Happy Feet Good. Casino Royale, Eh, Okay
Capsule review of my holiday cinema-going:
Happy Feet: Unexpectedly awesome, and proof that you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy a CGI animal movie. Casino Royale: Expectedly just a Bond movie, and confirmation that yes, I really did outgrow that genre sometime in late adolescence.
November 28th, 2006 at 11:26 am
I really liked “Casino Royale,” other than it being 30 minutes too long. But I would watch Daniel Craig read the phone book, so there you go.
I haven’t seen “Happy Feet,” but I am tickled that Michael Medved thinks it’s some kind of commie, pro-gay, pro-environment political screed.
November 30th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
I haven’t seen “Happy Feet” yet either, but I have really enjoyed some of the CGI movies the past few years, like the “Shrek” movies, “Finding Nemo” and and I forget the name of the one that takes place in the arctic.
I was very surpised at how the writers of these can find such a perfect balance between making children and adults laugh, and laugh a lot!
December 1st, 2006 at 9:55 pm
I also really liked Casino Royale. Finally a bond movie that doesn’t seem like more of a cartoon than the animated movies. I kinda want Daniel Craig’s hair.
December 4th, 2006 at 8:26 am
…Ice Age… was the other one I was trying to think of.
December 5th, 2006 at 9:07 am
“The Fountain”
excellent (and no it isn’t a swashbuckler)
On the walk back from the theater, I came across a big pile of wood with the sign: free firewood! After watching a movie with lots of tree of life symbolism, it seemed an odd bit of synchronicity… so I hefted arm load after arm load and carried the pieces in to the back yard where I spent some time recreating the tree. When I was done, I gathered up some fallen red bouganville flower petals and made the end of one ‘dead’ limb ‘bloom’.
The kids loved it.
December 19th, 2006 at 7:27 am
I had a similar idea after my family and I viewed “The Wicker Man” recently.
February 14th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
This is an old thread, and there’s a good chance that nobody is reading it…but I’m very pleasantly surprised with Casino Royale. This bond movie seems truer to the Ian Fleming Bond than any other movie after Dr. No. The guy is a cold-hearted killer. He’s not a playboy first, killer second. He’s a proper badass and doesn’t need all kinds of toys to get the job done. I don’t know who wrote the screenplay and who directed it, but it seems like they’ve thrown most of the old Bond cliches out the window. What a surprise. The latching onto the media/public fascination de jour (high stakes Texas Hold ‘Em championships) was kind of annoying, the movie still held me…and I think that the new Bond is good.
February 15th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Well, I read all the comments. I’ve thought about having a feature that shows the most-recent comments in the sidebar; I should really look into that, since there are occasionally interesting comments that get added to really old articles (one the other day on “How to shoot heroin”, for example).
On Bond, yeah, I can see your point about how much better of a Bond movie this was in terms of being more believable and truer to Ian Fleming and all that. It was much more serious than I’m used to Bond movies being, which is a good thing. And I really liked the sailboat.
I think in my personal assessment, this movie suffered from my expectations. Not that they were that high; almost the opposite: I was expecting mindless entertainment, with an over-the-top opening stunt, some smokin’-hot Bond girls, a ginormous set with a Dr. Evil plot to steal all the world’s hydrogen and hold it for ransom. What I got instead was… an intense, fairly complicated thriller. So it was actually better than I expected, but I dunno; not quite enough to overcome my mourning for the teenage silliness that was missing.
But that’s probably just me.