Category: Three Sentence Movie Reviews

Matt and I thought we were seeing Bridesmaids, but apparently the truck stop movie theater switches its movies on Saturday, not Friday. So when it started, there was a moment of cognitive dissonance and confused discussion before we accepted our fate and settled in to this movie. However, as Matt pointed out, this was free of most of the usual “boy movie” fare (projectile vomiting, fart noises, diarrhea, overtly disgusting sex) and was rather witty, which made it a pretty enjoyable movie.

The thing I loved most about the book that this movie is based on is the numerous spot-on descriptions of life’s passages between 22 and 42. There was no way the movie could depict these descriptions, leaving me to enjoy the passage of time through clothing, but little else. It wasn’t a bad movie, it just paled in comparison to the book.

The second half of season one had many delightful moments, perhaps my favorite being the Madonna episode and also the Safety Dance flash mob scene where both Matt and myself felt sad because Artie is such a good dancer and we normally never get to see him move his feet. I found the Bohemian Rhapsody/birth scene to be a bit of a stretch, but as usual enjoyed the singing and the dancing. Matt and I watched a dance tutorial in the DVD extras that told us how to do a tiny bit of the “Rehab” dance and I was somewhat discouraged to realize that they were teaching us the dance at about one-quarter speed.*

This movie finally broke my streak of movies that contained good acting, good story, and were a little slow. I’m not sure how I missed this in the theater, as it has three actors I love to watch, and I appreciated their performances as well as the swelling 40s-style violins, the black and white film and the plot that kept me guessing. It was odd to see Toby Maguire as a morally compromised person, but that was just part of the fun.

I’ve been a fan of Aaron Sorkin’s TV series the West Wing for some time and I must confess that until I watched this DVD I didn’t really understand what the actual West Wing was.* Luckily, I was hard up for movies and brought home this 30 minute DVD, hosted by Laura Bush, and it explained it to me. Thank goodness the library stocks such informative information.

I myself am not a crossword puzzle person, though I would like to be. I found the opening–where Will Shortz reads his mail–to be hilarious and the story surprisingly moving. There are “famous” people throughout this documentary, but I found the most interesting people to be the “only famous in the puzzle world” puzzle people.

This seemed to have higher production values than Pitch Black, though I found the story less compelling. The sets were awesome and I enjoyed seeing the arc of Riddick. In fact, I wouldn’t mind some more Riddick movies, though I think this one makes it a little impossible.

We currently have at our house a borrowed copy of the DVD set of the Chronicles of Riddick Trilogy including this movie, Dark Fury. It’s all packaged together and so I wasn’t aware that this is a 30 minute animated “bridge” between two films. It was clearly drawn by people who think that Vin Diesel is one of the ugliest people on the planet, and thus was not really very fun to watch.

I knew going into this that it was a really awful movie, but had hope that the scuttlebutt was wrong, as Peter Bogdanovitch was the director, plus Sandra Bullock and Durmot Mulroney starred along side River Phoenix (his last movie) and Samantha Mathis (who?*). But yes, it was that bad. There were a few lovely moments, and the commentary features make me like it a bit better, but mostly this is a “only if you have the flu” movie.

Note: this great swath of eight movies watched in four days was because I was working on the Roman shades for the front room and there was a lot of hand stitching, which called for a lot of movie watching.

Documentaries for me are like my sometimes feelings about exercise, namely they tend to be something I have to force myself to partake in and then I usually quite enjoy them. This was no different. With hardly a word, we get to experience the first years of four children in widely different settings, which was informative (so that’s what they do when there are no diapers!) funny and moving.