happy easter!

hello my little chocolate bunnies.
i hope you all have a wonderful easter. wear cute little pastel dresses and carry little wicker baskets around all day. i’m going to wander around looking for rabbits to dip in chocolate.

since there’s almost nothing out in the theatre world these days, i’ve been renting a bunch of movies (thanks itunes!). some good, some bad. i thought i would give you my quick reviews to save you from repeating my potential bad decisions.

the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford: very good. slow, but good. great dialogue, shot beautifully (if not a little forcefully artsy).

gone baby gone: holy crap, this was good. ben affleck has been on the wrong side of the camera all these years. this is where he belongs. the story is pretty heavy, pretty dark stuff. but the writing is smart, the performances are great. pretty weighty stuff.

then my streak ended. the following movies should only be rented if you won the lottery and are running out of things to spend money on: war, chaos, next and death sentence. i was warned about most of these by rotten tomatoes. i was warned and i ignored them. i have since clawed out my eyes.

then a surprise: 30 days of night. i thought this would suck (ha! a pun!), but i have a thing for zombie and vampire movies. thankfully i was wrong, it was very cool. the ending cheesed me out a bit, but i forgave it. it had a great look, it was well-acted and paced.

and then there are two that i feel weird about. the nines: pretty confusing (intentionally), but well acted and sort-of well written, except its premise is so silly that i don’t think it needed to be a film. certainly not a feature length film. it’s one of those endings that pees all over the audience.

and then last night was ’martian child’, which i wanted to see when it was in theatres, but it got slammed by rotten tomatoes. so i didn’t. but my curiosity got the better of me. i didn’t hate it. but it definitely could have used a re-write. maybe? i’m not even sure if that’s what was wrong with it. i mean, john cusack is always good, so it wasn’t that. i think the dialog, while smart, was a little goofy? or something. not sure. i liked it, mostly, so i would recommend it to you, oh dear chocolate bunny.

well that’s it for rentals.

then neil and kate and i took story to see ’horton hears a who’. it rocked! i laughed out loud several times. several embarrassing times. louder than i should have. the thing is, steve carrel and jim carrey aren’t particularly funny in it. in fact, i might’ve liked it more if someone else were in those parts. but the secondary characters are so charming! and the animators looked for every opportunity to punch up a gag, or make a moment. anyway, i am looking forward to seeing it again. that’s two times seeing.

-pete