Thor: The Dark World - I've found the Thor movies to be pretty weak so far. It's one reason why I'm not that excited about the upcoming third Thor movie. If you like Marvel movies or Thor's portrayal so far then you'll probably find much appeal to this movie but it's on the blander side for me and while I still remember much about it, none of what I remember really strikes me as fun. While better than the first one, based on my recollections, at least I can remember the first one had ice stickmen as the villains but I honestly cannot picture or recall the villain in this one. I know there was something to do with different worlds opening up all over at the end but what the purpose of that was I also cannot recall. Probably the biggest offender in the Marvel Films Have Weak Villains criticism.
12 Years A Slave - Yes, it won Best Picture so others would probably argue against my skip it recommendation but I've just never understood how others have seen this as some kind of masterwork. It's been said that the movie shows how slavery broke a person's spirit down piece by piece but I never got that. It just seemed to show that, surprise, there was a lot that people suffered in slavery. Now, I'm not trying to dismiss that suffering. It's just that there have been other movies that have depicted slavery and have shown its inhumanity before and nothing about this movie struck me as new. It didn't change my feelings towards it like, "Wow, I always though slaves had it kind of good before. Man, was I wrong!" There was one scene where Fassbender's character confronts Ejiofor's character, Solomon Northup, because of news he has learned about him. Solomon gives Fassbender a panicked explanation and he accepts it but it never struck me as believable. I just didn't buy Fassbender's character accepting Solomon's explanation considering his actions up to that point and the way Solomon acts in the scene. Frankly, Fassbender's character sometimes seemed over the top to be believable also.
For that matter, same with some of the suffering depicted. One thing that has stuck with me is a scene where some slaves are dancing or playing music in Fassbender's house. Lupita's character is really getting into dancing and, at some point, a glass bottle is hurled into her face and breaks on impact. Maybe I am the worst because I almost felt like laughing at that. It just came out of nowhere and seemed more like a comedic beat that a dramatic moment. When you stop and think about it in real life, you say, yeah that would be terrible but in the moment, it just came across as crazy and almost silly. Because of that unintended affect, it stayed with me because it was a misfire. Maybe it was a case of trying to show a lot of different ways that people were abused within just a couple hours of film time that it comes across as to excessive to seem over the top and thus lose some of its impact after awhile. The ending when he says his family again is kind of moving yet I thought Captain Phillips had the more powerful moment of a person suddenly decompressing from the trauma they had experienced.
In the end, the movie can be summed up by Solomon is sent to the south where he suffers and suffers and suffers as a slave and finally manages to luck out on reclaiming his freedom. It's a one-note film and my memory of it is that of hitting the same note of people being cruel to him and not really doing much else besides that. For that reason, I find it hard to recommend this film although people may disagree in that its one note is what makes it powerful and necessary to watch much like a movie about the holocaust. Yet, I would argue there that while the holocaust is also a subject that should not be dismissed or ignored, not all movies about it are equal and there are some worth watching over others that can make the same point. So, it is with 12 Years a Slave. Also, when I play quizzes with questions about Best Picture Winners, this movie and Argo are two of the more recent winners I always have trouble remembering that they won and when which just confirms my own bias that this movie isn't as powerful as people want to make it out to be.
Riddick - This was another case of watching a movie just because it was on the movie channel at the time. I came in a bit late to the movie where Riddick was fighting some people then began trying to traverse across some hostile land on a planet. That bit was kind of compelling enough that I kept watching. I haven't seen any of the other Riddick movies before and nothing about this one made me feel like they were worth checking out by the time it was over. I couldn't remember if it was this movie I had seen or Chronicles of Riddick but reading the synopsis of this film on Wikipedia reminded me that it was this one. Suddenly, a lot more moments of the movie came back to me while reading it over. Perhaps some may find it entertaining and despite its casual pace I still stuck with it to see where it would all go. It ended with silliness and a character's sudden about face to save the hero. A poor man's Yojimbo or A Fistful of Dollars. See those movies instead.
Topic: 2014 Oscars. Ranking the movies and your opinions on the 2013 movie scene. (Read 20836 times)
