I watch a lot of movies, mostly kids’ movies and Hollywood action blockbusters, but in principle I’m willing to watch anything that isn’t horror. I’m keeping a list of the movies I’ve seen. Read these posts for my reactions and plot summaries, many of which are in the form of a beat sheet as described in Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat.
I didn’t see this 2010 movie for the first time until 2014, and I’m not sure I fully appreciated it at the time. It is probably one of my top five favorite movies ever.
It has a dragon who is unbelievably powerful and cool but also catlike, silly, and adorable; it has a geeky underdog protagonist with a gratifying self-actualization plot; it has a romantic subplot featuring an immensely capable and hardworking girl; it has an awesome soundtrack; and it has the best aerial joyrides!
Siqi put in the DVD of HTTYD to test our new living room audio setup: he connected a new (used) pair of speakers behind the sofa, so now our system is 5.1 instead of 3.1. Pretty awesome! 🙂
This was advertised as a Keanu Reeves movie, but he’s not really the main character. The movie’s original title, “Daughter of God,” better reflects the fact that the movie is mainly about a young Catholic Spanish-speaking woman who has a strange experience late at night on a subway platform and starts seeing angels.
The movie turns out to be about rape and child abuse, not, as the standard summary claims, “police corruption.” So it was very heavy, with one particularly disturbing scene. You could argue that the movie has a happy ending, but the net effect of watching this movie was definitely the opposite of happiness. I would unwatch it if I could.
Incidentally, this movie is an interesting case of the use of unreliable narration in film. If it weren’t so disturbing, I’d want to watch it again and look for clues that what we’re shown initially isn’t what happened. It’s clever. But I hate the story.
Recently I made the mistake of listening to the soundtrack of Chicago on my computer. The songs are incredibly sticky. Hearing the songs echoing in my head for several days, I decided I wanted to rewatch the movie itself. This, of course, just reinforced the echoes in my head.
Watching the movie, I decided my favorite song, because of its sheer energy, was “Cell Block Tango,” which repeatedly insists that “he had it coming.”
Also, I remembered that, although the movie is incredibly good at what it does, I actually really don’t like the characters. See below for more on that.
According to Wikipedia, the movie is based on a 1975 stage musical, which is based on a 1926 play, which is based on some actual events in the news.
I remember bits and pieces of the previous John Wick movies, perhaps the first one especially, but they don’t have a lot of plot or dialog. They are mostly full of stylized violent action. Some of it’s cool and some of it’s too brutal for my taste, but I like the character, and I like Keanu Reeves.
Siqi and I saw this movie when it was newly released in theaters in China (two years after its US release). According to Wikipedia, it’s the first of the series to be released in China at all. Apparently the reason it was allowed to be shown, and the basis for a lot of the marketing, is the fact that it stars popular Hong Kong Chinese actor Donnie Yen.
Mainly the difference is that the book has a big battle in the middle that the movie doesn’t have at all, and the movie has a love story that’s nowhere in the book. See below for complete plot summaries of the book and movie.
I didn’t know anything about this movie before watching it, except that it looked colorful; my husband watched a trailer, and I got a glimpse of it. In particular, I didn’t know this was an origin story about Optimus Prime and Megatron. It took me waaaay too long to figure that out! However, I’m proud that on my own I identified the voice of Laurence Fishburne (who played Morpheus in The Matrix).
Characters
Orion Pax (a younger Optimus Prime) is curious, brave, and loyal, but I wouldn’t choose him for a friend. He has about 500% too much spontaneity for my taste. D-16 (a younger Megatron), his best friend, is sadly lacking in resilience, it turns out. Elita-1 is ambitious and hardworking, and somehow gets tangled up in Orion Pax’s drama in spite of her strong preference for doing things by the book. B-127 (a younger Bumblebee, or as he calls himself, “Badassatron”) is awkward, energetic, and irrepressibly talkative.
Setting
The story takes place on Cybertron, a whole planet of transformers. Orion Pax, D-16, and Elita-1 work in the energon mines. B-127 works sorting trash, also deep below the city. The dynamic, metallic surface of the planet is home to some robot-like animals, some ruins, some actual green plants, and a colony of outcasts. And it’s visited by aliens from another world… Why?
Premise
Cybertron was defeated in an interplanetary war, and its guardians, the primes, were all destroyed, except Sentinel Prime, who periodically leaves the city to search for the Matrix of Leadership, an important object of power that was lost in the war. Orion Pax is looking for it too, because he dreams of being a hero; he feels his potential is being wasted.
Theme
There’s a very explicit theme: a rejection of “Might makes right.” Subsidiary messages have sensible things to say about the importance of friendship, truth, and self-actualization.
Style
It’s a PG-rated animated science-fiction action/comedy with a slick, bright neon color palette that manages to suggest the 1980s.
Overall?
I hope we get more of these! I was so disappointed with the Michael Bay series (I think I only watched the first two), for their trashy tone, meh choice of lead actor, and loud chaotic action. Therefore, it pleases me that someone has, uh, transformed the source material in a manner appreciably more watchable.
“We do not know why we are here. We do not know who built the Silo. We do not know why everything outside the Silo is as it is. We do not know when it will be safe to go outside. We only know that that day is not this day.”
Silo is the grown-up version of City of Ember, which I love (the book version, at any rate). It’s also based on a book series. It’s sci-fi dystopia in which 10,000 people live in a city consisting of an underground silo. The world of the Silo, stratified vertically into different classes of citizens with different roles and lifestyles, is interesting in itself, but the characters bring it to life and drive the plot. The characters all have goals that motivate and explain their decisions (and conflict with other characters’ goals), and they all learn as they go, shifting their allegiance, or not, as suits their aims and principles and the information they happen to have.
Like all good sci-fi, Silo is about big questions made into relatable stories…
If you lived in an underground Silo, wouldn’t you want, first of all, to prevent your fellow citizens from threatening the existence of your world, even if it meant following orders and not asking questions, or concealing (or distorting) the truth? If the stakes are survival, don’t the ends justify the means? Curiosity killed the cat; it could kill you too—and 10,000 others with you! Is knowing the truth so important? On the other hand, is it possible for humans to happily ignore huge unanswered questions? What kind of truth requires such secrecy that people have to die for it? Aren’t we better off finding out whatever there is to find out, and knowing whatever there is to know? And anyway, isn’t it our nature that we will inevitably seek the truth, even if it doesn’t make us better off?
Who do you identify with: those who are willing to kill for the sake of secrecy in the name of safety, or those who are willing to die for the sake of solving a mystery? In probably every dystopia story, the audience is meant to side with the rebels. Silo, while clearly siding with the characters who seek the truth (as per the tagline), makes a pretty strong case for the local tyrant: there’s no twirling of mustaches here. Every issue has as many sides as there are characters, because every character has his or her own individual perspective. And yet, in the end, the truth matters.
Season 1 kicks off with a couple of mysterious deaths, but the greater mystery is whether the world outside the Silo is as inhospitable as the residents have been led to believe. Juliette, a gifted engineer responsible for the health of the Silo’s generator, is thrust into a new role that she leverages to find the answers to increasingly dangerous questions. Above all, she’s tenacious. Whatever she does, you root for her.
Season 2 is gripping in the sense that you want to know what happens to the people you met in Season 1, but it’s less gripping in the sense that the biggest mystery of Season 1 has been revealed. Moreover, Season 2 bounces between two separate plotlines. Circumstances are more strained; Season 1, even when people die, is more about solving intellectual puzzles, some of them political and all of them secret; Season 2 is more political rather than less so, but now there are many more overt physical conflicts: explosions, gunshots, arrows, and more than enough water to drown in!
There’s not yet any release date for Season 3, but it will probably start airing in 2026. 🙁 I’m tempted to read the books, but I also believe that would be a terrible idea, so I’ll wait until I’ve finished watching the show; then I’ll read the book series and compare.
This was fun. Silly, but with strong themes of hope, friendship, and family.
Wikipedia says: Polygon said Carrey’s “gloriously deranged one-man, two-character musical” contrasted with the “utter sincerity” of Reeves, who made Shadow a “weirdly likable little ball of pain”. Sounds about right.
A Christian knight named “Dante”, freshly returned from the Crusades, journeys through Hell looking for the soul of his lover Beatrice after she dies in his arms, the last of his family to be slaughtered by someone unknown. Her soul is snatched away from him by the devil as she screams that he must have betrayed her; he denies this. But at the gates of Hell, his torso is embroidered with a red ribbon cross depicting, like film slides, his sins. He meets Virgil and travels through the circles of Hell, attacking monsters, protesting his innocence, and calling out to Beatrice, whom the devil intends to wed. Can he stop the marriage? And is he worthy of Beatrice’s love? (Or God’s?)
This movie is based on a game that is based on the actual Inferno. The episodes in this Japanese/Korean/American production are animated in slightly different styles, but the plot all hangs together. It’s a clever fantasy/action/horror adaptation.
See below for more details about the plot. SPOILERS.
