Movie Reviews: A Few Films I Missed While on Tour

Now that my first blog tour is behind me, I’m going to catch up on some of my movie reviewing. I watched a number of films last month, but didn’t get a chance to post about them because I was busy with my tour. So, I’ll give a few brief words on each of four movies I’ve seen recently.

 

The Avengers: rank: 5 stars. This was a great movie. The “fight” between the Hulk and Loki was classic. Everyone who saw the film knows what I mean. That aside, the film had a number of clever one-liners… and I don’t mean Arnold Schwarzenegger one-liners—these actually were clever. The story line was good. The characters were good. All around, an exceptional movie. Although I have one comment to make (I may have made this same remark in other film reviews): the first time I saw the movie, I saw it in 3-D. I don’t even notice the 3-D effects anymore. They were cool for the first movie I saw them in, but now I get too involved with the story to really pay attention to the effects. I think it is just a case of abusing our technological prowess: we really don’t need 3-D, but now that we got it, I’m sure it will never go.

 

Men in Black 3: rank: 3 1/2 to 4 stars. This was a decent movie, probably at the same standard of quality as MIB 1 and 2. It wasn’t exceptional by any means, but it was an enjoyable way to spend some time. It involves some time-traveling, an evil villain bent on destroying the world, and an insight into Agent K’s personality and history as well as Agent J’s (I think it’s J). I’m not sure I approve of a certain bad guy being killed in cold-blood at one point, but I won’t go into detail about that here… I’ll leave that to other viewers to judge on their own.

 

Snow White and the Huntsman: rank: 2 1/2 to 3 stars. I had high hopes for this movie, but was sadly disappointed. It was the second attempt this year to breathe new life into the Snow White story. The first was an enjoyable kid’s film a couple months back entitled Mirror, Mirror. While Mirror, Mirror knew it was addressing a kid’s audience, Snow White and the Huntsmen tried to darken the tone of the film and gear it towards a more mature audience only to fall back in a couple of scenes to a fairy-ish tone. Overall, the movie just didn’t do much for me.

Dark Shadows: rank: 3 stars. This was another movie I had high hopes for and was, again, sadly disappointed by. It’s a take off of the 70’s dark soap opera of the same name. I think my biggest problem was the fact that Barnabas Collins (the vampire played by Johnny Depp) killed a number of innocent people. If they had been malevolent gangsters or something like that, I probably wouldn’t have minded, but they were hippies (perhaps I should revise my opinion? J) and harmless construction workers. I just can’t get behind a protagonist who is evil. In my own book, Drasmyr, I have a vampire who tells much of the story, but I don’t view him as the protagonist—he’s evil, the reader knows this, and though he may be cool, you’re not supposed to root for him. There are other good characters that fill that role. Here in Dark Shadows the vampire is indisputably the main character. And though he does have a certain amount of charm, he still kills innocents. And I just can’t get past that.