March 29, 2014

Gravity

Gravity was visually impressive for sure, but beyond that it didn’t do much for me. For as much hype as the film had, it was a major letdown. I had no emotional response. A few times they obviously were trying to elicit some emotion, and they all fell flat.

I didn’t enjoy Bullock’s performance. Her dialog was pretty bad at times… not that it is easy to pull off a mostly solo performance and make dialog interesting. I wanted to like the film, and at the beginning I thought I would. It went downhill and then it completely lost me when Bullock started howling.

I might even go so far as to say this movie was kind of dumb. Like, there was no substance, and no point. The characters felt so shallowly drawn. The film seemed to think it was powerful, which made it even more dorky. At the end when Bullock stamped her food on the sand and the music swelled… I cringed and wondered what anybody saw in this mess.

March 10, 2014

Justified Season 3

I finished the third season of Justified a few days ago and I am already half-way through season four. From the start Justified has been great, with its interesting characters and surprising flourishes of violence. In my opinion the third season was the best so far, but a lot of that is due to the foundation that was built through the first two. Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder are two of the best characters on television today.