Big Screen: Magic Mike

So bad. Way worse even than I expected especially considering how much buzz I’d heard about McConaughey’s performance in this. Seriously? The people spreading that lie are out to lunch, man.

And hardly any male stripping going on for a movie about male strippers so you don’t even get nearly as much eye candy as would have made it worthwhile. At least we saw it at the Brew ‘n’ View so I could drink beer while being disappointed.

Big Screen: The Bourne Legacy

This was acceptable. Some issues but Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz had some pretty nice chemistry and there were some great action-evolving-into-other-things scenes between the two of them. I liked the way they both tied it to the other Bourne movies and yet tried to give it some substance of its own.

(I have my issues with those movies as well. I mean the books are fantastic 100%, the first movie made a lot of stupid dumb choices. The second and third movies were better, thanks to Paul Greengrass, but still off track given they had to follow the choices the first set up. Still I do usually like this type of movie and I expect I will continue to. So there.)

Big Screen: Celeste and Jesse Forever

Really enjoyed this. Thought the previews, and the title, were a bit misleading however. It’s really not the story of a couple as much as it is the story of Celeste dealing with the ending of her relationship and finding a new road.

The music was lovely, the acting was nice, and sure it was sweet and somewhat predictable but it’s not the Hollywood ending and it’s not a slam you down ending either. Nice.

Big Screen: Killer Joe

I felt degraded and abused enough–and perhaps unable to ever eat chicken again–after this movie that I just cannot recommend it.

Sure, Matthew McConaughey does his role very well. So what? Sometimes that’s not enough to make a movie worth sitting through. (See “There Will Be Blood.” Career performance from DDL does not make that a movie I ever, ever, ever want to see again.)

Also: Every Single Person in this movie is a shallow jerk. You have no one to root for! NO ONE! Even the presumed naive victim just seems dumb, not wounded or someone you should care about.

Icky.

Big Screen: Looper

I really liked this in the end but it feels pretty formulaic for about the first 20-30 minutes. It seems like they’re giving too much away and you think “how are they going to drag this out for 2 hours” but then a new element gets added in. So I thought it got a lot more complex as it went along and in the end there were characters I really cared about the outcome for. Emily Blunt is amazing.

Did feel like Piper should have turned that role down or perhaps pointed out that the nudity was completely gratuitous (her character was clearly destitute without that).

Plus JGL and the director were there for a post-movie Q&A (I saw it at a screening a month or so before it came out) and JGL was wearing bright green socks and being super cute. So perhaps that colored my reaction. PERHAPS.

Big Screen: Argo

Liked it but not as much as I wanted to. (Didn’t fulfill my Ben Affleck fangirl needs, frankly. I don’t feel any urge to see this one again whereas I am still not done rewatching The Town.)

Didn’t feel as tense as I expected. Saw Arbitrage a week or whatever later and that was MUCH MORE the tension I felt should have been in Argo.

Acceptable enough but didn’t live up to the hype.

À la Nick Hornby, books in/books out for October.

Bought:

  • From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konisburg
  • The Michigan Mega Monsters (American Chillers #1), by Jonathan Rand
  • The Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater
  • The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst
  • Saga, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples (graphic novel)
  • The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate
  • The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
  • Outpost, by Ann Aguirre
  • Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell

Read:

  • From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konisburg (classroom library)
  • The Michigan Mega Monsters (American Chillers #1), by Jonathan Rand
  • Emiko Superstar, by Mariko Tamaki
  • American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang (classroom library)
  • The Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater
  • The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst
  • Saga, by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples (graphic novel)
  • Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord, by Sarah MacLean (iphone/Kindle)
  • The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate

Big Screen: Arbitrage

Yes, there are holes you could find in the plot after the fact.

BUT I really liked this movie, both in the moment and afterward. It was super tense, pulled out almost to the breaking point, and there were some really excellent performances.

I liked it even more after listening to director Nicholas Jarecki’s interview on The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell, my favorite and most often listened to podcast.

The one place I felt the movie really faltered was in the girlfriend/Richard Gere relationship. Make us think he actually loves her and this film would be that much stronger. As it is, she’s too irrelevant for some of the plot points.

Open up the world to me. That is what I believe.

After 50 years, Juster is still flummoxed as to why his book turned out to be such a success. Children surprise you, he says. When they read a book, they may experience it or appreciate it in a way that’s totally different than what the author intended. But that’s OK, he says. Sometimes writers feel like their job is to communicate a specific idea or a finite point of view. “I think the idea rather is to open up a piece of the world to a more creative encounter,” Juster says.

[emphasis mine]

I just read Phantom Tollbooth in May–loved the wordplay. Really a LOT of fun to read as an adult. (If I read it as a child (?) I had forgotten it.)