Yeah, I was sold on that until the ending as well. Turned an ok movie into a meh.



In other surprise recommendations from me, however ... The Iron Lady.

I'd heard it was a hot mess, and that Streep stole the Oscar with a fine impersonation.


Nope, I must have seen a different movie. It was a perfectly fine biopic, told very sweetly from the point-of-view of an aging Margaret Thatcher coping with deep senility and looking back on her career. I don't want to give too much away because I recommend seeing it on disc, but the particulars of that point-of-view established a deep sympathy for the character. And Streep's performance is far more than impersonation (but the impersonation aspects are indeed there and indeed fun).

I can't help but compare this favorably to last year's other famous biopic, J. Edgar, which was appalling and a dismal failure. Both movies shuttle back and forth in time, but The Iron Lady keeps a firm footing in the "present" of Thatcher's old age, and the flashbacks are presented pretty much in chronological order. J. Edgar seemed to have no "home base" and the time periods just fluttered about randomly and confusingly.

Oh, and the old age makeup in J. Edgar was embarrassing. The make-up in The Iron Lady is fantastic. This is not an unimportant element when telling a life story from young to old. Oh, and J. Edgar stars Leonardo DiCaprio, clearly out of his depth. The Iron Lady stars Meryl Streep, earning yet another well-deserved Best Actress Academy Award.

Both films take the standard biopic tack of pinning the main character's, well, character on a parent. J. Edgar did that with a sledgehammer, Iron Lady with a feather. But it's too simplistic in both cases, and I left both films not really feeling I got deeply enough into the life motivations of the main characters. I'm not sure if that can be done to my satisfaction in a movie-length biopic. So I give lots of leeway to the genre. Even with that slack, I left J. Edgar feeling confused about the character and not at all entertained. To my surprise, I was very entertained by The Iron Lady and left less confused about Margaret Thatcher than when I came in.

The Iron Lady is a bio success in my book. J. Edgar a sorry disappointment.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady. I had assumed it was going to be one of those things where a great actor puts on the Wookie suit for a paycheck and that she got an Oscar because she was long overdue for one. Plotwise, the movie was kind of "and then she, and then she and then she," but it was still engaging.

I think that's the failure of all bio films; they're kinda 'and then s/he, and then s/he, and then s/he" - hence the current trend of trying to jump around in time to shake that up a little. I find some movies better at that than others.

Poor Jules Verne, he doesn't get credit for that ending any more.

Normally I'd agree, but on the other hand if suddenly the entire world population of non-human apes became just as smart as us they'd still pose no real risk to us as a society. So something had to help.

Wow, that's a pretty rude way to talk about Margaret Thatcher.

Hey, I'm surfing the web on my phone standing on the street in front of our Kyoto hotel. Seems to much to expect me to notice there was another page of posts.

We finally saw Avengers Monday (and Dark Shadows - jumped from one movie to the other). I could see Joss Whedon's hand on Avengers. Good movie and I would say that if we hadn't seen any movie beforehand, we would have been okay, though seeing Thor helped.

Dark Shadows was meh. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as much as I had hoped for. I wish Tim Burton would stop making the same movie over and over again.

Heh, read that as we're whoring now....

Stop. Hammer time!

I hate you a little bit today Alex.