The Filmgoing Joel

Movies I have watched lately...

The Dark Knight: Excellent movie! Probably the best I've seen all summer. What can I say that hasn't been said so far? Just that the movie is almost unforgivingly bleak and that you won't be leaving the theatre with a smile on your face, nosiree. Unless you're subjecting people to your bad Joker impersonation and yelling "WHY SO SERIOUS" at your soon-to-be-ex friends. And let's not forget Aaron Eckhart's turn as Harvey Dent, people! That was superlative as well, but it's been kind of buried underneath the mountain of deserved praise Heath Ledger has been receiving.

Hellboy II: Good movie. Addressed one of the issues I had with the first Hellboy movie, being that even though Hellboy is supposed to be this ultimate badass, he sure turns out to be a lousy fighter. Glad to see Abe Sapien with more personality. Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane voiced Johann Krauss and contrary to my expectations I loved the performance. The design of the movie was spectacular, and the movie had enough goofy charm to make it a good sorbet to cleanse the palate of the unrelenting bleakness of The Dark Knight. Go see it, won't you?

On DVD:

Hard Candy: I think they will show this movie to my friend Ben if he ever happens to go to hell. Why? Well, this is essentially a two-character piece, with one of the characters being a pedophile, and the other character being Ellen Page. It's a predator-prey situation with the players switching roles. Instead of Ellen Page on the run from some creepy pedophile, the pedophile gets tortured by Ellen Page. Now, you might be thinking, "Right on! They won't let me cut off the balls of child molesters in real life, but at least I get to watch it happen in a movie!" Well, be careful for what you wish for. Neither character is very likeable, and if neither of them have your sympathies, then who cares? There's some decent psychological thrilling going on, but the second you start thinking things over after the end of the movie the more sour the taste in your mouth will be.

The Baxter: A romantic comedy about the guy who usually gets left by the girl at the end of an average romantic comedy. A fertile source of comic inspiration, but the end result is a bit muddled. The movie could either have been a romantic comedy told from a different perspective or a satire about romantic comedy tropes, but the movie tries to weld them together and the result is merely okay.

Sunshine: I really liked this movie. There were some absolutely gorgeous scenes but unfortunately there also had to be some utterly lame-ass ones as well with the movie shoehorning in the whole "maniac who is driven insane by the enormity of space is running around and ruining people's shit" thing at the end, which at this point in science fiction is INCREDIBLY tired. This was obstensibly a hard science science fiction movie as well, which means that the things that take place are supposed to be somewhat plausible and acheivable by small extrapolations of our scientific acheivements to date. Unfortunately, a little research reveals that there's a lot of horseshit mixed in to the movie's science stew and that tempered my enthusiasm somewhat. Still, regardless of accuracy, the final scene was beautiful.