Get the cuss out
Dad and I caught a double feature this evening at the Woodland Mall theater. Oddly enough, we paid for both movies, even though there was only a 15-minute gap between them and there were no employees anywhere in the theater checking tickets. Traditionally I would just walk from one theater to another, but I guess when tickets are $4 it's not such a big deal.
We saw:
Fantastic Mr. Fox - globalesque spoke highly of this one and it was a huge smash with the critics, so it's been on my "must-see" list for a while even though I never read the Roald Dahl book on which it's (loosely?) based. I'm not a huge Wes Anderson fan, but I really liked this one. As Entertainment Weekly's critic said, Anderson has been making animated films his whole career - he just kept casting live actors in them. His movies have always a little too precious and calculatedly quirky for me, but his unique brand of "whimsy" works a lot better in stop-motion animation.
The movie was basically a well-structured heist pic (Ocean's Furry Eleven?), but the best part was just the whole look of it. It was low-budget stop-motion animation (I suspect it was actually high-budget stop-motion animation masquerading as low-budget), but the sets and the characters were, well, fantastic. It was also quite funny, with lots of blink-and-you'll-miss-'em sight gags. (My favorite one: Throughout the movie, the word "cuss" is used as an actual cuss word - frequently - so the characters will say things like "What the cuss do you think you're doing?" or "I don't give a cuss." Then there's one shot of a wall with graffiti that says, simply, "CUSS.")
Very charming, surprisingly engrossing, and maybe you even learn something before you're through.
The Hurt Locker - Another movie that has been hugely popular with the critics, The Hurt Locker is a Best Picture nominee and was directed by Jim Cameron's ex-wife, which is a piece of trivia everyone seems to know, even though hardly anyone knows who Kathryn Bigelow is. It's an Iraq War movie about a team of bomb defusers and it's mostly a "day-in-the-life" (39 days, actually) depiction of their lives without a strict narrative arc.
I was slightly underwhelmed by it, based on my high expectations. It was a good movie, and certainly a competent, well-crafted one, but one that was hard for me to really like. (And all the handheld camera action left me feeling a little queasy too.) The acting was very good and the whole movie was very "intense" (not boring), but sometimes it was hard to understand what was going on, especially if you're not a soldier/bomb defuser yourself. I'm sure a lot of these scenes would have been terrifying if I actually knew what a bomb looked like or what it could do. But when I see someone uncover a metal cylinder with wires snaking away from it on a movie screen... well, it's not that dramatic to me.
This may turn out to be one of those movies that sticks with me long after I've seen it. But I can't honestly say I thought it was better than Avatar. And I think I would like to root for something besides Avatar to win Best Picture. (Does Up even have a chance?)
We saw:
Fantastic Mr. Fox - globalesque spoke highly of this one and it was a huge smash with the critics, so it's been on my "must-see" list for a while even though I never read the Roald Dahl book on which it's (loosely?) based. I'm not a huge Wes Anderson fan, but I really liked this one. As Entertainment Weekly's critic said, Anderson has been making animated films his whole career - he just kept casting live actors in them. His movies have always a little too precious and calculatedly quirky for me, but his unique brand of "whimsy" works a lot better in stop-motion animation.
The movie was basically a well-structured heist pic (Ocean's Furry Eleven?), but the best part was just the whole look of it. It was low-budget stop-motion animation (I suspect it was actually high-budget stop-motion animation masquerading as low-budget), but the sets and the characters were, well, fantastic. It was also quite funny, with lots of blink-and-you'll-miss-'em sight gags. (My favorite one: Throughout the movie, the word "cuss" is used as an actual cuss word - frequently - so the characters will say things like "What the cuss do you think you're doing?" or "I don't give a cuss." Then there's one shot of a wall with graffiti that says, simply, "CUSS.")
Very charming, surprisingly engrossing, and maybe you even learn something before you're through.
The Hurt Locker - Another movie that has been hugely popular with the critics, The Hurt Locker is a Best Picture nominee and was directed by Jim Cameron's ex-wife, which is a piece of trivia everyone seems to know, even though hardly anyone knows who Kathryn Bigelow is. It's an Iraq War movie about a team of bomb defusers and it's mostly a "day-in-the-life" (39 days, actually) depiction of their lives without a strict narrative arc.
I was slightly underwhelmed by it, based on my high expectations. It was a good movie, and certainly a competent, well-crafted one, but one that was hard for me to really like. (And all the handheld camera action left me feeling a little queasy too.) The acting was very good and the whole movie was very "intense" (not boring), but sometimes it was hard to understand what was going on, especially if you're not a soldier/bomb defuser yourself. I'm sure a lot of these scenes would have been terrifying if I actually knew what a bomb looked like or what it could do. But when I see someone uncover a metal cylinder with wires snaking away from it on a movie screen... well, it's not that dramatic to me.
This may turn out to be one of those movies that sticks with me long after I've seen it. But I can't honestly say I thought it was better than Avatar. And I think I would like to root for something besides Avatar to win Best Picture. (Does Up even have a chance?)