I missed last week because it was Thanksgiving and I was sick, but enough about that and more about this week’s movies…
Brothers:
The cast looks good with Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Natalie Portman, but I’ll be honest and say I know nothing about this movie, so let me look it up. One moment please… hmm, sounds depressing. Maybe I’ll watching it when it shows up on Netflix or something. Pass.
Everybody’s Fine:
I went to a screening for this, we arrived early as usual, but the line was so huge that we didn’t get in. That happens sometimes. I really do want to see it and might go this weekend. I love me a good holiday movie about family.
Armored:
So, I saw this last night at a screening. The short of it: six employees of an armored car company decide they are going to rob their own hauls and things don’t go according to plan. The thing with a movie like this is that it has been done before. A lot. So the point here isn’t really to be original, especially since crazy originality in heist movies tends to lead to implausible stretches of believability, but to simply do the story well. Armored starts a tad slow, mostly because the movie wants you to be introduced to the characters, their environment, and to almost painfully lay out exactly the reasons why the heist is going to happen now and point out all the reasons why it has to be done this way. For example, the man in charge of the officers explains that next week they’ll be getting new trucks with GPS, informing you that right now they rely on radio contact and so are blind between scheduled check-ins. However, once they get the money in the trucks and begin to commit the theft, the movie really picks up, and it does everything from that point on fairly well (except this one chase scene which if I had been the writer I’d have done without and put in a different tension element). No, Armored probably isn’t worth the full price of admission unless you’ve got the spare cash to burn, but it was fun and well done. Worth seeing.