Unlikely Double Feature
I have no objection to seeing movies alone, in fact there is an advantage to being alone when you are planning on ducking into another movie before or after the one you paid for!
I arrived a little early so I watched about 15 minutes from the early part of 'The Butler', I found it to be a little earnest and heavy handed... I'll see it on DVD (or when it is aired on TV sometime). It didn't seem bad, just not what I had hoped for (Danny Strong did such a brilliant job w/his Recount and Game Change screen plays.... I hope he's doing a good job w/the last Hunger Games movies!).
So I paid to get into The World's End, a wonderful comedy that is part of the Simon Pegg Cornetto trilogy (a joke about how each of the comedies: Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and now The World's End feature a different flavor of Cornetto ice cream, along with spoofing 3 different American movie tropes). It starts slowly, establishing place and characters, and then it takes off into amazing fun with surprising twists. I laughed a lot and totally enjoyed it (don't stay after the credits, there is no cap scene.. even though there had been one for Shawn of the Dead). Everyone has been raving about it on twitter so I was pretty confident that it would be loud and action packed, and that I would love it, which I did.
I picked Blue Jasmine for my second film because I knew it won't stay in Iowa long, and I knew it would be nice and quiet after all of the raucous silliness of the previous movie. I was really struck by now pointedly Woody Allen made fun of the NYC Bernie Medoff style elite (people who feel entitled to privilege while destroying the lives of other people). It also struck me as amazingly reminiscent of 'Street Car Named Desire' with a modern (and black comedy) twist. It is a very interesting film with a magnificent performance by Cate Blanchett. One of the first things I did when I got home was to Google Blue Jasmine/Street Car just to see how everyone else viewed it, and of course it is the first thing most reviewers mention. I really enjoyed this movie, it lacked the magic of 'Midnight in Paris' (all my favorite Woody Allen movies have that magic) but it is satirical and fascinating.
I arrived a little early so I watched about 15 minutes from the early part of 'The Butler', I found it to be a little earnest and heavy handed... I'll see it on DVD (or when it is aired on TV sometime). It didn't seem bad, just not what I had hoped for (Danny Strong did such a brilliant job w/his Recount and Game Change screen plays.... I hope he's doing a good job w/the last Hunger Games movies!).
So I paid to get into The World's End, a wonderful comedy that is part of the Simon Pegg Cornetto trilogy (a joke about how each of the comedies: Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and now The World's End feature a different flavor of Cornetto ice cream, along with spoofing 3 different American movie tropes). It starts slowly, establishing place and characters, and then it takes off into amazing fun with surprising twists. I laughed a lot and totally enjoyed it (don't stay after the credits, there is no cap scene.. even though there had been one for Shawn of the Dead). Everyone has been raving about it on twitter so I was pretty confident that it would be loud and action packed, and that I would love it, which I did.
I picked Blue Jasmine for my second film because I knew it won't stay in Iowa long, and I knew it would be nice and quiet after all of the raucous silliness of the previous movie. I was really struck by now pointedly Woody Allen made fun of the NYC Bernie Medoff style elite (people who feel entitled to privilege while destroying the lives of other people). It also struck me as amazingly reminiscent of 'Street Car Named Desire' with a modern (and black comedy) twist. It is a very interesting film with a magnificent performance by Cate Blanchett. One of the first things I did when I got home was to Google Blue Jasmine/Street Car just to see how everyone else viewed it, and of course it is the first thing most reviewers mention. I really enjoyed this movie, it lacked the magic of 'Midnight in Paris' (all my favorite Woody Allen movies have that magic) but it is satirical and fascinating.