Road to Perdition

I remember thinking it was shite the first time around when it was released probably because I was expecting too much after American Beauty.  But I found it pretty interesting this time.  It's proof that you can carry a movie with cinematography alone.  Almost every shot is just gorgeous.  Some really creative compositions and camera movements.  And the lighting of course.  One of my favorite shots was a dark room with streetlight pouring into a window with rain water running down it, so all the light is filtered and shifting.  I can't think of many films as beautiful. 

May have actually been too beautiful for the subject matter.  But the rest of the movie was overly restrained, and overly simple with almost no character development.  I realized at the end that I didn't care about any of the characters.  You could see all the developments coming long before, and there weren't many.  I'm not sure why Sam Mendes chose this story to embellish with these visuals, but maybe he just hired a great cinematographer because he could, and that was that.  I wish the music was a bit less heavy handed though.  Because the music wanted it to be a sweeping epic oscar winner like Sam's previous movie, which it wasn't.  Too much pulling at heart strings without anything to back that up. 

Worth seeing for the look of it alone.  I wound up thinking of it as sort of a moving photograph, or tone piece and really enjoyed it.  Actually got kind of giddy at some of the shots. 

The Hobbit was OK. Banal, popcorn munching entertainment and a pretty good spectacle. The fact that it's based on a book of serious subtle sophistication is, well... Jackson will do what Jackson does, which is to take literary works to the lowest common denominator and make dumb mass-market blockbusters out of them, and that's what we get here. There were a few quality scenes that stood out though - the riddle scene and the party scene in particular.

Had no issues with the 3D aside from some poor synching of the left/right channels, especially when you tilt and otherwise move your head. I didn't notice the high frame rate either to be honest.

I outright hated the LotR movies - not because I'm a Tolkien fan looking for a literal interpretation, but simply because I though they weren't very good movies, aside from parts of the first one. This one was better, but still has quite some room to go.

Did you see the HFR version?  48fps seemed pretty hard to ignore to myself and others.

Saw a few movies lately:

Django Unchained -- Awesome, but I'm an unabashed QT fan (most of the time, at least). He's developed such fine control in direction and writing the past two movies. I felt this one was a half-notch below Inglorious Bastards, but most of the scenes in Django weren't about slowing building tension to the point of suffocation as IB was. The final 20 minutes kinda trailed off in Django, in comparison to the masterfully drawn first half of the movie. Christoph Waltz has SUCH control of every scene.

The Hobbit -- Was better than the LOTR movies, but I felt there was a lot of fat that could have been trimmed. Some scenes were excessive that disrupted the flow of the movie, IMO. I'm already dreading an Extended Edition. I thought I'd get acclimated to the HFR within half an hour, but found it pretty distracting for the whole movie really. Still found it enjoyable overall, and I'll be watching the next two.

This is 40 -- Not much of a reaction to this movie, a few funny scenes, but really just... blah overall. Maybe I'm getting older, but Judd Apatow's schtick is wearing thin on me.

Pitch Perfect -- Just no...