When I first saw the ads for this movie, my first thought was that an entire generation of school children were going to grow up misspelling “happiness”. To my relief, one of the first scenes deals with that very issue, so after that, I was ready to settle back and enjoy the movie. (Well, at least as much as I could with the two annoying teenage girls sitting a few seats down who liked to echo bits of the dialogue. As they jostled and tripped their way out of the theatre, though, one of them dropped and broke her cell phone, in what I like to think was a nice bit of karma. Anyway.)
Fury
This probably isn’t the best movie to see the same weekend as The Book of Life, since it really was hard to switch gears and write this review. It doesn’t help that I’m not entirely sure what to say about this one, either, since at times it was very good and at other times I found myself wondering why, exactly, they had put a particular scene in, as sometimes it seemed like they were just trying to be artsy or surreal or something.
The Book of Life
This didn’t quite seem like a kids’ movie, despite being animated — after all, it’s about people dying and going to the afterlife — but kids’ movie it was, and again I felt a little weird about being in the theatre. I really think it would have freaked me out a little when I was a kid, though of course I’m a coward.
Continue reading “The Book of Life”
Dracula Untold
At least this time there’s a different problem with the movie — this one was edited too much, as opposed to last week, when it wasn’t edited nearly enough. It’s too bad there isn’t a way to average them out somehow, except then we’d end up with a movie about a vampire trying to find his missing wife while fending off scary hordes of rampaging Turks and reporters.
Gone Girl
Ben Affleck playing a sociopath usually works out all right, and this movie was no exception. When he doesn’t have to try to show normal human emotion I like him a lot better, much like Keanu Reeves. As it turns out, what I should have been worried about was the editing, or maybe it was just that Gillian Flynn, the author of the novel this is based on and who also wrote the screenplay, wouldn’t let anyone edit anything out.