Three weekend movies
May. 9th, 2016 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiWe consumed some media this weekend:
1. Captain America: Civil War. This tiny indy character piece does a nice job of establishing two friends as antagonists (both driven by different forms of grief), without making either into a villain. More importantly, while it's got plot holes aplenty, it's infinitely better than the flaming heap of dog shit that was Mark Millar's comic series. It has at least a couple of truly wonderful moments, and it has the first Spider-Man I've given a shit about since the original Raimi film. There's also a wonderful moment right at the very end in which Black Panther undercuts and takes the piss out of one of my least favorite recent movie and TV villain tropes (not going spoilery yet -- I might make a longer post later).
2. Sisters. Grabbed this from the library, and was genuinely surprised by how funny it was. It's an inversion of the classic party movie (think House Party or Can't Hardly Wait), this time with the party being held by a bunch of forty-somethings, all of whom have kids and stable lives now. The entire cast is brilliant (I mean, when Poehler and Fey are your stars, and you have Maya Rudolph, Diane Wiest, Bobby Moynahan, and James Brolin, you know you'll get some great moments). Moynahan nearly steals the movie in the second half, but pretty much everyone here is wonderful and the chemistry between all the characters is great. If you want a plot, it's this: Fey an Poehler play sisters whose parents are selling their childhood home, and while cleaning out their room, they decide to throw one last party, this time allowing Poehler (the "good" sister who was always sober at parties) to cut loose. All hell eventually breaks loose. Oh, and it has John Cena being surprisingly funny in some scenes. Kind of like the next film.
3. Trainwreck. This was a fun movie that should have been a good half hour shorter, and was frankly probably a little overrated. There were a ton of great comedy bits, but at times, it got so lost in the comedy that the characters just didn't work (specifically, there's just no reason to believe the love story at the center of the film). Yes, it subverts and reverses the male/female romantic comedy roles, but so did Pitch Perfect (which did so much better, and happens to have been directed by the same person who did Sisters). The best roles are almost always given to the athletes here, as not only does Cena do some great stuff early on (there's a sex scene between him and Poehler that's painfully funny), but Lebron James and Amar'e Stoudemire also get some great opportunities to shine. The big issue, as with a lot of comedies, is that it has trouble balancing finding some heart and doing zany stuff, and the decision was made to throw everything into the final edit, which just got overburdened. Still worth a view, but definitely the weakest of the three films we saw.
1. Captain America: Civil War. This tiny indy character piece does a nice job of establishing two friends as antagonists (both driven by different forms of grief), without making either into a villain. More importantly, while it's got plot holes aplenty, it's infinitely better than the flaming heap of dog shit that was Mark Millar's comic series. It has at least a couple of truly wonderful moments, and it has the first Spider-Man I've given a shit about since the original Raimi film. There's also a wonderful moment right at the very end in which Black Panther undercuts and takes the piss out of one of my least favorite recent movie and TV villain tropes (not going spoilery yet -- I might make a longer post later).
2. Sisters. Grabbed this from the library, and was genuinely surprised by how funny it was. It's an inversion of the classic party movie (think House Party or Can't Hardly Wait), this time with the party being held by a bunch of forty-somethings, all of whom have kids and stable lives now. The entire cast is brilliant (I mean, when Poehler and Fey are your stars, and you have Maya Rudolph, Diane Wiest, Bobby Moynahan, and James Brolin, you know you'll get some great moments). Moynahan nearly steals the movie in the second half, but pretty much everyone here is wonderful and the chemistry between all the characters is great. If you want a plot, it's this: Fey an Poehler play sisters whose parents are selling their childhood home, and while cleaning out their room, they decide to throw one last party, this time allowing Poehler (the "good" sister who was always sober at parties) to cut loose. All hell eventually breaks loose. Oh, and it has John Cena being surprisingly funny in some scenes. Kind of like the next film.
3. Trainwreck. This was a fun movie that should have been a good half hour shorter, and was frankly probably a little overrated. There were a ton of great comedy bits, but at times, it got so lost in the comedy that the characters just didn't work (specifically, there's just no reason to believe the love story at the center of the film). Yes, it subverts and reverses the male/female romantic comedy roles, but so did Pitch Perfect (which did so much better, and happens to have been directed by the same person who did Sisters). The best roles are almost always given to the athletes here, as not only does Cena do some great stuff early on (there's a sex scene between him and Poehler that's painfully funny), but Lebron James and Amar'e Stoudemire also get some great opportunities to shine. The big issue, as with a lot of comedies, is that it has trouble balancing finding some heart and doing zany stuff, and the decision was made to throw everything into the final edit, which just got overburdened. Still worth a view, but definitely the weakest of the three films we saw.
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Date: 2016-05-09 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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