Six Movies

I made it to six movies in the last four days. Here they are from the one I liked most to the one I liked least.

Young Victoria - It always helps to start with a good script. Julian Fellows wrote the script for this. It is actually very different from the script he wrote for Gosford Park. Gosford Park was an incredible script, but at the same time it was very complicated and almost impossible to follow unless you watched it multiple times. The number of characters in Young Victoria, is probably the minimum you could have and still tell this story. With a character like Queen Victoria it would be tempting to add more characters, just because of the number of people she actually had to deal with. By limiting the number of characters in the film, it allows each character to be fully realized, which would not have been possible if more had be crammed into the movie. I particularly enjoyed Miranda Richardson's portrayal of the evil mother.

It's Complicated - This film gets second place because it has so many laughs. Who could pass up getting to see Meryl Streep stoned. The other performance that I thought really stood out was John Krasinski, who played the son-in-law to be. I would expect to see him in a lot more movies.

Up in the Air - I would say that this film is witty rather than funny. George Clooney was perfectly cast as a man who flies around the country laying people off from their jobs. Clooney is always likable no matter what he is doing, which is quite an accomplishment. I thought the story was OK, and it was helped because it is so topical in the present times.

Me and Orson Welles - The plot of this film is almost the same as the plot of An Education, which is also out now. I guess the story of a young person going out into the big world and finding that things are not as expected is fairly common. I liked An Education much better. With Zac Efron it hard to judge his acting, because in this movie you are not sure if he is acting or just playing himself. Also, I am not sure how you portray someone like Orson Welles who was a larger than life personality in the real life, but the performance of him in this movie seemed a little cartoonish to me.

Avatar in 3D - The amount of melodrama in this movie was way past my tolerance level. Technically the animation was incredible, but the 3D affects did not really make the movie any better for me. It seemed to me to drag on forever. The script was not that bad, but it was not that good either.

Fantastic Mr. Fox - It may be partly because I was tired, but I just did not like this movie. I thought the characters were to human, they should have been more foxy.

This leaves me with the opinion that the best movies of the year were these two that came out earlier.

The Hurt Locker - I don't think you can take a war movie seriously unless there are scenes that are almost impossible to watch, and this movie certainly has some of those. But I still think everything about this movie was flawless.



In the Loop - This movie probably has the best script of the year, and a long list of great actors.