Posted by Bizarro Santamorphman
in Last movie you watched + 2 lines review. (Started by Bastard Walt August 28, 2007, 04:18:56 amBoard: Entertainment
Into The Woods
Stephen Sondheim's acclaimed fairy tale musical finally makes it to the big screen after several aborted attempts. After spending the first half of the movie retelling of several famous fairy tales, things take a decidedly darker turn as the movie explores what happens after you get what you wish for. It's pretty good! I haven't seen the stage version but I could tell that there were some odd cuts/changes (some for time, some to make the movie less dark/more palatable for a Disney audience), but the movie still retains its essential darkness (at least as far as I can tell from reading about what was changed) and none of the changes ruins the movie, I think.
Big Eyes
The real life story of a painter (Amy Adams) whose work was falsely claimed and sold by her husband (Christoph Waltz) as his own; her unique paintings (of giant-eyed, sad children) became a cultural phenomenon, selling millions of prints. For over a decade she was forced to lie to the entire world to keep up this charade, and was forced to spend the majority of her time in virtual isolation in her studio cranking out new paintings. This is also a pretty good movie! Adams and Waltz are great, and it's really nice to see Tim Burton reteaming with the screenwriters of Ed Wood, because this is easily the best Burton movie in a over a decade.
Top Five
Written, directed, and starring Chris Rock, this movie is about a comedian who has to confront his past and present life and career when he spends a day in NYC being interviewed by a journalist (Rosario Dawson). This movie is fantastic, simply incredible. It's whip-smart and absolutely hysterical. I can't recommend this highly enough!
Wild
Another true story type deals: following the death of her mother, her divorce, and years of drug abuse and self-destructive behavior, a Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) impulsively decides to hike over a thousand miles on the Pacific Crest Trail (going from southern California to Washington state), alone, with no prior experience. An incredibly powerful, incredibly great movie. Witherspoon is simply incredible and now I really wanna start reading Cheryl Strayed's memoir that this was based on, and also her other writing.
The Hobbit: battle of five armies or something (no trailer for this)
these Hobbit movies are so fucking frustrating because there's clearly a good/decent movie underneath all this stupid drawn out shit and weightless, terrible CGI sequences. It's such a depressing thing to watch, and I truly believe a good movie can be made of these three piles; the performances are there! Martin Freeman is great and Bilbo actually does have a whole arc, even though it's stretched out to the point of parody and hacked to pieces because of all the random irrelevant shit added in between.
Also I'm glad that Peter Jackson finally found a place for climax of the second movie (where Smaug attacks Laketown gets killed) by jamming it into the opening of the third movie. I guess this must be a new innovation in cinema like 48FPS and stuff, but it sure is weird jamming an ending of one movie into the first 10 minutes of a different movie!
Selma
A historical drama about the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches spearheaded by Martin Luther King, Jr. This is the best movie of the year, easily. Intensely gripping, incredibly written, directed, and acted, and immensely emotionally powerful. I simply cannot recommend this movie enough. It is a movie whose message is not only incredibly relevant because of last year's striking down of key provisions of the Voting Rights act these marches achieved (the loss of said provisions have led almost immediately to incredibly restrictive voting registration limits that have overwhelmingly disenfranchised minority voters, all in the service of literally non-existent voter fraud), but also because of the events in Ferguson and elsewhere in the past few months. This is a movie everyone should see.
