Wednesday, January 2, 2008 - Holiday Movie Roundup

For my first post of 2008, I am going to talk about some movies that I saw over the long holiday.

• Sweeney Todd - I know I've already blogged about this, but I just wanted to give it another shout out because my appreciation for it has only deepened as I have listened to the Original Broadway cast album a few times. Yes, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are not even capable of impersonating Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, but I am struck at just how faithful the movie was to the musical. I think this may be the best musical adaption I have ever seen.
• Transformers - Being a child of the 80s, I am a Transformers dork, and I got the movie for Christmas. Actually, I got it three times because my parents got me the copy on my Amazon Wishlist, and my grandmother bought it for me twice. Ah, senility! Anyway, I will not say this is a great movie, but Michael Bay and his team did a pretty good job of making a live action cartoon. I am certainly agreeable with them putting realtime physics onto the Transformers, because it was always kinda silly that a robot the size of Megatron would transform into a handgun. However, with the translation to realtime mechanics, the robots really lost a lot of their personality, which is kind of why we watched in the first palce.
• Serenity - This is sort of a Joss Whedon couple weeks for me, since I also received the 6th season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD, but Serenity is the movie created after the short lived series, Firefly, bit the big one. Whedon's idea was to make a quirky outer space drama be like a western, with six gun lasers and everything. It was probably a little too quirky for your average viewer, but it is certainly an interesting vision. The movie is pretty self-contained, so you do not need to have watched any of the series to appreciate it, and if you like Sci-fi at all, I encourage you to give it a look.
• Enchanted - This was the second of our New York double feature that Romeo, Maestro, and I took in yesterday. I think the best way I can describe it is "cute." Since we paid for I Am Legend in IMAX, we snuck into Enchanted, and I am pretty happy that I didn't pay for it. Obviously, I am not the target audience for this type of movie, but I think they did a pretty good job of making a story that appeals to all ages. Plus, the twists and nods to the ragged conventions of Disney fairy tales were pretty welcome. Amy Adams was great as Gisele, and Timothy Spall, who played kind of the same character without the moral redemption in Sweeney Todd, was pretty good in his different guises.
• I Am Legend - I am not a huge Will Smith fan, but I appreciate his place in the culture. I have the same problem with him as I do with Tom Hanks. I just really cannot take them seriously. In Hanks' case, whenever I see him being dramatic, I think of him in a dress on Bosom Buddies. Since I love sci-fi and enjoyed Constantine from the same director, I decided to give this one a go, and I found a very atypical Hollywood blockbuster. I could have done without a lot of the shaky camera work because watching it on IMAX only made me sicker, and while I can see people get decapitated and laugh at it, I really do not like seeing animals hurt. However, I can say that I really enjoyed the movie. I certainly didn't always buy Smith's decent into madness, but I think he conveyed the loneliness that his character felt. I do not know if it benefited at all from the IMAX experience. Since it was a pretty quiet movie, except for the action scenes, it did not benefit from the amazing IMAX audio, but heck, I mainly wanted to see it so that I could see the six minutes of Batman: The Dark Night footage, which was pretty fantastic. I may even start buying Heath Ledger as The Joker.
• Hot Fuzz - I LOVE THIS MOVIE! I was bored one night, and I didn't feel like going out to the video store. So, I checked out what I could get on demand through cable. Being a movie nerd, I had heard a lot about Simon Pegg and his band of crazies, but I never got to see Shaun of the Dead, so I was unsure as to what I was getting into. I am so glad I bought it (twice). Quite frankly, it is the funniest thing I've seen all year. If you love British dry humor, then you absolutely need to watch this. Even when it starts to get spin a bit out of control with the schmaltz towards the end, just thinking about the grocery store siege will make you laugh all the more.

So, this is how I spent my Christmas vacation. I really kind of went batty with boredom for a lot of it, but now that I am back at work, I wish I was still on the couch!