Movie Diary
a) Kung Fu Panda 3
My kindergartener's school has been closed from the blizzard for over a week now, so I've been doing all sorts of stuff to keep the kid entertained during the day, Chuck E. Cheese's, family visits, you name it. So today we went and hit the first morning matinee on opening day of the new Kung Fu Panda movie, since he liked the previous movies (and the TV series). I've always thought that these movies were firmly in the middle of the pack as far as the big computer animated kids movie franchises go, but this movie was a perfectly fine installment to the series, a few decent laughs, some cool visuals and action sequences. But the second act got a little sad and my sensitive little dude had to cry it out a little bit.
b) Mad Max: Fury Road
I get why people are excited about this, but man, what a Mountain Dew-ass movie to get a Best Picture nomination. At this point it's been spun as part of the movie's cool feminist misandry agenda that the movie actually belongs to Charlize Theron. But isn't it still technically a flaw that Mad Max is the dullest part of a Mad Max movie, that the role that made Mel Gibson into an international superstar has been passed onto Tom Hardy to basically look like Gerard Butler and do even less than Gerard Butler would've done with the role? Like, when the ads for the movie started I actually thought Charlize was playing a female Max, and they may as well have done that and just dropped Hardy's character from the plot without losing anything.
c) Cinderella
Helena Bonham Carter playing the Fairy Godmother in this made me think about how Tim Burton probably could've directed this, and how if he had it would've been way worse than the serviceable job done by a guy who directed American Pie and Twilight movies.
d) The Imitation Game
This seemed pretty well made, although I was pretty spaced out the day I watched it and never really followed it too closely.
e) Bee Movie
So many modern animated features are basically about taking famous comics and having them voice animals and creatures in some way that weds the sensibility of their sitcoms or standup comedy to something that theoretically kids and their parents can enjoy. And Dreamworks always does it so much more awkwardly than Pixar, Antz was some kind of wrongheaded cartoon Woody Allen movie, and Bee Movie really does so little to successfully adapt Jerry Seinfeld's style of humor into a cartoon. I really just kinda wanted to watch it to satisfy my morbid curiosity about the whole thing, and I needed something to watch with my kid, but I will say, the kid didn't hate it.
f) The Salton Sea
Val Kilmer is one of my favorite actors whose decades-long career has only been very sporadically dotted with actual good movies and/or roles that brought out the best in him. So I'm always up for checking out a Kilmer movie I haven't seen and hopefully catching him living up to his potential. This wasn't very good, though, he plays a meth-addicted saxophonist and the movie felt like a long laundry list of cinematic cliches about jazz and drugs, I never got to the end of it.
g) Legend
I kinda wanted to watch this just because it seemed so odd that Ridley Scott went from Alien and Blade Runner to this movie about unicorns and elves that I'd barely heard of. But visually it's really awesome and Tim Curry is a great scenery-chewing villain, and you've got Tom Cruise and Mia Sara looking all pretty on the eve of Top Gun and Ferris Bueller, respectively. Definitely didn't deserve to be such a flop in the context of Scott or Cruise's careers, although I guess it was a little too dark to be an elementary school staple like Labyrinth.
d) The Imitation Game
This seemed pretty well made, although I was pretty spaced out the day I watched it and never really followed it too closely.
e) Bee Movie
So many modern animated features are basically about taking famous comics and having them voice animals and creatures in some way that weds the sensibility of their sitcoms or standup comedy to something that theoretically kids and their parents can enjoy. And Dreamworks always does it so much more awkwardly than Pixar, Antz was some kind of wrongheaded cartoon Woody Allen movie, and Bee Movie really does so little to successfully adapt Jerry Seinfeld's style of humor into a cartoon. I really just kinda wanted to watch it to satisfy my morbid curiosity about the whole thing, and I needed something to watch with my kid, but I will say, the kid didn't hate it.
f) The Salton Sea
Val Kilmer is one of my favorite actors whose decades-long career has only been very sporadically dotted with actual good movies and/or roles that brought out the best in him. So I'm always up for checking out a Kilmer movie I haven't seen and hopefully catching him living up to his potential. This wasn't very good, though, he plays a meth-addicted saxophonist and the movie felt like a long laundry list of cinematic cliches about jazz and drugs, I never got to the end of it.
g) Legend
I kinda wanted to watch this just because it seemed so odd that Ridley Scott went from Alien and Blade Runner to this movie about unicorns and elves that I'd barely heard of. But visually it's really awesome and Tim Curry is a great scenery-chewing villain, and you've got Tom Cruise and Mia Sara looking all pretty on the eve of Top Gun and Ferris Bueller, respectively. Definitely didn't deserve to be such a flop in the context of Scott or Cruise's careers, although I guess it was a little too dark to be an elementary school staple like Labyrinth.
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on Friday, January 29, 2016 at 2:37 PM.
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