We saw Arrival this afternoon and quite enjoyed it. No spoilers in this post, though I can't make any promises about comments ( Read more... )

We went to see the second Hobbit movie today. Now we already knew, of course, from (a) the fact that it's a trilogy and (b) seeing the first movie, that there was going to be a lot of extra stuff. Even so, I found myself wondering if as much as a quarter of this movie was in the book, or if my memory is faulty ( Read more... )

It's funny the things that do and don't trigger suspension-of-disbelief problems for me. I enjoy speculative fiction -- science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, etc. This means accepting some basic premises -- faster-than-light travel, teleportation, magic, time travel, or whatever. I'm totally cool with all that ( Read more... )

I never got around to seeing the Les Mis movie in the theatre, but I watched it on DVD last night. (Remember when we had to wait a year or more, rather than a few months, for a movie to come out on DVD? My, how times have changed.)
It appears that my standards for musicality, for a musical, are higher in ( Read more... )

I've been learning a lot and it's going to take a while to write it all up -- certainly not before I get home. So in the meantime, some shorter bits:
( Read more... )

We went to see The Hunger Games this afternoon. I have read the first of the three books. I thought the movie was a good treatment of the book; they missed some opportunities but they added some nice bits too. (I don't think the rest of this post contains any spoilers that weren't in the trailer.)
The Rue plot in the book was very powerful, and ( Read more... )

The Butterfly Effect got lukewarm reviews when it was in theatres and I don't go out to see that many movies anyway, so I missed it at the time. Last night I remedied that with the DVD, and boy am I glad I did. (No spoilers in this post, but I can't vouch for comments.)
The story follows a college student, Evan, who had several blackouts as a ( Read more... )

Spoilers in this post are few and marked; for comments you're on your own.
I had expected a movie this close to the end of the series, and one ( Read more... )

We finally saw Avatar today. Because we dallied, our only options were 3D (digital or IMAX). To see the plain old 2D version we would have had to head off to the wilds of Bridgeville or Tarentum or the like.
Consensus on the Google-indexed parts of the Internet suggested the the ( Read more... )

For my birthday I received a gift subscription to Netflix (I'd been considering it but never did anything about it on my own). This is excellent. I've populated my queue with enough stuff to get rolling, but I figure suggestions are always good. Here is your invitation to evangelize DVDs you think I'd like ( Read more... )