Beasts of the Southern Wild

I was very curious to see Beasts, so many critics have said it wasn't like anything they'd ever seen before. And I agree, it's not.  What is about? On the surface, a little girl named Hushpuppy lives with her father in low-lying part of New Orleans called The Bathtub.  They fish, have animals and live in squalor but they're happy. Everyone else lives that way too-black and white and they don't know any other way. And then the storm comes, Hushpuppy's father gets sick and the Aurochs come. What are the Aurochs? They are enormous beasts, trampling everything in their paths and generally causing mayhem. They look like a cross between a water buffalo and a woolly mammoth. Can anyone else see them besides Hushpuppy? Doubtful, because they represent all her fears, and she has many. But if you want a true female empowerment movie, this is it. Hushpuppy faces everything (after behaving like a brat in the beginning) and triumphs, more or else. She does what has to be done, and who can ask more than that? She is the spiritual heir of Paikea, from Whale Rider, another little girl destined to be a leader in her community and one who will make her mark on this world. 

The Amazing Spiderman

I was very curious to see what the new Spiderman was like. I was (and still am) a big fan of the first two movies (the less said about the third one, the better) and also as a big comic book geek, this movie had my name all over it (not like The Avengers did, but still).  So,  what's the verdict? Overall positive, I'd say. Andrew Garfield is quite winning as Peter Parker, here more of a loner skateboarder than science nerd. And finally there's a heroine who can match up with him in Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy. One of the things I didn't like about about the first three movies was the character of Mary Jane Watson. They took a perfectly good character, full of intelligence and guts and turned her into a wuss. There was ONE moment in all three movies where she was not like that and that's it. So I was happy to see that not be the case with Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker's first love. She's funny, feisty and intelligent. She calls Peter out on his bad behavior, she stands up to The Lizard (more on him later) and she's smart. It was relief. And it helped that she and Andrew Garfield has so much chemistry together it's ridiculous. But did they really have to kill off Denis Leary? Captain Stacy dies well into the series-they couldn't have kept him around for another movie or two? He brightened the whole place up every time every time he appeared. And now a few words about The Lizard. Really? I have a friend who said that when he first saw The Lizard's tail, he thought "oh, no" and in a "wow, the special effects are really bad" kind of way, not in a scary kind of way, and I felt the same. The Lizard was NOT scary. He was one step above a guy in a rubber Lizard suit and that's pretty sad, considering the Spiderman effects were extremely good. They didn't have to be that bad, I'm sure they could have afforded better-and Rhys Isfans certainly deserved better. But that's just me-I'm sure not everyone thought he looked like a guy in a rubber lizard suit. 


And the guy in the scene after the credits? Totally Norman Osborn. It's the Chekhov rule-if you show a gun in the first act, someone has to use in the third act. You can't spend the whole movie talking about Norman Osborn and never have him show. The question is, who will play the Green Goblin and will HIS special effects be any better? 

The Hunger Games

I liked the Hinger Games very much, the problem with it though, is that can't really be true to the book and still get a PG rating. Ah, the all important PG rating-it's the reason all those 10-year olds were at a movie that wasn't really appropriate for them (and were running around screaming before it started. Yes, it annoyed me, mainly because if I'd pulled that at a movie with MY parents, they would never have taken me again).  Ahem. Well, did Jennifer Lawrence look like Katniss? I thought not-she looked a little too old and was not the small, skinny girl I pictured. However, she more than made up for it with her performance. And Josh Hutcherson was quite good as Peeta, although it did seem that Jennifer was much taller than he, which I thought was quite funny. And I'll say this-ALL the supporting players were good. Elizabeth Banks in her outrageously flashy clothes, Woody Harrelson as the drunk who helps them survive, Lenny Kravitz as Cinna, the stylist who becomes Katniss's only friend in the city-all were good. And a special shout-out to Stanley Tucci, who seems to be able to anything-is there a part he can't play? And of course, Donal Sutherland, always good at playing the bad guy. And I really liked adding in the background to the Games-you now see the Gamesmaker and the people who work for him, you see that the fire IS created and that, indeed, everything is carefully planned-except what Katniss and Peeta do at the end. But here's the thing-I really wanted it to be violent. The books are quite violent, and the end of The Hunger Games is not only violent, it's emblematic of the whole horror of what has happened throughout the whole book-and they watered it down. Watering down the end really does a disservice to the book and it was all to get the PG rating. I find that very disheartening.