Today I saw The LEGO Batman Movie. I really should be talking about how it was a masterpiece of parody, how every frickin' frame had at least 3 in-jokes in it and some had dozens (Easter eggs? More like a damn chicken farm)...but right now the thing I wanna mention is the cute talking-animal commercial which preceded the movie advertising a product which you can put in your cat's litter box that will keep your dog from going into it to eat the cat poop. I did not know this was a thing and right now I am so glad I'm not a pet owner.

I decided to watch a more-obscure Kurosawa flick that I got from Netflix, The Bad Sleep Well. Ten minutes into it I'm going, "Holy crap, that's Phil Moscowitz!" I had no idea the guy had an actual career!

My take on Captain America: The Winter Soldier:

(Non-spoilery stuff above the cut)

Okay, I thought there was one special effect that wasn't very good and there were a couple of elements I thought were underused, but, other than that? Damn, this was a terrific flick. This is the Captain America movie I've been waiting for, the one that would let me feel Steve Rogers on a gut level. Thirty seconds in I was saying, "I already love this movie," and five minutes in I was saying, "I really already love this movie," because, yes, at last, Steve Rogers. Cap. YES. I feel it now. I get it. The man who smells like fresh applesauce and freedom; I salute it at last. This is the Captain America I thought I was signing on for and this movie has made me very happy.

No secret that Marvel Phase Two hasn't been a hit with me so far; I thought Iron Man 3 was irreverent and kinda annoying and lacking any sense of threat, while Thor 2 was mostly dull. I tried not to get my hopes up too high for this one as a result but it just kept looking so damn good in the previews, I couldn't help but pin some hopes on it. I'm so glad this one hit the mark for me.

( Here begins the Spoilery Stuff... )

I saw Gravity today and unconditionally adored it. Spacetravel and disaster and physics and survival mathematics and human ingenuity and narrative, ungh...!

Hawking's Chair, but this film was aimed directly at me and my film needs. What a movie.

The Hobbit: Way, way, WAY too long. I was writhing. There's some genuinely charming stuff in there, but most scenes are five times as long as they should be, and every major scene is played out five times over. Pacing, Peter, PACING. The Hobbit is an entertaining, nicely-paced book. Why bog it down so badly with all that extra filler?

(Except The Riddle Game. The Riddle Game was fabulous. The movie should have been The Riddle Game plus one hour. And that's all it should have been.)

My suggestion: stay home, wait for someone to cobble together a heavily edited-down version. You won't, but if you did I think you'd be happier.

Peter, you've got a chance to correct this with the next two. Edit them down. Don't pull a Lucas on us.

(Nothing to do with the film content, but I absolutely hated the 48 fps release. It looked like videotape. Please do not let this be a trend that lasts, ugh.)

Saw Brave yesterday. A lovely film.
1) As if I needed more reasons to be in love with Kelly Macdonald, Emma Thompson, and Billy Connelly. AS IF.
2) Gorgeous animation, just beautiful.
3) A Disney film with a heroine and a LIVING MOM, how about that, and the storyline is about their non-pathologic relationship, woo!
4) Felt a little bogged-down in the middle but picked right back up again well before the end.

Not my favorite of all the Pixar films, or even in the top five, but, hey, Pixar. Pretty much all the Pixar films are in my top 100 of all films ever.

(Haven't watched the season ender of Korra yet. On the schedule for tonight!)

For today's edition of JR:PLR, I give you 28 Weeks Later (sequel to 28 Days Later , both well-executed zombie contagion movies. Y'don't need to see the first to enjoy the second; they stand fine on their own). In this film you can see the dawning of casting directors saying, "Hey, let's keep putting that guy in military roles." Renner plays Sergeant Doyle, who really is kind of like earlier-in-his-military-career!Hawkeye; he's a soldier and sniper who disobeys his horrific orders and hits the ground to lead a group of uninfected humans out of Zombie Zone. (They let him have better hair than they did in The Hurt Locker, too; good thing Whedon let him return to that. Hair is a big factor in Renner's potential life-ruining superpowers.) Watching him in this and thinking about how many soldiers he's played in film made me think that twenty years ago, they'd have cast Michael Biehn to play Hawkeye, mightn't they have.



Here's a tribute fanvideo I found for Doyle on YouTube; of all those I saw I thought this one was the most aesthetically pleasing. WARNING for zombie blood 'n' gore, plus SPOILERS for pretty much everything in the film. Also SPOILERS all over the YouTube page itself, if you choose to go there.

Saw Snow White and the Huntsman yesterday. I wish it had been better. My disappointment had nothing to do with the performances; everyone's good! Everyone sustained their accents, and I thought Stewart and Hemsworth were particularly good as leads. (It's odd watching Hemsworth play a character who doesn't win every fistfight, isn't it.) The problem was the story (really was nothing we haven't seen before) and the tone, which couldn't decide when the camera framing needed to stay mythical and when to show views meant to frame a more colloquial moment. It was a jarring blend that at times worked against Charlize Theron in particular, and it...well, it was just boring. As in, "Are we staying for the rest of this?" I'll say that I'm glad I did; it did actually get better once the dwarves showed up (the effects for the dwarves were amazing; when I recognized half the actors playing the dwarves and realized they weren't dwarf actors, my jaw dropped) and the story had some nice elements from that point. I did like fairyland (it got the mythical thing right). By the end, though, I just wanted to pluck Stewart in her silver armor right out of that movie and stick her in a Joan of Arc biopic. I'd watch that.

The S.O. and I don't riff films in the theatre unless we have a completely empty theatre, but we have a rule that the previews are fair game and the occasional whispered riff is forgivable. Both of us Avengers-on-the-brain folk managed to make Arc Reactor jokes:

Duracell battery commercial just before the previews, recognizably voiced by Jeff Bridges: "...use the battery trusted by artists everywhere." Me: "And then say F**K BATTERIES and pluck your genius billionaire protégé's Arc Reactor out of his goddamn chest."

Kristen Stewart rides by in armor bearing standard. S.O.: "Put Tony Stark in that armor and he'll be Joan of Arc Reactor."

My favorite two minutes and thirty-nine seconds I saw on that screen yesterday came before the film started. Yeah, thass right, it's a lead-in to today's installment of Jeremy Ruiner Renner, Professional Life-Renner Ruiner:

Shoot, the day before my heart had been pounding just from reading the snippet in Esquire Magazine's Summer Preview for this film which read simply, "Completes Jeremy Renner's metamorphosis into an action star." Watching this I thought I was going to need freaking nitroglycerine pills. (S.O. just chuckled and patted me on the head.)

Avengers, The Avengers, Avengers Assemble...whatever they called it in your damn country, it's my duty to tell you they titled it wrong. The actual title of this film is, Would You All Just F**k Already.

Oh my GOD. I have never seen such a wealth of eyesex in two-and-a-half hours.

I understand ever so well why eeyore9990 said she couldn't make a proper response post to this film because her reaction was pretty much just one long squee sound. This film...I want to do this film. I could throw one leg over that boxed reel of celluloid and make moaning noises. There is little point in me trying to do a moment-by-moment breakdown of what I loved and what worked because every shot and every line and every plotpoint and every characterization and every calculated "See what we did there?" was beautiful. Some near-and-dear stuff will get specified under the cut, but, oh my god. The film gave every major character their own spotlight in the dance and I love how it did that and I loved absolutely everybody.

Which means my true fandom contribution should be to LIST ALL THE MOMENTS WHERE THE CHARACTERS WERE HAVING BETWEEN-SCENE SEX. AND THEN WE WILL ALL WRITE THEM. AND I'LL WRITE THE ONES THAT GET NEGLECTED. C'mon, what else do you hang around my journal for, anyway?

( SPOILERS, oh yes, behind here. More than just the eyesex discussion. But a whole lotta that anyway. )

Dreamt Sunday night that I had to give an impromptu stage performance of the mayor's wife in The Music Man and I did it channeling Sian Phillips as Livia in I, Claudius. Seemed to go over well.

I think I had ancient civilizations on my mind last night because I got my hands on a DVD of the animated Joseph, King of Dreams and watched it Sunday. This was the direct-to-DVD Dreamworks follow-up to the success of Prince of Egypt. Now, I never hear a single word about this film, and I have lots of animation fans in my net circles, so I figured it was a critical flop. But I found it cheap and was curious.

I went into it with low expectations. I was astounded at how delightful it was! If you can overlook the utter forgettability of the songs (I can), I can hardly think of a thing to criticize. I never realized how hard it must be to make everyone in that story sympathetic. Joseph could come off as arrogant, his brothers could come off as brutes, Potiphar could be a foolish cuckold. But everybody lived. Flaws and gifts, hopes and despairs, there were so many full-fledged characters in that thing. I was amazed. They kept it a children-friendly story yet no one was reduced to one-dimensional motives. Even tricky adult-issue elements chose to practice very nice subtlety, such as Potiphar's wife trying to seduce Joseph; there was all this careful unspoken communication that just poured out of that important scene: Joseph knowing he can't accuse his accuser right back because he knows it'll be an unforgivable offense, Potiphar understanding what's really going on and hating it, and Potiphar's wife showing an ounce of compassion even while she protects her own interests first.

There's so much of that. They were so very careful, trying not to give the viewer facepalm moments. Joseph doesn't simply blurt out his dreams about lording it over his brothers, for example; it's carefully set up and he's not so naive to miss that they won't like hearing that.

I really, really liked this film. I'm sorry it seems to have been so overlooked. (It's on Netflix streaming; check it out if you feel like it!)

Short non-spoilery thoughts on Quantum of Solace:

No James Bond opening titles music has ever moved me so little (okay, maybe Gladys Knight's License to Kill ties it), but that's the beginning and end of my beefs. The film was wicked cool. The action sequences, in particular, were a heckuva editing choice, for which my personal jury was out for a bit, but I decided they really fit. Every chase scene, on foot or by motorbike or car or boat or plane (and, yes, of course you'll have every one of those and then some in a Bond film), essentially said, "Look, it doesn't matter if the viewer knows in every eighth-of-a-second cut who it was who got their windshield shot out or nearly missed that leap to the next roof or got his arm sliced with a sliver of glass--all you need to know is that every move of this is fast and violent and it HURTS LIKE HELL."

Daniel Craig ate up that screen--and so did Judi Dench. I also enjoyed the villain; I have a thing for weaselly weak-sternumed bad guys, ever since I realized I wanted to be Piter De Vries in the De Laurentis Dune, what can I say.