Last movie you watched......

I'll still see it.

 

Yep, and I'm pretty damn confident I'm going to enjoy it. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, end of argument.

 

Boy, that Dark Knight Rises was some portentous pantload, wasn't it?

 

We almost went to see 'Gangster Squad' late show Saturday night.
I surreptitiously got the choice switched to 'Zero Dark Thirty' and managed to make someone think it was her idea.

 

Silver Linings Playbook - The abrupt and dramatic erasure of the mental illness of the main characters was a bit jarring and weird, but it kept my interest. Definitely the best thing DeNiro has done in ages. I prefer this Jennifer Lawrence over the one in Hunger Games and Winter's Bone.

 

As promised, "Looper." Not as good as "Inception," but very satisfying.
Best part was the little kid - my God, what a remarkable performance.

 

You Inception'ed her. Nice job.

 

"Salmon Fishing in the Yemen."

Liked the main plot a lot, but didn't care for any of the interpersonal relationships. Had they made the soldier something more than a boyfriend of three weeks and focused a bit more on the relationship with the scientist and his wife, maybe. It had potential, but as it was I just didn't care for any of that.

And the press officer or whatever -- huh? The scenes from her house, I just wasn't sure what I was supposed to think. Making the Secretary of Whatever a boob wasn't necessary.

The media thing -- when the secretary and soldier were introduced to the press -- was just insipid, because there's just no way that many British media would have been there, and no way "all you need to know is he's a war hero" would have worked -- no one had any idea who that guy was.

And, in Yemen, there is just no way the girlfriend of three weeks would be OK to sleep in the same room as the guy. That's hashuma to the max.

The other plotline of the locals trying to destroy the project could have been fleshed out more. As it was, we just didn't know why they were trying to hamstring the thing. I would have much more preferred that subplot to be developed that the silly one with the relationships. Really, it's OK to have a movie about a subject and not have to have romantic involvement.

 

"Shame" is a great example of how well that clean, spare storytelling can work. There are not many characters. You have Brandon and Cissy. You have Brandon's love interest at work, his boss, and an assortment of paramours who kind of waltz in and out of the film. A low number of characters does not necessarily always work. It didn't work in "Carnage," for example, where people talked like they do in plays, not like they do in real life, and it felt like Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly, Christopher Waltz, and Jodie Foster were hamming it up for the snobs at Slate and The New Yorker, who consider "the theat-ah" the only true art, and such more than they were trying to inhabit real flesh-and-blood characters. But "Shame" never feels like a play, just like another terrifically lean recent screenplay - "Killer Joe" - did not, and that one was actually adapted from a play.

Compare to some of the bombastic, noble failures of the past couple years. I'm looking at you, "Prometheus." And I'm looking at you, "Inception." And I'm looking at you, "Dark Knight Rises."

Every great screenplay I can think of from recent times, but going back to "Chinatown" and before, manages to wring complexity out of simplicity. A lesser writer and director would have fucked up "Shame" by layering on some subplot related to his computer habits at work, for example. Instead, it's a movie about characters. At the same time, it's not a movie where nothing happens. There's action. There's tension. You walk out of it a richer person than you were entering it. I can't say that about "Inception" or "Dark Knight Rises," to continue to pick on Christopher Nolan, movies in which I have to expend so much energy following every extraneous plot contrivance over three flaccid hours that I can no longer bring myself to care about the results of any of it.

 

"Paranorman."

Cute concept and good animation. But too thin on story to be a full-length movie. The set-up was terrific, but as soon as they put a plot into motion, it lost steam very, very quickly. I was checking my watch a lot during the third act. It would have been better as a short film or as a one-hour TV Halloween special.

Note: Not really for younger kids at all.

 

Citizen Kane.

Hit home on many levels. Great flick.

 

I'm sure that there are also quite a few people who have been caught up in the middle of a terrifying race riot who don't think they are appropriate subject matter for a screwball comedy.