More than two weeks since my last real update. Once again, the day to day stuff starts on Facebook and gets back posted here, so this is movies and TV series.
“The Big Sick” is a romantic comedy about a girl in a coma, based on reality, written and starring the person who really lived it. The movie is every bit as strange as that implies, but a LOT of fun. We liked it a lot.
“Spider-Man: Homecoming” is the most recent reboot of the Spider-Man franchise. This version is younger and slightly goofier than his predessors. Being the first movie of a new sequence, it doesn’t suffer from the “bigger, better, more” mania that cripples most long running series. We enjoyed this one a great deal.
“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” is pretty and kind of dumb. Cara Delevinge ALMOST carries the movie, but Dane Dehaan is too short and too baby-faced to have the gravitas that the title role calls for. To some extent, the time for this movie passed about a decage ago; we have seen so many awe-inspiring settings that we have run out of awe. It’s adequate and enjoyable, but no more.
“War for the Planet of the Apes” is the third and presumably last episode of this rather amazing series that demonstrates that a 40 year old schlock series can be mined to create something that is truly epic. There is a beauty to this narrative that often makes me cry. We have loved the others, and we love this one as well.
“Atomic Blonde” might be the movie that people ought to be talking about when they are gushing over “Wonder Woman”. It tries a little bit too hard to be cool and edgy, but Charlize Theron is amazing as the title character. We liked this one a great deal.
“Dunkirk” takes one of the most amazing events in history and manages to make it pointlessly confusing and kind of trite. There are still a few scenes where the magic of the event transcends the idiocy of the film making, but there aren’t really enough of them. We were not impressed.
“Jessica Jones” has finally come out on DVD, and we got to watch it. The first episode gets lost in its efforts to be dark and cool and edgy, but then settles down and tells a good story well. We really enjoyed the comics this was based on, and this is a worthy re-imagining.
“Daredevil” is based on one of Marvel’s most consistently interesting heroes, and does the source material justice.
“Big Love” has an interesting setting, but in the end it is just another soap opera of the “stupid people being unhappy” variety, and we barely made it through the first episode before we bailed. We are glad that we borrowed, rather than bought, this particular DVD set.
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