Movies

I’m trying to climb back into the movie game. Carol and I saw 007 in Casino Royale today. We enjoyed it. I thought it was definitely several steps ahead of the last few Bond movies. When she wasn’t wearing too much makeup, Eva Green was an bonny bond girl.

Eh. It was better than needles under the toenails, but not as good as playing with Malcolm (did that not work? try the jpg. btw, I’m experimenting here with Mac versus Windows gamma. If either image is bad on your computer, let me know)

A Prairie Home Companion and Prada made a nice Meryl combo weekend. Ying and Yang with the high fashion maven and Yolonda. I had forgotten Robert Altman made one of my favorite movies about the arts, The Company. And, now after scrolling way down Altman’s imdb page, I see he made 6 episodes of Combat! I watched Combat! on channel 56 in the days before cable, when channel 56 meant black and white shows and fewer but off the wall commercials. And, scrolling just a touch further, I see he also did 8 Bonanza episodes! I’ve always wondered what Altman was famous for, now I know. It was his eight episodes of Bonanza.

Oh my. I still haven’t put back the reviews. Oh well. It was a good weekend for movies. Carol and I saw The Devil Wears Prada, which was fun. Until I get the reviews back up, I’d say this was a 4.

Saw Nacho Libre last night. Very funny! I am still pondering whether having watched Jack Black’s video podcast had a positive or negative effect on my enjoyment of the movie.

Myk said Cars holds its own with the Pixar family of great animation. I concur. Very funny, sweet, and beautifully animated.

It’s weird to give such a poor rating to a comedy which made me laugh quite a bit. Several things bothered me about The Break-up. First, I identified with Vince Vaughn’s character at some awkward times. Never enjoyable to identify with the clueless “infantile” guy of the movie. Second, the only relationship that didn’t suffer some kind of meltdoown at some point was Jennifer Aniston and her boss. Every other relationship was awful at some point. Finally, the whole movie was uneven. It’s a shame this movie didn’t work better. It had some fun moments and a good cast. It successfully created several nice moments that were ruined by the insubstantial moments that followed.

Kirk Honeycutt from Rotten Tomatoes says “The movie is amusing and clever but only skin deep”. That sums up how I felt afterwards pretty well. (oops. forgot to rate it)

Over the Hedge made me laugh. The short before the movie, which for a short time I managed to confuse for the actual movie, was very sweet. You have to love Shatner as a possum who was constantly flopping over “playing dead” at the slightest breeze.