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Showing posts with the label action

Good People (2014) *

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My Saturday night movies are starting to develop a bad pattern. I seem to pick boring movies. This was supposed to be an action, crime, thriller. Well, the action was mostly at the end, there was a crime, and it didn't thrill me very much. It starts out as one of those gritty dramas. Or at least tries to. The colours are muted, mostly greys, and we quickly establish that the "good people" are a couple down on their luck. They have money troubles, fertility problems, so you can really feel that these people are just in a hole. Now this is where the predictability starts to happen. Generally bad things don't seem to happen to the good people who are well-off and happy. From then on, it feels like a generic thriller. It has the drugs, the single mum, the ageing cop with a personal beef against the evil guys. It was almost like watching one of those genre comedies, like it should be titled "Thriller Movie".  It's not the cast, really....

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) * * * *

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I was really curious about the final installment of the Batman trilogy. On the one hand, I was interested in how they could end it. If you are familiar with the old movies, then you may know that those were sort of designed to never end. They also got worse and worse. On the other hand, I had been satisfied by the previous movies, and wanted to see the same level of achievement. When talking about this movie, probably for the rest of history, people will not be able to bypass what happened at a midnight screening in Colorado. The events are tragic, but when looking at the list of injured and dead, something un-understandable jumped out at me. How come there were small children and babies at a midnight screening of an admittedly violent movie? I really have no idea what they were doing there. Moving on, it did affect my viewing of the movie. I watched it at a mall, in the afternoon. I did have a bit of a bad feeling about watching it in a theatre. When someone s...

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) * * * *

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I have to confess, I'm a huge fan of superheroes. Let me explain why. I come from a family of readers. My mum could read at the age of five, and she read War and Peace  by eight. I went to school at the age of six, but I struggled in the beginning with reading. Then, I got my first comic book. It was black and white, and it had a little-known character called the Phantom, who lived in a rainforest probably somewhere in Africa. He was an environmental superhero, saving animals, punishing polluters. Comic books got me into reading and superheroes, for which I will always be grateful. My favourite character has always been Spider-Man. On the one hand, because he's human. Superman is great, but he's a Kryptonian, with his own personal body-armour skin. On the other hand, because even though Spider-Man is a scientist, and a photographer, he's still an average guy with money problems. He's not like Bruce Wayne, who gets to live in a big mansion, and has no worries a...