Weekend (7 Mar) - Movie Madness

Weekend (7 Mar) - Movie Madness

This past Saturday was the second day of the Showcase, where crazy people like me spend entire days and most of the night watching movies at the local theatre. I stayed for all five movies this time, getting to the theatre about 10am and leaving just after 11pm that night. The Showcase crowd was larger and rowdier than last week's group. The noise got pretty deafening in between flicks, but we were true movie nuts and everyone settled down once the shows started.

They started us off with "An Education." You were right, erik, that coming in I wasn't very interested in this one. A British flick, about the seduction of a High School girl by a hustler in his thirties, had all the earmarks of a typical glacially moving and endlessly boring movie, including Emma Thompson playing the school dean. Much to my surprise, the movie was actually very good. I really liked the lead actress, Carey Mulligan. The movie was entertaining and likeable, although there were few surprises.

"The Hurt Locker" was next. This one got the Academy Award for Best Picture (as well as a bunch of other awards) Sunday night. Although I thought "Avatar" was better, "The Hurt Locker" was deserving, given the rest of the competition. This movie is "Blackhawk Down" for EOD soldiers, those men and women who have to disarm live shells, IEDs, and suicide bombers. It's intense and fast paced, and I thought it was well done.

"Up In The Air" was, eh, ok. I don't care much for George Clooney, and he didn't get any better in this movie, where not a great deal happens and it ends pretty much the way it started. It's basically young-hot-up and coming female exec thinks she knows everything until she's teamed up with the grizzly corporate veteran (Clooney) and shown how it really works. Mildly entertaining.

I was disappointed with "The Blind Side." Next to "The Hurt Locker" this was the one I most wanted to see. It's a good movie, but I guess I was expecting more from it. The movie is based on the true story of a getto black youth essentially adopted into an affluent white family and who becomes an NFL player. My one complaint is that the movie makes the whole thing look too easy. The main character seems to drift through the movie, good things happen to him, and there are few depictions of what in real life was a grim, painful, hopeless, upbringing for this kid.

The last movie of the evening was "Inglorious Basterds." I know you liked it, erik, but for me it fell flat. I was ready to rock and roll with a violent movie about a group of Jewish soldiers sent behind enemy lines to brutalize and massacre German soldiers. Unfortunately, except for the early scene in the movie that bloodily introduced the characters, this team of soldiers were mostly screw-ups. Their rise to fame and fear among Germans was barely touched on, and when they did get screen time it was to show half the team getting killed in a pub by mostly drunken Germans, giving themselves away as Americans so blatantly they deserved to be slaughtered. The rest of the crew, including the incompetent leader, Brad Pitt (that outrageous accent was the funniest thing in the movie), were captured and basically were non-entities for the last half of the movie. Having Hitler attend the showing of the movie "Nation's Pride" about a German sniper killing hundreds of Allied soldiers while that same sniper, now a movie star playing himself in the movie, made moves on the French woman who owned the theatre and planned to burn it down with Hitler inside, was a nice touch. But the inglorious basterds had little to do with any of that. As in all Tarantino movies, most everyone is dead by the time closing credits start. It was just too bad that Pitt had to survive. By then I was rooting hard for that German SS officer to kill him. Too bad at the end he turned out to be a wimp as well.

Rating all ten nominees, I would rank them:

#1: Avatar
#2: The Hurt Locker
#3: Up
#4: An Education
#5: The Blind Side
#6: District 9
#7: Up in the Air
#8: Inglorious Basterds
#9: A Serious Man

"Precious" wasn't rated because I didn't see it.

It's still pretty quiet on the WoW front. Philly is 33% of the way to level 77. Happy is still bringing in the gold. And Wild is still wondering if he will be getting into any raids this week.