Movies, Movies, Movies

I know I had promised movie reviews for the Academy Award Best Picture nominees (I have seen all the nominees but one it turns out-still waiting for Amour to come out on Netflix and looking forward to how much of an upper that one will be).  As an avid movie lover/watcher I also have quite a few more reviews to add to those from recent films I have seen in the movie theater and at home through Netflix.  (Not to go off on a tangent but does anyone else miss going into actual video stores and picking out what to watch?  I do.  Now I’m in charge of our queue at home and get blamed if the movie is bad, cough cough Prometheus but I’ll get to that later.)

 

As I was getting iced at the end of physical therapy I saw something interesting in Health magazine (the only kind of magazine they have there besides Reader’s Digest unfortunately).  There was a site that had four-word movie reviews.  I took it as a challenge to see if I too could write four-word movie reviews that were still meaningful.  Here it goes.

Best Picture nominees:

Zero Dark Thirty and Silver Linings Playbook- (see older posts for reviews).

Beasts of the Southern Wild- Whimsical, almost better afterwards

Les Miserables- Could have been better

Lincoln- Smart and vastly underrated

Life of Pi- Great effects but soulless

Argo- Extremely close to perfect

Django Unchained- Powerful in every sense

Amour- (Review to come after Netflix)

Netflix DVDs:

Animated:

Brave- Spunky heroine, cute bears

Indies:

Moonrise Kingdom- Childlike but also childish

The Sessions- Poignant, subtle love observations

Safety Not Guaranteed- Indie without direction/endgame

Robot & Frank- Funny and surprisingly heartfelt

The Master- Unlikable to a fault

Foreign Language Films:

The Intouchables- Eye-opening, new Odd Couple

Elena- What was the point?

Footnote- No-one to root for

Lemon Tree- Heart-wrenching look at loss

(Other foreign film recommendations: Caramel, A Separation, and Paradise Now, all excellent.)

Blockbusters:

Flight- Don’t waste your time (P.S. Seth MacFarlane’s hilarious Flight sock puppet sketch for the Oscar opening is quite accurate even though it is also somewhat offensive.  The part with the socks in the washing machine is genius.)

Prometheus- What was that? Ewww (My family will never let me live this choice down.  It was tres horrible and I got mean looks at the end for the two hours that we will never get back.  Squids freak me out more than usual too now.)

Current movies out in theaters in the time, as I like to call it, when movies go to die (post-Oscar/pre-summer period):

Side Effects- Solidly good, watchable thriller

Beautiful Creatures- A much lesser Twilight (Speaking of which The Host got horrible reviews so I didn’t even attempt to see it, and I see a lot of movies.)

Admission- So intensely, incredibly disappointing

Olympus Has Fallen- Circa Air Force One

Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor- Hack-job writing, preachy hilarity (I dragged my sister to this one and she said some of the funniest things when we came out.  I believe her best quotes were, “So basically the gist of the movie was ‘Woman thou shalt not cheateth lest you be alone and miserable for the rest of your life!’”  Another great one was, “When Kim Kardashian is the best thing in the movie you know you have a problem.”  Lastly, “Jurnee Smollet-Bell deserves an academy award for acting in this film.”  I have to add that I thought it was so awful that nothing happens to the men in the movie and Judith, the main character, was deciding between dull and duller.  Their banality alone should have led to some consequences instead of only the women suffering.  All in all, my sister wasn’t too happy I made her see it with me but I thought it was hilarious nonetheless-though not as funny as Beyonce in Obsessed.  Need I say, “Did you not get my message?”)

Not much to look forward to on the movie front.  That's why I'm always sad when the awards season ends.  I’m waiting to get Rust and Bone on Netflix and A Royal Affair which should be good.  The films that are out right now that I thought would have gotten better reviews didn’t.  The Place Beyond the Pines (with Ryan Gosling), Trance (a Danny Boyle film), and The Company You Keep (a Robert Redford film) all received middling reviews.  Coming to theaters soon are the Tom Cruise futuristic/sci-fi film, Oblivion, and The Great Gatsby (which got pushed back to spring instead of this past winter).  I am afraid of Baz Luhrmann’s interpretation even though I’m sure Leonardo DiCaprio will make a fantastic Gatsby but I guess we’ll see.  Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock are teaming up in The Heat this summer and I’m excited for that.