quick movie recap

June 12, 2003

Matrix Reloaded: I liked what I liked and got kinda bored by the rest. It’s not that I don’t enjoy pseudophilosophy and K.Dickish mindfuckery, but I think it should be delivered in a better way than people talking really, really slowly. For this part of the movie, I found reading a lot of the deeper online discussions to be more interesting than the movie itself. The action scenes were bananas though, and I didn’t even mind when the CGI got a little fakey-fake. All in all, it had me chomping at the bit for the third one, which I guess was the real point.

Finding Nemo: The trailers for this really didn’t captivate me, but the staggeringly good reviews forced my hand. Nemo’s very good, although I’d still rank it below the two Toy Story movies. There’s not really any urgency or conflict in the movie, and that’s generally the secret to making me really buy into animated films (primary example being Iron Giant, I guess). Still, there’s some great character work and some really fun fish business.

Spellbound: Spelling bees. Everyone’s been in one, but I don’t really know of anyone that ever went National… Spellbound’s a documentary about eight kids that went National, that went big. ESPN. Uh, maybe that was ESPN2. Whatever! Surprisingly, none of the kids were pushed that hard by their parents, and all of them seemed to honestly like spelling. My favorite part was watching the Indian kid struggle through the spelling of “darjeeling.” I couldn’t have made that up if I tried.

2 Fast / 2 Furious : Most people know my dirty love for the first, so I went to see this despite the godawful reviews and previews. It’s actually funnier, intentionally and unintentionally, than the first. 2Fast also features one of the single gayest scenes since Tony Curtis gave Olivier a spongebath in Spartacus, which falls into unintentionally hilarious, I guess (this is arguably the gayest movie since Top Gun). The action itself is pretty standard, with a few really great stunts that were actually done with real cars, which was refreshing.

HULK : Interestingly, Ang Lee tries to make Hulk a real movie, which kind of makes it compelling and kinda boring at the same time. The HULK SMASH bits are all great, and the graphics are good enough to make Hulk a sympathetic character, which is pretty key. There’s a huge amount of time devoted to the non-smash though, and while it’s necessary, sometimes it goes on for quite a while. It doesn’t beat out Matrix:Reloaded for exposition though. I’ll catch it in the theaters before I give it a final verdict, but it’s already a pretty watchable piece of entertainment.

Posted in Moving Pictures