Looper; Robot & Frank
Watching films I've had out from Netflix since May...
Finally got around to watching Looper, which would have easily been ten to fifteen percent better as a film if they hadn't put Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in those awful prosthetics. (Because, yeah, I'm watching a movie about time-travel assassins and random telekinesis, but the thing I'm going to be thrown by is whether JGL looks enough like he could grow up to be Bruce Willis. *That's* what's going to shatter the conceit.) It's not good when looking at the main character is actually unpleasant, and that's not supposed to be the case. Mostly I'm just grumpy about the movie, because it had a lot of the ingredients to make a fun, interesting time-travel story, but decided instead to be about futuristic manpain, only with a character I didn't even care about. Twice.
(Actually, it reminds me a bit of how much I hated Inception - "dream a little bigger, darling" doesn't work when no one making the movie is - and also, that thing where a female character only exists for a boring hero to have wistful flashbacks about, although I guess at least Marion Cotillard's character got a first name and some dialogue, so it can always get worse.) (Since I can't remember a single name from this movie except Ariadne, I'm assuming she had a name, but I could be wrong.)
Just - it's the future, right? Could we maybe have something more interesting than the same old tired gun battles and explosions? And no, putting them at funny angles doesn't count, Inception.
I liked Robot & Frank, though, although it did suffer a bit from that weird delusion people seem to have that libraries are just places with books in them. (One of the side plots is that these future hipsters are closing the library - which has no computers or anything in it, somehow, and of course no one ever goes there except Frank - in order to turn it into a "community space," which in the actual world is redundant, which you would know if you'd been to a library recently.) I mean, I get it, the movie is about memory and obsolescence, so it's ~thematic~, but bleh anyway.
Also, Netflix has decided from these two movies that I am interested in "critically-acclaimed crime dramas," which I find inordinately amusing. Er, no. Way to miss the point there, Netflix.
Finally got around to watching Looper, which would have easily been ten to fifteen percent better as a film if they hadn't put Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in those awful prosthetics. (Because, yeah, I'm watching a movie about time-travel assassins and random telekinesis, but the thing I'm going to be thrown by is whether JGL looks enough like he could grow up to be Bruce Willis. *That's* what's going to shatter the conceit.) It's not good when looking at the main character is actually unpleasant, and that's not supposed to be the case. Mostly I'm just grumpy about the movie, because it had a lot of the ingredients to make a fun, interesting time-travel story, but decided instead to be about futuristic manpain, only with a character I didn't even care about. Twice.
(Actually, it reminds me a bit of how much I hated Inception - "dream a little bigger, darling" doesn't work when no one making the movie is - and also, that thing where a female character only exists for a boring hero to have wistful flashbacks about, although I guess at least Marion Cotillard's character got a first name and some dialogue, so it can always get worse.) (Since I can't remember a single name from this movie except Ariadne, I'm assuming she had a name, but I could be wrong.)
Just - it's the future, right? Could we maybe have something more interesting than the same old tired gun battles and explosions? And no, putting them at funny angles doesn't count, Inception.
I liked Robot & Frank, though, although it did suffer a bit from that weird delusion people seem to have that libraries are just places with books in them. (One of the side plots is that these future hipsters are closing the library - which has no computers or anything in it, somehow, and of course no one ever goes there except Frank - in order to turn it into a "community space," which in the actual world is redundant, which you would know if you'd been to a library recently.) I mean, I get it, the movie is about memory and obsolescence, so it's ~thematic~, but bleh anyway.
Also, Netflix has decided from these two movies that I am interested in "critically-acclaimed crime dramas," which I find inordinately amusing. Er, no. Way to miss the point there, Netflix.