DVD Logging
Feb. 3rd, 2017 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckAlice Through the Looking Glass - I gave up halfway through this because I really didn’t care about the story or the characters. I considered persevering because I like time travel stories in general, but… This one was boring.
Green Lantern - I’m not entirely sure what I think of this movie. The plot hung together moderately well, but I felt irritated by the main character a lot of the time.
Jewel Robbery - This a pre-code movie involving a society wife flirting with a very handsome jewel robber during the robbery and again after. I found it surprisingly fluffy. I’m not sure what I expected, but fluffy was apparently not it.
Jodhaa Akbar - I only managed to get through two hours of this, not even the first DVD, before I had to return it to the library because someone else wanted it. I liked the two lead characters and was rooting for their romance (knowing a little history makes that easier as the two people involved are historical personages). I stopped at a point when a big misunderstanding (caused deliberately by someone who wanted to terminate the relationship) was about to happen and just didn’t go back. I don’t recall what made me pick this movie out of the library catalog (maybe it was remembering enough to know that a happy ending was likely?), and I’m pretty sure I didn’t realize it was two DVDs (plus a third with extras). Everything, including the actors, was very pretty, and the song and dance bits were well integrated.
LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures season 1 - I put a hold on this at the library without having any idea what it was apart from LEGO Star Wars. This series is very much in the same tone as the other LEGO Star Wars stuff I’ve seen, but it has a fairly solid plot and a cast of original characters. It’s set between Empire and Jedi and focuses on two brothers and a sister who do salvage and repair of space vehicles. Scott and I had a lot of fun watching.
Murder She Wrote season 2 - There’s something soothing about watching these. The world they present is much simpler, not because it’s the past but because everything ties up neatly and because good people end up okay. I’ll probably wait a while before I go on to the next season.
Pete’s Dragon (1977) - Cordelia said she wanted to see this version before trying the more recent movie. We got one third to halfway through it before she told me to stop, that she wasn’t willing to watch any more. On my own, I might have persevered because raising Cordelia has given me a bit of immunity to this sort of badness, but I also might not have because there wasn’t really any reason to. Even if I didn’t already know the story, I knew the story. 1970s era Disney is not going to throw in an unexpected twist ending or a rocks fall everybody dies tragedy.
Pete’s Dragon (2016) - This is much more engaging than the 1977 version, and the child actors are better. The writers seem to have thought through at least some implications of what they were doing, and none of the antagonists are out and out villains. The story almost approaches questions of wilderness preservation and natural resources by having the story set in a logging town where there are difficulties with over harvesting versus the possibility of unemployment, but the story veers away from that pretty rapidly and never goes back.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - I kept thinking that the world building made no sense for this. Scott says that that disconnect is the point, but I think I’d have been more interested if the story didn’t try to do the Pride and Prejudice parts. The movie was better than I expected it would be (but I went in with rock bottom expectations), and I think there could actually have been an interesting story to tell about how a decade or two of zombies would change society in that era. Farming, for example, would be extremely dangerous, but people have to eat. Does this version of England have the resources for foreign trade? If they don’t, a lot of things change. Is the rest of the world affected by the zombie plague? How is it that these young ladies have had time to travel to either Japan or China for training and still be so very young? It’s not a short trip in that era. I’m overthinking this, aren’t I?
Star Trek: Captain’s Summit - I got this from the library because I thought Scott would be interested. He said he’d already seen it, but he put it into the Blu-ray player immediately and watched it through. This is a set of three discussions between Jonathan Frakes, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart, and Whoopi Goldberg about their experiences with Star Trek. I’m not strongly into Star Trek, and I still found it fun to watch.
Woman in the Moon - This Fritz Lang movie was restored almost two decades ago. If I understand correctly, it was considered lost for many decades. It’s long, almost three hours, and acting choices often seemed odd to me just because fashions in such things change a lot. There’s an infelicitous choice with regard to the English translation of the intertitles-- The German is white lettering on black background. The English is white lettering superimposed on the lower part of the same screen with the German. The text often overlaps which makes reading either language problematic (not that I can read German beyond a word or two). The pace, in general, felt slow (which, again, is a change in fashion rather than a good/bad thing). The rocket doesn’t launch until after the halfway point, and there are a lot of scenes of people talking to each other, having prolonged conversations. That’s not desirable in a silent movie, IMO. I found the second half more interesting than the first, mostly because I was fascinated by how the folks making the movie thought things would work and what they thought the moon would be like, and the last twenty minutes were actually something approaching tense.
Xanadu - I remember liking this when it first came out. I think it was the music and the fantasy elements, mostly. I was in high school then, and I saw it in the theater. Now… It’s very, very 80s in look and sound. The male lead is kind of wooden and dull, and I actually want the movie to be about Gene Kelly’s character who has depth and charm due to being, you know, played by Gene Kelly. I suppose an actual Muse (as presented here) is kind of the ultimate MPDG in terms of it being all about the male character and his development.
Green Lantern - I’m not entirely sure what I think of this movie. The plot hung together moderately well, but I felt irritated by the main character a lot of the time.
Jewel Robbery - This a pre-code movie involving a society wife flirting with a very handsome jewel robber during the robbery and again after. I found it surprisingly fluffy. I’m not sure what I expected, but fluffy was apparently not it.
Jodhaa Akbar - I only managed to get through two hours of this, not even the first DVD, before I had to return it to the library because someone else wanted it. I liked the two lead characters and was rooting for their romance (knowing a little history makes that easier as the two people involved are historical personages). I stopped at a point when a big misunderstanding (caused deliberately by someone who wanted to terminate the relationship) was about to happen and just didn’t go back. I don’t recall what made me pick this movie out of the library catalog (maybe it was remembering enough to know that a happy ending was likely?), and I’m pretty sure I didn’t realize it was two DVDs (plus a third with extras). Everything, including the actors, was very pretty, and the song and dance bits were well integrated.
LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures season 1 - I put a hold on this at the library without having any idea what it was apart from LEGO Star Wars. This series is very much in the same tone as the other LEGO Star Wars stuff I’ve seen, but it has a fairly solid plot and a cast of original characters. It’s set between Empire and Jedi and focuses on two brothers and a sister who do salvage and repair of space vehicles. Scott and I had a lot of fun watching.
Murder She Wrote season 2 - There’s something soothing about watching these. The world they present is much simpler, not because it’s the past but because everything ties up neatly and because good people end up okay. I’ll probably wait a while before I go on to the next season.
Pete’s Dragon (1977) - Cordelia said she wanted to see this version before trying the more recent movie. We got one third to halfway through it before she told me to stop, that she wasn’t willing to watch any more. On my own, I might have persevered because raising Cordelia has given me a bit of immunity to this sort of badness, but I also might not have because there wasn’t really any reason to. Even if I didn’t already know the story, I knew the story. 1970s era Disney is not going to throw in an unexpected twist ending or a rocks fall everybody dies tragedy.
Pete’s Dragon (2016) - This is much more engaging than the 1977 version, and the child actors are better. The writers seem to have thought through at least some implications of what they were doing, and none of the antagonists are out and out villains. The story almost approaches questions of wilderness preservation and natural resources by having the story set in a logging town where there are difficulties with over harvesting versus the possibility of unemployment, but the story veers away from that pretty rapidly and never goes back.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - I kept thinking that the world building made no sense for this. Scott says that that disconnect is the point, but I think I’d have been more interested if the story didn’t try to do the Pride and Prejudice parts. The movie was better than I expected it would be (but I went in with rock bottom expectations), and I think there could actually have been an interesting story to tell about how a decade or two of zombies would change society in that era. Farming, for example, would be extremely dangerous, but people have to eat. Does this version of England have the resources for foreign trade? If they don’t, a lot of things change. Is the rest of the world affected by the zombie plague? How is it that these young ladies have had time to travel to either Japan or China for training and still be so very young? It’s not a short trip in that era. I’m overthinking this, aren’t I?
Star Trek: Captain’s Summit - I got this from the library because I thought Scott would be interested. He said he’d already seen it, but he put it into the Blu-ray player immediately and watched it through. This is a set of three discussions between Jonathan Frakes, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart, and Whoopi Goldberg about their experiences with Star Trek. I’m not strongly into Star Trek, and I still found it fun to watch.
Woman in the Moon - This Fritz Lang movie was restored almost two decades ago. If I understand correctly, it was considered lost for many decades. It’s long, almost three hours, and acting choices often seemed odd to me just because fashions in such things change a lot. There’s an infelicitous choice with regard to the English translation of the intertitles-- The German is white lettering on black background. The English is white lettering superimposed on the lower part of the same screen with the German. The text often overlaps which makes reading either language problematic (not that I can read German beyond a word or two). The pace, in general, felt slow (which, again, is a change in fashion rather than a good/bad thing). The rocket doesn’t launch until after the halfway point, and there are a lot of scenes of people talking to each other, having prolonged conversations. That’s not desirable in a silent movie, IMO. I found the second half more interesting than the first, mostly because I was fascinated by how the folks making the movie thought things would work and what they thought the moon would be like, and the last twenty minutes were actually something approaching tense.
Xanadu - I remember liking this when it first came out. I think it was the music and the fantasy elements, mostly. I was in high school then, and I saw it in the theater. Now… It’s very, very 80s in look and sound. The male lead is kind of wooden and dull, and I actually want the movie to be about Gene Kelly’s character who has depth and charm due to being, you know, played by Gene Kelly. I suppose an actual Muse (as presented here) is kind of the ultimate MPDG in terms of it being all about the male character and his development.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-04 04:25 am (UTC)Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did not sell me on the world-building, either. Maybe I overthought it too, but really, I think if you're going to go with such a conceptual mash-up, you need to have planned it out a little better than that. Fandom has spoiled me for good fusion AUs, I think.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-05 02:19 am (UTC)My husband tells me that I have to treat P&P&Z like a crackfic and not worry about all the things that don't make sense. I don't know. A book/movie length crackfic needs more actual scaffolding than a drabble does because at length such things start to collapse under their own weight. The joke gets stale.