Last movie you watched......

Shared "The Breakfast Club" with our two teenagers this weekend. I love that move, more importantly, our boys did not laugh at us but actually enjoyed it. "I will not be made a fool of.....(Vernon) [cut to shot of toilet seat cover hanging out of pants]"

 

"Barney's Version" (2010) has turned up on cable lately. Gets by on the appealing force of its cast - Paul Giamatti, Rosamund Pike, Dustin Hoffman (!). I'll watch anything with Giamatti in it - I'm heartbroken that he drifted through the town where I live, visiting Civil War sites, without me hearing about that until a few days after - but I like the AV Club's description of it as "an outsider's version" of the novel it's based upon.

 

Have seen a few lately:
Wild - Nicely shot/done, pretty intense at times. Reese was very good.
The Imitation game - absolutely awesome.
Birdman - loved the one cut/shot style. At first I hated the drums, but then towards the end it grew on me.

 

The Drop. I dozed off a few times, but the parts I saw were pretty decent.

 

Wild was good. It's always good when actors remind us how good they can be. I've always been a Witherspoon fan, but she hadn't been in anything really good in a long time.

 

Some friends of my wife & I wanted to see Blackhat so we went with them tonight to see it. It was ok. Lackluster ending. Could have been 20-30 minutes shorter. Also could have been a lot worse than it was.

 

Saw Into the Woods on Tuesday, not usually big on musicals, but this was actually quite entertaining.

 

Interstellar on Friday. I really enjoyed it. Few things though: score was amazing, but pretty darn loud at times and you really couldn't make out some of the dialogue. Not sure if Nolan did that on purpose. Loved how everything on Earth was a pretty quick pace and everything in space was slower. Nolan does a fantastic job of capturing emotion. Just quickly, the scene where Brand and Coop come back from the water planet, which seemed less than a few hours, was really 23 years. The scientist who stayed on Endurance waited 23 years. No human contact. That scene was superb IMO.

And the ending. Gosh.

Damn.

 

Mortdecai. Reasonably amusing and entertaining. Not riotously funny, but a decent two hours in the vein of The Pink Panther. Paul Bettany was really good. It struck me how much Gwyneth Paltrow has aged.

Mrs. Novelist and I had the theatre to ourselves, which really made the experience better. Nobody waving phones around in front of us.

 

Rambo III - again. Score one for the good guys.

 

Caught Lone Survivor on Cinemax Saturday night.

I guess my overall impression is that it was a very poorly planned mission. But, yes, those guys sure can take a lot of pain. It really can't be easy to tell such stories in the allotted 2-2.5 hours of a movie.

 

Finally watched "Muscle Shoals" this morning. What an incredible documentary. If posters such as Machine Head, Coco and the like haven't seen it, they really should. Also, anyone who loves the Drive-by Truckers will recognize the bassist who plays a prominent role.