procrastinaters.com

A spot to share our movie thoughts/suggestions/reviews is a good idea, no?

I'll start us off. With the holidays, there's always a good bunch of big budget movies out and a few others the studios really want you to see, so they make sure to save them for now, and do not release them into the movie abyss that is between the end of the summer and Christmas. So here's what I've seen/been looking forward to.

The new Sherlock Holmes - saw it. not bad if you want an easy action film and/or like Robert Downey. not quite as good as the first one.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - saw it (thoughts later)

Mission Impossible - want to see because I'm a sucker for big-budget action non-sense

New Year's Eve - Looks like crud but will end up having to sit through it with the GF.

--

So I'll start with GWTDT because ZOMG WHAT A MOVIE. Seriously. Go see it now, assuming you can stomach the one hard-to-watch rape scene (not for the kidz). I never read the book (lol books? amirite?) and am a sucker for anything that New James Bond Daniel Craig is in so I wasn't really sure what to expect from this one. I didn't even read the back of the book, so I had no idea what I was getting into. The preview (see here) sold me pretty well.

So let's see how I can talk about this without giving things away like a dope. Craig is his usual self, although his character is a bit of a departure from the James Bond that seems to occasionally follow him. He doesn't throw a single punch and the one scene with gun-play leaves his character fretting and scared, so even as an unabashed Craig fan that was nice to see the actor/director go away from the really easy beat-em-up he could bring to a role. His character is a journalist who basically gets ruined with a loss in a libel suit at the beginning of the movie. He is tasked with investigating a 40+ year old family death. The twists and turns are great and the movie, while three freakin hours long, has so many twists and turns and little events it doesn't feel like it's so long. It's not overly drawn out, every scene has some importance to it.

Part of what makes it so long is that the other lead, Rooney Mara (the girl with said tattoo), is a separate story for the first half of the movie, save for her private investigation of Craig's character. She's a mistreated miscreant that was declared insane by the state and, despite being in her 20s, is under the eye of the state. She's also the best PI in the business, if you can work with her quirks and introversion. The pair end up collaborating eventually on the cold case Craig is looking to solve and, with any age old family issue, it doesn't want to be discovered.

But seriously, there's a lot of plot points in this movie so don't get the large soda. You won't want to run out in the middle of the movie.

-- Edited by kdawgy on Wednesday 28th of December 2011 12:36:56 AM