Man... I watched some movies today. I woke up and played some Zelda Wind Waker, and am starting slowly to get the hang of it. So, I won't condemn it till i'm done with it.
But the main bulk of my day was spent watching movies. I was itching to see War of the Worlds after it got postive reviews from Mesh, Roe, Haddon, and Crabby but the wife didn't want to see it, she wanted to read. So we compromised or divided and conquered and I saw the movie and she went to Barnes and Noble.
War of the Worlds was pretty darn good though very very hard to watch. I think I even teared up at a moment, its just very gut wrenching. The coming destruction of mankind is a pretty depressing thing to grasp with. Tom Cruise did a good job, heck a great job, I didn't even get the feeling I was watching Tom Cruise. I got the feeling I was watching a dead beat dad who's just trying to figure out how to protect his kids during an alien invasion. Dakota Fanning was pretty darn good too, Tim Robbins... well he was as creepy as everyone said he was. This movie really reminded me of Jaws, it captured that sense of dread. Its not fear so much, I mean fear comes from the unknown i think in alot of ways. But with War of the Worlds, we know what our fear is, we know what to fear, so the fear turns into dread because the viewer knows that humans have pretty bad odds on this one. I mean I don't have a death ray... the aliens do. It was very Jaws esque, you know what's out there, you know the villain, now its just a matter of how are they going to survive this? And will they defeat it or just aim to survive? So hopefully that didn't ruin it too much, I spoke as generally as I could. Though I must say the ending was great, very much to my satisfaction. Did not have nearly the cheese of Independence Day or the anti-climatic nature of Signs (though i love signs still a lot).
I think Signs went more for the fear aspect as Shallymallybig bang tends to do. He goes for fear of the unknown. Whereas Spielberg (Wells) is like, "Look these aliens are here for one reason only... to kill us."
I do think some of the critics have it right that the aliens themselves were a bit cliche, they looked almost exactly like the Independence Day ones only smaller. But it wasn't really about them anyway, its more about the struggle of mankind.
So then we came home, relaxed, didn't mow due to rain. Then we went to babysit.
The people wifey sits for are pretty well off, and have a million DVDs, some of movies I didn't think anyone would ever watch or purchase the DVD of. Dickie Roberts Child Star... I mean was that even a movie?
But we watched Anger Management, which was way funnier than I was expecting. Jack Nicholson was great, I love him in comedies and Batman films.
Then we watched the Stepford Wives. Which wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. Not great, kind of dumb, but not as bad as a lot of people made it seem. It did have one of the funniest lines, "I thought to myself where could I hide a town full of robots and no one would notice.... of course Conneticut." Hahaha take that Contitecticut.
So it was a good day of movies. Relaxing.
Posted by holtonian at July 17, 2005 12:15 AM | TrackBack