OK, this week was moving week, you may or may not have noticed how quiet it's been around here and I apologise but moving is stressful! We just moved from a 3 bedroom house in to a 1 bedroom apartment. It was hard work. But the trip to Europe next year will be worth it I'm sure.
So there was very little moving picture viewing in the past 7 days. Mostly we fell asleep to CSI. It's a staple of our bed time viewing. Press play get amazed at the obnoxious female characters, get sleepy, zzzzzzz.
First off we largely enjoyed recent LAMB acting school subject Willem Dafoe in Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper. A very well made film that at times feels a little too slow. Or at least this week it wasn't really what we needed to relax to. Dafoe is so very very good as the former drug addict gone straight who still deals and is facing a bleak future. This film is well worth seeing.
Sucker Punch on the other hand is so very very bad. At no point during the partial viewing of this movie was I impressed by anything enough to watch another 30 seconds. I gave it half an hour, I hoped it would get better but the major issue I had with this film is Zach Snyder. He is to movie directing what magic markers are to simple pen drawings. At no point does he even consider making something simple and subtle, he just hits you over the head with a hammer and hopes that the splitting headache leaves you feeling like you've absorbed enough of the "story." I know a lot of people think that his choice of music is maybe even the best part of the film but for me it's the steel casing around that hammer. Repeating the chorus of Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics whilst you watch a bad family situation just in case you weren't sure she was being abused, using Where Is My Mind by The Pixies as she's locked in a mental institution is so ham-fisted it's unreal. The Dawn of the Dead remake was good, Watchmen was merely OK because I loved the book but this was absolutely beyond mediocre. But then you all knew that anyway right?
Bad movie week finished with the stand out worst movie of Ben Affleck's career. And that's saying something. Reindeer Games or Deception depending on what market you're in. Twelve minutes in and I was asking the question "how many stages of development and how many people read this to get this made and nobody thought to remove this first twelve minutes?" and it just got worse. I quite like Affleck, it's my Kevin Smith thing I guess, but his directing is also good so he gets to make whatever he wants as long as he doesn't make any more Michael Bay movies. The rest of the cast are big names who usually put in good performances, the director John Frankenheimer had recently made Ronin and was a big name in the sixties and yet the script is abysmal. There are no redeeming features yet I was so tired after the move that I merely drank my beer and let it happen.
Has anyone watched anything actually good this week?
