2010: Movies Sorted By Tier
Submitted by jim on Sat, 02/20/2010 - 23:35
Tags:
Loved
- None Yet
Really Liked
- How to Train Your Dragon ... Fun for the whole family. You'll probably feel the same way about this as you do about Kung Fu Panda, which I also really liked, although personally I think I enjoyed this even more.
Glad I Saw
- Alice in Wonderland ... Visually impressive and imaginative, and I actually think this sequel of sorts improves on the plot (at least for cinamatic purposes), and I do like the framing of the whole thing with a Jane Austenesque social dilemma for our heroine, but it there's not much here to latch onto, emotionally. I really only cared about the Bandersnatch.
- Shutter Island ... I just can't put my finger on what didn't quite work for me here. I do find it hard, generally, to engage with and since I saw that coming early perhaps I held the whole thing at arm's length. DiCaprio is great, and the movie finishes very strong, but.. but... I dunno. A near miss for Scorsese, I think. A near miss from him is better than a direct hit from somebody else, but still.Spoiler: Highlight to viewplots that take place inside somebody's head
Guilty Pleasures
- The Wolfman ... Some pacing issues, and Del Toro is a little heavy-handed with the brooding, and it was a mistake to make the wolfman look so much like the wolfman of old, I think. The gore is distractingly gratuitous and doesn't evoke horror so much as detachedly noting "hmm, that was gorier than it needed to be." But it was fun enough and I jumped a few times and it had Emily Blunt in it.
Could Have Missed
- Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief ... I try not to compare book and movie versions, separate works and all that, so I don't care if I envision a character with red hair and she is cast as blonde, or that sort of thing. But adaptations like this do bother me, where they strip everything that's interesting out of the book and flatten it and linearize it down to nothing. There's no prophesy of a traitor, so there's no "who is it" tension. There's no Kronos stuff, which means there's really no villain of interest. The script is thin, the acting is uneven, and the directing is half-hearted at best (even with a whole heart Chris Columbus isn't usually up to snuff). That said, my kids really liked it, and I'd say it was okayish, it just could have been so much more (see The Spiderwick Chronicles for an example of how to make a good adaptation).
Should Have Missed
- Clash of the Titans ... If you remove the nostalgia and MST3K cheesiness from the original but otherwise do a pretty straight remake, what are you left with? Exactly. On the bright side, Anthony Lane has great fun with his review. Enjoy the review, skip the movie.
El Sucko Grande
- None Yet
Unranked
- None Yet
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