Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Movies: An abbreviated list

Disclaimers first: We watched some movies in the theater, and we rented some from a local shop. Ergo, this isn't an all-encompassing observation, just 10 keepers and 10 throw-'em-backs of the 91 Netflix flicks seen in 2008, in reverse order of date seen (i.e. most recent at top of list) with a short note. Yeah, yeah, your favorite movie's on the wrong list. Whatever.

Play it again, Sam!
  1. Lust, Caution (tense!)
  2. PU-239 (touching)
  3. The Tunnel (tense *and* touching)
  4. King of California (engrossing)
  5. Shortbus (uncommon people have common problems)
  6. Enchanted (way cuter than I would have thought)
  7. Reign Over Me (way deeper than I would have thought)
  8. My Life as a Dog (fuggedaboutit - awesome movie)
  9. The Brave One (predictable, but really good)
  10. Cashback (unpredictable, and really, really good)

Can I get those hours of my life back?
  1. Cassandra's Dream (as boring as Broken Flowers)
  2. Making Of (nope, the fake documentary parts do not work after all)
  3. Amores Perros (gratuitous dog fighting)
  4. Year of the Dog (too preachy, and not even close to comedy)
  5. Lions for Lambs (if they'd stuck with the guys in Afghanistan and skipped the rest of the movie, it would have been good. They didn't. Oh yeah, and too preachy.)
  6. Vantage Point (boring. boring. boring. from several different perspectives!)
  7. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (too fucking long, just like the title)
  8. The Omega Man (I can see how this would have been good when it came out, but it did not age well)
  9. Gone Baby Gone (just couldn't give a crap)
  10. Lucky You (it would have been lucky to skip this one. I tried, really, but it is still just typical poker crap)

Friday, June 29, 2007

Deus ex machina

I love to watch movies, even bad ones. Lucky me, because if I objected to watching movies that aren't any good, I would have way fewer choices.

For me, a good ending is the make-or-break element of most movies. I'm OK with nebulous endings, sometimes. But not very often. I'm more OK with those than with the miraculous Problem Solved ending. It seems as though the writers (I think of movies with poor endings as being the work of a committee) said, "Well, we've done everything we needed to do. Got the scene with Nicole Kidman naked. Got the trippy special effect with the electromagnetic pulse. Got the Michael Mann driving scene. OK, let's wrap this up."

Hey, I'm not saying I'd do better, but I'd be OK with fewer, better movies. On the bright side, the prevalance of deus ex machina endings means that a good wikipedia article has been written, or at least one that contains a good for-instance:
(e.g. the rope that binds the hero's hands is luckily chewed off by a rat.)