movie weekend
My girlfriend is off wandering the East Coast so I'm left to my own devices this weekend. While tomorrow I might be finally building a window seat that I bought the wood for nearly a year ago (Sad, I know. I do tend to procrastinate), tonight is being used for movies.
So far I've watched The Dirty Dozen on cable and Dreamgirls on DVD. Of the two, I'll go with WW2. While I know virtually everyone loved Dreamgirls, I'm in that small group that dissents. Over at Rotten Tomatoes Dreamgirls got a 78% fresh rating but I found it to be boring.
What I did like about it was Jennifer Hudson and Beyonce's wonderful singing and Jamie Foxx giving another great acting performance. There were also very good supporting roles by Eddie Murphy and Danny Glover. Yet, despite those "high notes" the movie struck me as an overly long docudrama which couldn't remember the correct names for the people. Should I blame the Broadway play for that or this movie? I don't know and I don't care. It might have been a little more interesting if the history lesson showed a little more grit but this tepid treatment was a snooze.
And another thing... the lead character of Effie, played by Hudson, is so annoying and hard to like that the payoff at the end--where we're supposed to get all misty--just misfires. Who freakin' cares what that self-involved {censored} wants? The scene of Effie in the unemployment office telling off the clerk keeps coming to mind. She said that she wasn't about to bother working since all she could do is sing--and nobody would let her. Jeeze. They should have cut that scene. What a bitch!
Next up is the movie The Prestige. This is a 2006 film starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as young magicians in London around 100 years ago. They're bitter rivals who trained together as apprentices. The Prestige got a 75% rating at Rotten Tomatoes and I hope it's better than Dreamgirls.
Dark eerie lighting, turn of the century London, mysterious goings on--what's not to like?
Update: I watched The Prestige last night and it was really good. The plot is kinda intricate and twisted and totally told out of sequence so you have to pay close attention during the first third of the movie. By that point, you've seen enough of the history of these two magicians to be able to figure out quickly where each new sequence belongs. These are two dudes that REALLY don't like one another. Hugh Jackman is excellent and Christian Bale is even better.
Tonight I watched most of Singing in the Rain on TCM--now this is a musical, Dreamgirls is garbage by comparison--then put in my third library DVD, Fay Grim. This is a 2006 quasi-spy flick that was so poorly acted that after 30 minutes I gave up on it. Stunk to high heaven. Maybe it was supposed to be campy and that was why they were all acting so arch--but if it was a spoof I didn't get it. Fay Grim's got some big name actors like Jeff Goldblum and Parker Posey in it so I expected better.
So far I've watched The Dirty Dozen on cable and Dreamgirls on DVD. Of the two, I'll go with WW2. While I know virtually everyone loved Dreamgirls, I'm in that small group that dissents. Over at Rotten Tomatoes Dreamgirls got a 78% fresh rating but I found it to be boring.
What I did like about it was Jennifer Hudson and Beyonce's wonderful singing and Jamie Foxx giving another great acting performance. There were also very good supporting roles by Eddie Murphy and Danny Glover. Yet, despite those "high notes" the movie struck me as an overly long docudrama which couldn't remember the correct names for the people. Should I blame the Broadway play for that or this movie? I don't know and I don't care. It might have been a little more interesting if the history lesson showed a little more grit but this tepid treatment was a snooze.
And another thing... the lead character of Effie, played by Hudson, is so annoying and hard to like that the payoff at the end--where we're supposed to get all misty--just misfires. Who freakin' cares what that self-involved {censored} wants? The scene of Effie in the unemployment office telling off the clerk keeps coming to mind. She said that she wasn't about to bother working since all she could do is sing--and nobody would let her. Jeeze. They should have cut that scene. What a bitch!
Next up is the movie The Prestige. This is a 2006 film starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as young magicians in London around 100 years ago. They're bitter rivals who trained together as apprentices. The Prestige got a 75% rating at Rotten Tomatoes and I hope it's better than Dreamgirls.Dark eerie lighting, turn of the century London, mysterious goings on--what's not to like?
Update: I watched The Prestige last night and it was really good. The plot is kinda intricate and twisted and totally told out of sequence so you have to pay close attention during the first third of the movie. By that point, you've seen enough of the history of these two magicians to be able to figure out quickly where each new sequence belongs. These are two dudes that REALLY don't like one another. Hugh Jackman is excellent and Christian Bale is even better.
Tonight I watched most of Singing in the Rain on TCM--now this is a musical, Dreamgirls is garbage by comparison--then put in my third library DVD, Fay Grim. This is a 2006 quasi-spy flick that was so poorly acted that after 30 minutes I gave up on it. Stunk to high heaven. Maybe it was supposed to be campy and that was why they were all acting so arch--but if it was a spoof I didn't get it. Fay Grim's got some big name actors like Jeff Goldblum and Parker Posey in it so I expected better.
Comments
(Actually we watched The Prestige and The Illusionist, which is also about stage magicians, but has a completely different premise and plot, in the same weekend.)
I think you'd like it.