I’ve finally gotten to see some movies in the past few weeks. Here they are, with my usual brief few-sentence review/description. The Road and Avatar are going to get a bit more treatment, I imagine. But I’ll go in order of when I saw them.

Up (wiki), dir. Pete Docter, 2009.
Up is somehow amazing endearing, happy and sad, and well-made. It was engrossing, I laughed and I cheered. I’m not so sure I’d want to watch it again tomorrow, but I sure would in a year. I definitely recommend it. (It’s about an old man who’s always wanted to go traveling, a young excitable boy scout, and the way they head to South America — with balloons raising the man’s entire house.)

Zombieland (wiki), dir. Ruben Fleischer, 2009.
This movie was ridiculous and every bit deserving of the praise it has received. It’s about a young man (Jesse Eisenberg, who was the older brother in The Squid and the Whale, and the lead in Adventureland — yeah, another “land”) who’s trying to survive in post-zombie-apocalypse America, and joins forces with an older man and two young women, sisters. It’s a romance, it’s a comedy, it’s a zombie movie. There are some quirks but they’re not overdone; the games the movie plays are surprisingly fun. I didn’t get even the slightest bit bored; I paused the movie so it would last longer. And maybe once or twice in a few awkward scenes. Definite recommendation.

On the plane from Madrid, I watched three movies.

Julie and Julia (wiki), dir. Nora Ephron, 2009.
I would never have watched this without some sort of prompting, but I’d heard good things, and it was indeed a fun movie. The acting is good (Meryl Streep plays Julia Child very well), and the plot is nice. Plus it’s about cooking! It’s certainly no movie to shy away from.

Juno
Watched this for my second time. Still good. Although yes, I agree with the criticism: how is a girl this smart having premeditated sex without a condom? (With Juno, there’s no excuse.) Still, that accepted, great movie.

City of Ember (wiki), dir. Gil Kenan, 2008.
I watched this movie near the end of the flight, more because I didn’t want to read than anything else. And it was pretty good, to be honest. A silly science fiction movie about a future where humans live in an underground city while the earth restores itself (think Wall-E and Zion from The Matrix films), where the generator is failing and the mayor (Bill Murray! especially funny after seeing him in Zombieland) is too blind to care about more than himself. So the kids (who go through a perhaps unnecessary but The Giver-like ceremony at the beginning) have to figure out what’s wrong or how to get out. And one of the kids is Saoirse Ronan, this young British actress who’s getting a lot of press and who has a difficult name. Anyway, not bad. Not something to search out, either.

When I got home, I watched some movies with my folks:

Adoration (wiki), dir. Atom Egoyan, 2009.
This movie was quite cool. I like Atom Egoyan, who also directed The Sweet Hereafter and Ararat. He’s concerned with [immigrant] identity, with Canada’s role in the world. This movie’s about a young man who ends up taking a school exercise too far. Read about it. Or just watch it. There are flaws, but Egoyan’s a magnificent story-teller, and watching the story unfold is pretty cool.

Avatar, dir. James Cameron, 2009.
Everyone knows about this, probably. I think Musa had interesting things to say, and I found this article very interesting. Mostly I just ended up having enjoyed the movie (I saw it 2-D; haven’t seen a 3-D movie in at least ten years), but feeling like it was kind of lame anyway, and not even all that special or novel. Also it reminded me of the amazing Ferngully. It reminded me a lot of Ferngully. Good, though. Worth seeing if you’re excited about it, I guess. Certainly not boring.

500 Days of Summer, (wiki), dir. Marc Webb, 2009.
Second time watching this (on DVD). A little less enjoyable the second time, but still fun. I like Joseph Gordon Levitt a lot. And Zoöey Deschanel, for that matter.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, dir. Sergio Leone, 1966.
I bought this for my father for the holidays. I first watched it with him and his father a good long while ago, and again at school last year. We sat down and watched it a few days ago. It’s still an excellent movie. There are some great scenes, and young Clint Eastwood is great. A classic, no kidding.

Finally there are two movies I’ve seen with friends:

The Road, (wiki), dir. John Hillcoat, 2009.
I read Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocolyptic novel about a man and his son trying to survive maybe a year or two ago. I didn’t like it that much, to be honest — a bit too sparse and bleak for me, I think — but I liked the ideas behind it. I think the movie does an excellent job of filling in the lines, for the most part, and sometimes for making things a bit more intense (not always in a good way, but mostly). There are some things that annoyed me about the movie — the scenes with the dead mother, for one — but they were in the book, too. It’s a very faithful adaptation. The two underground scenes — one involving a bunker, and one a cellar — were fantastic. My theatre was mostly empty, and I heard people gasping, and cheering, at appropriate moments. I didn’t quite approve of the way they ended the film, but other than that I was very impressed. Well done, sirs. Viggo Mortensen is the father, and excellently so. Still bleak and sad. Recommended.

Lastly:
Sherlock Holmes, (wiki), dir. Guy Ritchie, 2009.
So I mean, Guy Ritchie directed this. So I shouldn’t be surprised. But it’s not even as clever as a Guy Ritchie movie should be. It takes the character of Sherlock Holmes, a few elements of it, and then throws him and a souped-up Watson into a Dan Brown novel. Taken as that, it’s quite good. But the mystery is lacking. It’s a gang movie at heart, and that’s too bad. Robert Downey, Jr. is excellent as Holmes, in this role, and Jude Law makes for an attractive Watson (which Should Not Be, but oh well). Ritchie’s trying too hard to avoid the stereotypical Holmes, I think, and ends up falling too far in another direction. Still, I enjoyed the movie. Just… better plot, please. If only they had just made an actual Holmes story into the plot. I might’ve fallen for a street-tough Holmes anyway.

And that’s it for the moment.