Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Movie Night
What is the deal with every movie being 15-30 minutes too long these days? I saw Moneyball last night and, enjoyable though it was, I was dying at about the two hour mark. Did they really need all those montages of Brad Pitt being sad while people said bad shit about the A's on the radio? Or all of that Jonah Hill? How about just one guy calling Brad Pitt an asshole to his face and no Jonah Hill at all? Actually, no Jonah Hill at all is a good rule of thumb for any movie, if you ask me.
Anyway, it was pretty good. My comparative ignorance of baseball ended up being a pretty good asset because most of the plot elements were genuinely surprising to me even though they actually happened in real life. I thought that Brad Pitt's low-key-to-the-point-of-a-near-coma acting stylings were pretty appropriate to the role for once and the writing was also enjoyably not too aggressive. Having the guy from Parks & Rec (Oh, who am I kidding? The guy from Everwood) there was sort of distracting, but fortunately there wasn't enough of him to make that too big of a deal. And I actually sort of got goose bumps at one point, although that may have been because I forgot to close the flue on the fireplace a few days ago and there was kind of a draft.
Doesn't it feel good to actually make use of your Netflix? Now if only I could get to that copy of The Deer Hunter that's been sitting there for more than a year, I'd totally be in business.
What is the deal with every movie being 15-30 minutes too long these days? I saw Moneyball last night and, enjoyable though it was, I was dying at about the two hour mark. Did they really need all those montages of Brad Pitt being sad while people said bad shit about the A's on the radio? Or all of that Jonah Hill? How about just one guy calling Brad Pitt an asshole to his face and no Jonah Hill at all? Actually, no Jonah Hill at all is a good rule of thumb for any movie, if you ask me.
Anyway, it was pretty good. My comparative ignorance of baseball ended up being a pretty good asset because most of the plot elements were genuinely surprising to me even though they actually happened in real life. I thought that Brad Pitt's low-key-to-the-point-of-a-near-coma acting stylings were pretty appropriate to the role for once and the writing was also enjoyably not too aggressive. Having the guy from Parks & Rec (Oh, who am I kidding? The guy from Everwood) there was sort of distracting, but fortunately there wasn't enough of him to make that too big of a deal. And I actually sort of got goose bumps at one point, although that may have been because I forgot to close the flue on the fireplace a few days ago and there was kind of a draft.
Doesn't it feel good to actually make use of your Netflix? Now if only I could get to that copy of The Deer Hunter that's been sitting there for more than a year, I'd totally be in business.
