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Sick Girl Movie Reviews: Man of Steel, Now You See Me, Magic Mike, Frozen

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I’ve been sick a lot this year, which is a fun result of having an autoimmune disorder. Sometimes I catch up on my reading; sometimes, if my vision has gone too blurry to let me read (ocular migraines, yay), I end up watching a lot of TV.

Man of Steel was a godawful boring movie, wasn’t it? Was the director hell-bent on setting up even more dramatic circumstances than Superman canon generally offers, and then having his entire (stellar) cast suppress all visible signs of emotion no matter what was happening to them? Spoilers ahead! There were things I was really into, even when they made absolutely no sense: the Krypton setup, Jor El as an interactive AI, Lois in the Arctic dig, Clark turning up at The Daily Planet after shenanigans have occurred. And some things I did not buy at all: the Codex is in his cells! Clark lets his dad die to hide his secret? And then he leaves his mom alone on the farm and becomes a boat hand… because reasons. Also, there were some really weird scene changes and editorial cuts. I feel like a great movie could be made out of alternate takes from this one, if you also just cut the tornado sequence entirely and let the audience assume Jonathan died of natural causes somehow. And maybe if you minimized the shots of alien ships crashing into skyscrapers. That was probably a really unpleasant viewing experience for New Yorkers — it was for me — and I don’t think the movie offered a lot of compensation for making people sit through that. If your big emotional climax is a guy screaming his man-pain to the sky, you’re going to have to top Point Break, and this one didn’t despite its megabudget and superexplosions. Characters feeling things is more compelling than shit blowing up: Film 101.

Now You See Me was mildly amusing, but it broke its promise to the viewer, which was that we’d be following the lives of the illusionists. Instead, after the big opening act, the bulk of the movie focused on Mark Ruffalo’s detective character and a totally nonsensical counterpart from Interpol. A lot of the misdirection was obvious, but the big reveal didn’t feel earned. Meh.

Magic Mike was so stupid I felt my brain cells dribbling out my ears, and the eye candy was so tasteless that it didn’t make up for the (expected) lack of plot and dialogue. I suppose having Olivia Munn take her top off a few minutes into the movie was the directors’ way of throwing a bone to any men in the audience who got dragged to see this, but it didn’t help my feeling that everyone involved was being exploited for very little reward. The frustrating part is that there were some good ideas here, but they didn’t get any follow-through. The subplot with Munn’s character using Tatum’s to get her kink on because she couldn’t share that side of herself with her fiancè was way more interesting than what was going on in the main story with The Kid’s sister. Because a three-way is acceptable in a mainstream movie only if it’s played as a man’s conquest rather than a woman’s desire, I guess. But the story about a hard-luck guy doing high-risk things to make his entrepreneurial dreams come true is one we’ve seen a dozen times before; I’d much rather watch a movie about a psychology grad student working through her discomfort with her own sexuality. That’s a movie we don’t ever get to see.

Frozen was adorable. The tot actually sat still and watched it for about forty-five minutes, which is about three times as long as his usual attention span. I watched the second half over the sounds of his LEGO trains, so it’s possible that I missed some stuff, but I’m sure we’ll see it another three or four hundred times.

The second half of the second season of Arrow did absolutely nothing to redeem itself. So much potential; so much squandering. At least Dig got something to do for, like, twenty minutes.

And that’s all I managed to clear off the DVR this week! We have Starz for a couple of months to watch Outlander (of which I approve so far), and I’m getting a virus every three or four weeks, so tune in next time for more Sick Girl Movie Reviews!


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