups is not that we haven’t been watching movies, but that she hasn’t really been paying attention to them lately, for various reasons, including that none of them is “Breaking Bad“. Anyway, here’s a sample of some of the selections that have arrived and departed unremarked. (Longtime readers will recall that the ratings system I use is, “How many minutes did it take for this movie to put my wife to sleep?” By that standard, none of these did very well.)
Continue reading “Freezing Bad; Or, Not A Review Of “Frozen River””
So a few weeks ago we were between Netflix discs (“The Heat” had gone back, “Pacific Rim” had not yet arrived), and while looking through the list of streaming movies one evening, I noticed that “Flight” was there. I’d been interested in seeing that for a while, and my wife is a fan of Denzel Washington, so I decided to start watching it, which led to a conversation that went something like the one described below:
Most readers probably know that I do the occasional film review here, and that because I like just about every movie I see, instead of actually rating movies myself I judge them based on how long it takes for them to put my wife to sleep. A few readers may even remember that, several years ago, I had been trying in vain to get my wife to sit through “The Two Towers” and “Return of the King”, after having subjected her to “The Fellowship of the Ring” in an actual movie theater. Alas, my efforts were in vain, until she happened to wander past the television when I was watching “The Two Towers” for the umpteenth time, and she happened to see Gollum. A bit more back story: When we finally got replaced our picture tube last year, it was with a 3D flat screen; and because it’s difficult to find 3D movies for rent locally and I am too cheap to buy them, I rent them by mail, a la Netflix, from an outfit called 3DBluRayRental.com. Are you with me so far? Good. So here is my non-review review of the 3D Blu-Ray of “The Hobbit”.
So it’s been a very (very) long time since I posted a movie review, and the Oscar-nominated “Beasts of the Southern Wild” seems like as good a film as any to break the lengthy review hiatus.
Last weekend we finally got around to watching “A Perfect World“, the Clint Eastwood film in which Eastwood plays a Texas Ranger trying to catch Kevin Costner’s escaped convict as he makes a run for freedom. Complicating matters is Costner’s hostage, a young boy he snatched during a home invasion. Lacking a father figure at home, it doesn’t take long before the boy starts going all Patty Hearst on us.
So this weekend we finally got around to watching “Paranormal Activity”, the (in)famous smash hit that was filmed down in San Diego for about $11,000 and went on to make a couple hundred million dollars. My wife wasn’t all that enthusiastic about it, because of the “found footage” nature of the film, which reminded her of “The Blair Witch Project”. We both hated that movie. Maybe we’re jaded from having spent so much time hiking and occasionally getting lost in the woods, but all we both kept thinking during TBWP was, “Just keep walking downstream, you idiots!” Fortunately, that wasn’t an issue with “Paranormal Activity”.
So this weekend I saw “The Brothers Bloom”, a caper movie along the lines of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, only with a little more jaundice. I say “I” saw it because my wife was not around for it, which means I can’t say how long it took her to fall asleep, so I’ll just have to estimate it instead.
Viscosity 