Movies of the Week - Summer Roundup
Sep. 8th, 2014 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaceyLife has been hectic and I've been missing out on blogging my cinematic experiences. In some cases that's good (some disappointments) but in other cases I need to give a shout-out.
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Entertaining animation from Dreamworks with a few dodgy accents. The second outing for Hiccup and Toothless, his dragon, plus the the intrepid Viking dragon riders of Berk. Set five years after the first movie the villagers of Berk are now thoroughly committed to dragons. The children have grown into teenagers and together with Hiccup's long lost mother thwart the evil intentions of Drago Bludvist, his bewilderbeast and his evil dragon army. Some sad moments and a lot of feelgood factor, this is Hiccup's coming of age story. Yes, I know it's a kids' film. Go see it anyway.
Guardians of the Galaxy
Every bit as good as I'd hoped. This is a fun movie (based on the Marvel Comics) with a witty script, an intriguing cast of humanoid and non humanoid characters and some rip-roaring adventure. Chris Pratt is an engaging hero at Peter Quill/Star Lord, an incompetent petty criminal with more panache than sense, but like Han Solo he comes good in the end. The Guardians are a bunch of extraterrestrial misfits, Groot - a sentient tree whose single word vocabulary is Groot, Drax the Destroyer, Rocket the sentient racoon, who seems to be the brains of the outfit Zoe Saldana - green this time instead of blue (Avatar) is Gamora, the assassin who changes sides to keep the Orb out of the hands of the villains. Lots of thud and blunder. Our heroes are pitted against Ronan the Accuser and the titan, Thanos. It's still in cinemas. If you haven't seen it, go! A shout out to Karen Gillan (Amy Pond/Dr Who) as a mean bald villainess.
Maleficent
Oh dear. This didn't live up to its hype, I'm afraid. Angelina Jolie plays... Angelina Jolie in curtain chewing mode. It's a live action replay of Sleeping Beauty with the bad fairy, Maleficent, trying to atone for her mistake in condemning the pricess to the prickly spindle spell, and the dopey good faries trying to bring up the princess out of harm's way. Theres a feminist revisionist backstory which accounts for Maleficent's bitterness towards the king on the occasion of his daughter's christening. It's a bit ho-hum to be honest.
Chef
It was a slow week and the trailer looked mildly amusing so H and I toddled off to see Chef, a movie which seems to have passed most of our friends by, which is a pity because it's excellent. John Favreau writes, produces, directs and stars in a movie which is almost food-porn. Hey, no almost about it. You leave this film hungry. It's incredibly good humoured, has very little in the way of jeopardy or bad humour. Favreau pulls in old mates to take cameo roles: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Downey Junior, Scarlett Johansson. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a brilliant chef who, after falling out with his restaurant-owner boss (Hoffman) and getting on the wrong side of snarky food critic Ramsay Michael (Oliver Platt) in an accidentally public twitter storm, decides to quit his job and get back to basics. he does this in a decrepit food truck supplied by Downey Jnr playing the ex-husband of his estranged wife, Inez (Sofia Vergara). It's a road movie as well as a food movie. Casper takes to the road with his friend (and cook) Martin and his son, Percy, rebuilding his reputation and self-esteem and also the relationship with his son and his ex-wife. A great summer feelgood movie. Catch it if you still can.
What If
Very sweet and worth watching if you want to see Harry Potter grow up. Daniel Radcliffe rom-com. Pretty entertaining. Radcliffe is reasonably adorkable and doubtless will please all twenty-somethings who grew up with Harry Potter. Set in Toronto, Radcliffe plays Wallace, a chap with a dead-end job and not much in the way of prospects, who falls for Chantry, a girl at a party who already has a long term live-in lover. They agree to be friends and their friendship develops... and develops. There are complications, of course, mostly in the shape of Chantry's boyfriend, but it's a rom com, so I don't need to tell you how it ends, do I? Suffice it to say no one ends up under a train. It's a good way to spend a wet Wednesday afternoon.
Earth to Echo
The promo says it's An adventure as big as the universe'. Yeah, right, A kind of cutesy ET with kids chasing round on bikes and in stolen cars with very good intentions. Amusing enough, but one of those movies you magically forget as soon as you leave the cinema. Tuck, Munch and Alex are a trio of inseparable friends who are about to be separated permanently when their neighbourhood is scheduled for demolition for aGalactic Super Highway err... wrong movie... road. In the last week before moving away they track down strange signals received on their phones and discover a cutesy little alien robot, called ET Echo, stranded on earth. There's a lot of running about, a big reveal at the end, and a message that being separated by distance doesn't destroy a friendship. Yeah, that's about it really without getting into spoiler territory. I'm glad I didn't pay full price to see it.
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Entertaining animation from Dreamworks with a few dodgy accents. The second outing for Hiccup and Toothless, his dragon, plus the the intrepid Viking dragon riders of Berk. Set five years after the first movie the villagers of Berk are now thoroughly committed to dragons. The children have grown into teenagers and together with Hiccup's long lost mother thwart the evil intentions of Drago Bludvist, his bewilderbeast and his evil dragon army. Some sad moments and a lot of feelgood factor, this is Hiccup's coming of age story. Yes, I know it's a kids' film. Go see it anyway.
Guardians of the Galaxy
Every bit as good as I'd hoped. This is a fun movie (based on the Marvel Comics) with a witty script, an intriguing cast of humanoid and non humanoid characters and some rip-roaring adventure. Chris Pratt is an engaging hero at Peter Quill/Star Lord, an incompetent petty criminal with more panache than sense, but like Han Solo he comes good in the end. The Guardians are a bunch of extraterrestrial misfits, Groot - a sentient tree whose single word vocabulary is Groot, Drax the Destroyer, Rocket the sentient racoon, who seems to be the brains of the outfit Zoe Saldana - green this time instead of blue (Avatar) is Gamora, the assassin who changes sides to keep the Orb out of the hands of the villains. Lots of thud and blunder. Our heroes are pitted against Ronan the Accuser and the titan, Thanos. It's still in cinemas. If you haven't seen it, go! A shout out to Karen Gillan (Amy Pond/Dr Who) as a mean bald villainess.
Maleficent
Oh dear. This didn't live up to its hype, I'm afraid. Angelina Jolie plays... Angelina Jolie in curtain chewing mode. It's a live action replay of Sleeping Beauty with the bad fairy, Maleficent, trying to atone for her mistake in condemning the pricess to the prickly spindle spell, and the dopey good faries trying to bring up the princess out of harm's way. Theres a feminist revisionist backstory which accounts for Maleficent's bitterness towards the king on the occasion of his daughter's christening. It's a bit ho-hum to be honest.
Chef
It was a slow week and the trailer looked mildly amusing so H and I toddled off to see Chef, a movie which seems to have passed most of our friends by, which is a pity because it's excellent. John Favreau writes, produces, directs and stars in a movie which is almost food-porn. Hey, no almost about it. You leave this film hungry. It's incredibly good humoured, has very little in the way of jeopardy or bad humour. Favreau pulls in old mates to take cameo roles: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Downey Junior, Scarlett Johansson. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a brilliant chef who, after falling out with his restaurant-owner boss (Hoffman) and getting on the wrong side of snarky food critic Ramsay Michael (Oliver Platt) in an accidentally public twitter storm, decides to quit his job and get back to basics. he does this in a decrepit food truck supplied by Downey Jnr playing the ex-husband of his estranged wife, Inez (Sofia Vergara). It's a road movie as well as a food movie. Casper takes to the road with his friend (and cook) Martin and his son, Percy, rebuilding his reputation and self-esteem and also the relationship with his son and his ex-wife. A great summer feelgood movie. Catch it if you still can.
What If
Very sweet and worth watching if you want to see Harry Potter grow up. Daniel Radcliffe rom-com. Pretty entertaining. Radcliffe is reasonably adorkable and doubtless will please all twenty-somethings who grew up with Harry Potter. Set in Toronto, Radcliffe plays Wallace, a chap with a dead-end job and not much in the way of prospects, who falls for Chantry, a girl at a party who already has a long term live-in lover. They agree to be friends and their friendship develops... and develops. There are complications, of course, mostly in the shape of Chantry's boyfriend, but it's a rom com, so I don't need to tell you how it ends, do I? Suffice it to say no one ends up under a train. It's a good way to spend a wet Wednesday afternoon.
Earth to Echo
The promo says it's An adventure as big as the universe'. Yeah, right, A kind of cutesy ET with kids chasing round on bikes and in stolen cars with very good intentions. Amusing enough, but one of those movies you magically forget as soon as you leave the cinema. Tuck, Munch and Alex are a trio of inseparable friends who are about to be separated permanently when their neighbourhood is scheduled for demolition for a
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Date: Sep. 8th, 2014 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 8th, 2014 10:58 pm (UTC)