I enjoyed the original The Fast and the Furious. I’m pretty certain I even saw the second installment in the theater. And I think Tokyo Drift was the 3rd movie, but I have no memory of the 4th movie existing. In fact, the only reason I even think there was a 4th movie is because the last one released was called Fast Five (and I have now seen ads for number 6).
I liked Fast Five. I knew going in that plausibility was not going to be high, so I was just able to ignore that and enjoy the ride.
I loved the first X-Men movie and enjoyed the next two. Wolverine was a different story, but I found myself watching X-Men First Class with the same wonder as the first movie.
I did have one major quibble though. You know from the earlier movies that Professor X and Magneto are friends, despite their different views of the world. What you never see in those movies is a relationship between Professor X and Mystique. And yet, according to First Class, they grew up thinking of themselves as brother and sister. There aren’t even hints of this in the earlier movies.
I had a speech impediment as a child. Throughout first grade, I met with a speech therapist weekly to help me get rid of my lisp. It was very much about muscle training. Even now, if I am very tired, or on the rare occasions I have too much to drink, my lisp will return.
This is the personal background I brought to watching The King’s Speech. I not only enjoyed the movie very much (I do love Colin Firth), but I also found the scenes of actual speech therapy feeling very familiar, despite the differences between lisps and stutters.
No, Russell Crowe was not great as Javert, and yes, that is kind of sad because with a good Javert, his two solos, Stars and Javert’s Suicide, are the most powerful songs in the show. And no, Amanda Seyfried also wasn’t great, but Cosette’s songs have always been my least favorite. However, Hugh Jackman was a fine Jean Valjean, and Marius and Eponine were well cast. The movie was not ruined by the so-so singing, and it did allow other performances to shine. I won’t buy the movie on DVD, but I’m not sad I saw it in the theater.
Geek confession time- I’ve never read Tolkien. I did tremendously enjoy Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and looked forward to seeing The Hobbit. I am amused that he was able to keep three really long books to a movie each but has decided to turn the shortest of the books into three movies of its own.
I enjoyed The Hobbit tremendously. Martin Freeman is the perfect Bilbo, and the dwarves were differentiated well enough to keep track of who was who. The action was very well done, though I am happy we did not see it in 3D.
Rock of Ages was a lot of fun. Know in advance that I like musicals, and I love 80s hair band music, so on some level, this was a movie made for me. The leads were appropriately cute and innocent. Tom Cruise excels at playing the random crazy guy (though I’m not positive that’s acting), and Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand were a very cute coupleI didn’t even find Russell Brand very annoying, which is saying something.
Mary J Blige’s character should have been explored more. She seemed awfully tangential for how important I think she was supposed to be.
We finally saw Brave the night before Thanksgiving. What can I say? A Disney Princess movie that does not end in marriage- what is the world coming to? AND there was an actual mother in the movie- not a wicked step-mother, but a loving mother. In the past, only Disney animal movies have been allowed these things. It’s like my childhood has been completely upended, and I am thrilled.
I loved bothMeridaand her mother. I loved that the central love story was the one between parent and child, especially in a movie that’s aimed at, you know, children.
Because we are behind the times at our house, when Avengers was coming out last summer, we had people telling us- Oh, you need to see Captain America before Avengers. Last night, right before we watched it, J asked to make sure we’d seen Thor, as he felt that was the most important prerequisite. We had. We’d also seen the Ed Norton Hulk (I loved Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner), and the firstIronMan.
Honestly, I don’t really think we really needed to see any of them. They added something, but the movie stood on its own just fine.
What I liked most about The Warrior’s Way was the fight choreography- especially in the beginning. It felt very true to the many martial arts movies I have seen that weren’t made by Americans. It was shot beautifully, and certainly paid tribute to many films that have gone before it.
From there, we entered the American West. It wasn’t exactly an honest picture of the time period, but this movie wasn’t meant to be a historically accurate depiction of anything.
The ending was emotionally satisfactory, even if the postscript scenes made little sense, even within the context of the movie.
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