Last movie you watched......

I think that was Mark Boal trying on some David Mamet.

Zero Dark Thirty is, well, some movie. It's very effective, a crack pipe of badassery. Bigelow's always had a good handle on what rocks people's worlds.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/secrets-of-zero-dark-thirty-20130111

Kind of offensive that Bigelow was "completely surprised" to find out women were crucial to operation. You'd think she would recognize that women can be highly successful in jobs traditionally assigned to men.

 

Saw The Place Beyond the Pines. Maybe I'll get killed for this but I hated it. Boring and bland and the story was told basically like a self-contained three part mini-series. Gosling was good as usual but they never let any of the characters become fully-realized or developed enough for me to care about them. Some of these rave reviews I keep reading about how it should be an Oscar contender, etc. just baffles me. I guess you take that cast and make an artsy kind of movie and people are supposed to bow down to it. I just don't see it. Nearly walked out a couple of times.

 

It was immensely better than THL.

 

Saw the Seventh Seal about a month ago. Easily one of my top five favorite movies.

 

Saw Alex Cross last night and hated it. Started off strong and Matthew Fox was intriguing as the sociopathic villain, but it quickly fell into a trite, formulaic cop flick. The fact that we never learn anything about Matthew Fox's character was a real disappointment.

The acting, particularly Jean Reno's, was laughably bad by everyone except Fox.

I didn't realize it until my girlfriend told me part-way through the movie that this was part of the same series as Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider (both of which I also disliked). I thought the same thing about those movies, that they had a good concept, but ultimately fell flat.

 

Wouldn't a good movie have ruined the trilogy then?

 

Plus, it has one of the most random spoofings of all-time, in that it was mocked in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey:

 

The all-timer is Strange Brew being based on Hamlet.

 

I was excited about World War Z. Now? Not so much.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/04/world-war-z-vanity-fair/64723/

Sounds like a rental at best.

 

The Mouse That Roared with Peter Sellers and The Expendables 2. Not as weird of a double-feature as you would think.

 

Jeebus - How the hell does that movie cost $200 million to make? I mean, I guess if you give anyone $200 million and tell them they can spend it, they'll find ways, but as a genre "zombie movie" strikes me as something that generally has fixed costs, even if you factor in the extra $20 million or so it probably took to guarantee Pitt's services.

I do agree with the article's assessment that the book doesn't exactly lend itself to a movie - it's mostly disconnected stories, and I think it probably would have worked better as a mix of Walking Dead and Twilight Zone, like zombie killing in a new locale each week. The Zombie Survival Guide seems like it would have been easier to adapt for a movie, except Zombieland kind of already used that format.