Finally watched Despicable Me last night. It's been repeatedly referenced in this project I've been working on so I decided I needed to just go ahead and rent it. My wife and I both loved it. It wasn't so much the story or anything that got me, but absolutely everything about the direction. The design of everything, all the camera work, the color palette, the animation itself, and the pacing and timing of gags. Great stuff. Rivals Pixar on all those levels.

Can't wait to see this.

Finally saw Scott Pilgrim vs The World last night and I really liked it a lot. The wife was meh on it, making wonder if it was a Guy movie?

I saw this with my mom, dad, and adopted sister. My mom and I liked it. My dad and adopted sister didn't.

That was pretty much my take too plus a very slow pace that had me sneaking peaks at my watch and trying to figure out how much longer it was going to last. It was definitely a poor choice for a late show though. Maybe I would have liked it more if I saw it less tired.

Caught ol Burt Reynolds in White Lightning the other night and thoroughly enjoyed that though.

The Naked City. this seems like a precursor to the L&O/CSI-type police show format. crime occurs. police work the case. things happen. a tip comes in. police work the tip. the case is solved in 90 minutes with some tense moments. it was all right. the best part was reading about it afterward and how they shot it surreptitiously on location. there're scenes in busy new york neighborhoods where supposedly no one except the actors knew a movie was being shot. pretty cool.

Morocco. whoever at comcast writes the descriptions for marlene dietrich movies should actually watch the movie. i thought this was going to be exotic and dietrich's character would be some sultry vixen, based on the description. she's a singer who falls for a soldier. there's hardly any development between them. i didn't really buy her devotion to him. there's one specific time lapse that is a little confusing because it's never noted how much time has passed and i thought that would've been critical. but whatever. this is good for dietrich's big singing scene where she kisses another woman and later, supposedly, convinced the censors to leave it in.

It spawned such a TV show as well--with the same name. I like this movie. By today's standards it does seem kind of routine but it is worth it just for the location shots alone. How else are you going to see 1940s NYC?

If there was a movie about Guy, I'd be all over it.

I don't think it's a guy movie as much as one for those with short attention spans/grew up playing video games.

Finally watched Social Network. Despite Derris' supreme delusion and self aggrandizing of his own best -of-list-and-dogfucker-based-tastes, this was fucking good. What the good doctor Derris failed to realize in his dissection of my tastes and criticism is that this movie was made for someone like me: smartest guy in the room outwits all the better-bred with a leg up dumbies to create his own fortune. It's The American Dream writ large for the Internet age. "if you had invented Facebook, then you would have invented Facebook."


There's also an undercurrent of "whatsoever profits a man if he gains the world, but loses his soul?" which looks like it was probably played up for the dramatic, but was a good driving point to the story. Also, the whole thing proves that FB is mostly about making yourself look cool, and stalking chicks you used to bang, or really wanted to bang in hs/college.

I might watch it again today before I return it. Next up, I think, is Hot Tub Time Machine, unless I bump something else to the top of the list.

Saw Biutiful last night. I'm still digesting it, as there is a lot of content and theme going on here. On the verge of being indulgently grim, but with Bardem's charter, Uxbal, staying "good" despite all of the "bad" going on around him. It was hard to watch in places, and definitely pushes and pulls at the emotions. If you're a fan of Iñárritu's past films (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel), you should see it.

Just watched The Hurt Locker. Shit was intense. Good fucking movie, despite being dramatized to fit the director's world view.

I liked that one, too. I would have given the Oscar to Inglorious Basterds though.

I read a review that said this was a great companion picture to The Social Network, I'm not sure I agree with that, but this was a really interesting documentary. The trailer hooked me right away.





This was great even though I'm sure they took a number of liberties with the story.

And this afternoon i watched The Losers, which might be the most enjoyable comic-based movie I've ever seen. It was a little like GI Joe meets the A-Team, with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Jason Patric is pretty funny underplaying an over the top villain. Great movie for a Saturday afternoon time waster.

Catfish has been sitting on my TV cabinet for a couple of weeks, haven't found the time to watch it yet.

this was one of the backyard movies for us last summer. Great completely mindless action movie, and I COMPLETELY agree about Patric, he was great.

I got to go to a screening of Rango on Saturday, thanks to a friend who I hadn't seen in a long time. (I mainly wanted to go to hang out/catch up with this guy as I was only moderately interested in seeing this.) It was pretty good, really, but a little off somehow. Having seen it just after Dispicable Me, there was a notable contrast. Rango was weirdly "adult", in that it was fairly dark, violent, and crude with a lot of adult references, but at its core it was really a kids' fick. So who was it aimed at, exactly? The 10-to-14-year-old boy audience and their dads? Animated films generally tend to try to cast a broader net than that, probably because they cost so much to make that they need to appeal to everybody. I thought Dispicable Me did a great job of that. And while Rango was entertaining and very impressive on every technical level, I wonder how well it will actually do. I'm probably not going to be recommending it to anybody except maybe my coworkers and some other animation/CG nerds I know who probably are already planning to see it anyway. You could do a lot worse, though, I'm sure, with the current crop of movies in mainstream theaters right now.

There's a brief HST/Fear & Loathing reference/cameo in it, as well as a kind of kinda awkward Indian/desert/Western "spiritual" element that culminates in a sort of surprise cameo.

I hated this movie mostly because it would've been better if they just went for the R rating and not watered everything down for the PG-13. You could just tell in certain parts where that happened.

Did anyone get in on that 50% off Criterion sale on criterion.com? Picked up the BBS Story Bluray for $50.

Christ, I've watched a load over the last couple of weeks, I really should of kept a list of them. The two that stood out though were Mike Leigh's Another Year, which was fucked up but fantastic, and Inside Job which was pretty disturbing.

I also liked Morning Glory, well, mainly because of McAdams. I'd tap that!

Might be of particular interest to some folks here: The Cable Guy Fifteenth Anniversary Blu-ray out tomorrow!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... scathed-20

I don't think I could ever make it through that whole movie again.

But I could probably re-watch that one scene where they're at Medieval Times or whatever.

I can actually see that, if I had ANY expectations going in. I only watched it because it has Stringer Bell in it.

I bumped Inception to the top of my Netflix queue. Should be here tmrw.

For big stupid fun, I did enjoy finally seeing Machete this weekend. Nothing really other than exactly what you would expect really but it was fun.

I thought it was terrible and couldn't even muster to enjoy even stupid fun out of it.

i saw this 3 times when it was in theatres.

Good price for that set. I got a couple blu-rays, a couple dvds, and the Basil Deardon's London Underground Eclipse set.