Last movie you watched......

Couple good scenes on a swing by the river. Otherwise, it was mostly set in a hotel.

 

"Zombieland." Really enjoyed that. Good script – Bill Murray surely ad-libbed all his stuff – and very well-made.

 

Law Abiding Citizen. Pretty good idea for a movie, but I'm not sure the folks behind it knew what they wanted it to be.

Gerard Butler was good, but I didn't get much from Jamie Foxx. Oscar or not, I never got the sense of any "interior life" to his character, who had to make quite a moral journey by movie's end. Denzel could have done more with the material, but he's played this kind of role before.

 

Academy Award nominee "Even the Rain." It's a beautiful movie, wonderfully acted, superbly edited and expertly directed. Go see it if you can.

 

Blows beyond comprehension. The Devil Wears Prada was Oscar material, by comparison.

 

"Taking Chance," an HBO movie I got off Netflix when I searched for Kevin Bacon movies.

Powerful movie, just over an hour, about a Marine officer who volunteers to accompany a deceased soldier's remains home from Iraq. It's about the reactions (and respect) the people along the way show both the escort and the fallen soldier.

The movie follows PFC Chance Phelps' remains from the time he's killed until his funeral and illustrates the process of getting the remains back to the family (or families, in this case, as Phelps' parents were divorced and remarried.)

It's based actual events; I'd like to read the book.

The thing that really surprised me is that most of the people seemed to know what the escort was doing. The airport personnel knowing was one thing, but even the young children in the airport stopped to watch him salute Phelps' remains, and there was a scene in which the body was driven from Billings to Wyoming and a smal funeral procession formed.

To me knowledge, I've never run across a soldier escort in any of my travels. I've sat next to several armed forces representatives it never would have crossed my mind to ask.

Anyway, as I said, a hugely powerful movie.

 

"A Girl Cut in Two," (2007) which I DVR'd mostly because it had Ludivine Sagnier in it. I thought it was going to wind up being a variation on "Shopgirl," with an older man and a younger man vying for a young woman's attention. Then somebody pulled a gun ...

 

Watched Winter's Bone last night. Hawkes and Lawrence were both deserving of the recognition from the Academy. The scene where they get pulled over by a sheriff while driving in the truck sealed the nom for Hawkes, I thought.

It was a very depressing movie, but it was very well-made. Not one I would watch over and over, but still very good.

If the Best Picture field was still five films, though, I don't know if it would have made the cut. I think it would have been The King's Speech, The Social Network, Inception, Black Swan and then either The Fighter or True Grit.

 

Pay It Forward ...finally got around to it, 11 years later. Ending was seen from a mile away, odd film but good message. Unrealistic? Pretty much.

 

Is that on PPV or out in RedBox, Netflix, etc.?

 

I totally think it should be recommended viewing.

 

I thought it was sad to watch a couple of good actors have to try to make something out of that material.