17 November 2009

A few movie mini-reviews

Okay, I’m bored enough to write something, and I’m a bit behind on my movies so I’ll do them all in one go.

Where the Wild Things Are

wild-things

I’d been looking forward to this movie for a while, I think since some time in 2007. I remember liking the book a lot as a kid, although I don’t think I’ve read it in many years. I might buy it sometime. Maurice Sendak supports the film adaptation by Spike Jonze, and that’s good enough for me. So I saw it a few weeks ago. It was pretty good. Definitely cool looking, although I think I might have liked it better if the wild things were a bit less muppet-like. It was just a bit too obvious that they were dudes in monster suits, but I suppose that could be argued to be a story element in itself, since that’s what Max is being, and the monsters are a reflection of himself. I guess there’s a pretty good amount of philosophical stuff that my shallow mind glossed over. It was fun, and I think a fitting homage to the source material.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

clooney-staring-at-goats

Oddly based on a documentary, this movie seems like fiction but is mostly based in truth. Ewan McGregor and George Clooney star in a strange comedy about psychological warriors and their cooky methods of battle. It’s pretty funny, and The Dude’s in it. Good enough for me. There are a lot of sideways Star Wars jokes that always got a good laugh out of me, especially with the false Obi-Wan Kenobi being there. In the end though, its use of narration and some other awkward factors made it less than a blockbuster. Oh well.

Boondock Saints II

bds2

I liked the first one. It had a style to it. Sure, it was basically Quentin Tarantino’s style, but it’s a good style! It was a solid movie with good enough acting and funny bits with great violence. The makers of this sequel obviously saw all of these elements, and definitely tried to fit them all in again. However, they did it wrong somehow. The cheese factor seems to have doubled to me, although everyone else I was with said it was the same. The new characters were a little bit too outrageous to fit, I think; Julie Benz and Clifton Collins Jr. are great actors in their own right, but their addition to this story was just done wrong. Julie’s over-sexualized southern cop character is annoying, and Clifton’s Mexican brawler is just too flamboyant. His counterpart from the first movie, Rocco, was a bit more reserved (in my memory), and also flawed. Julie’s was Willem Dafoe (no more explanation needed). So anyway, I laughed, shrugged a lot, and I left the theater not really disappointed; I didn’t expect it to be as good as the first one, but still, it could have been better than that. I think it deserves the punishment it’s getting from the critics, unlike its predecessor.

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