Tag: movies
-
Movie review: The Imitation Game
I don’t share our 16 year old daughter’s obsession with Benedict Cumberbatch (it would be difficult to aspire to those heights), but I do think he’s an excellent actor, so I was looking forward to seeing this movie, which stars the actor as Alan Turing, a brilliant British mathematician, who invented the predecessor to the…
-
Movie Reviews: Big Hero 6 and The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies
Two very different movies, and both equally good in their own ways. “Big Hero 6” is a Disney movie and contains the classic Disney elements: a traumatic event in the first 10 minutes of the movie, a hero in conflict, and a guardian angel (of sorts) to help him. There are strong secondary characters as…
-
Book review: The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book really deserves a bifurcated rating. I give the actual story–the history–5 stars. Recovering and preserving the priceless art that the Nazis looted during their march through Europe is a…
-
Movie review: Captain Phillips
I know, I know, Captain Phillips has been out for months. But getting to a movie theatre takes an immense amount of effort for me (you actually have to show up at a certain place at a certain time and sit in the dark for 2 hours). Reserved seating helps some, though. This time, I…
-
Movie review: The Desolation of Smaug (Hobbit II)
While I’m a huge J.R.R. Tolkien fan, “The Hobbit” has always been my least favorite of his Lord of the Ring series of books. And I simply could not fathom how anyone could make three movies out of such a short book. I liked but didn’t love the first Hobbit movie (you can read that…
-
Movie review: Saving Mr. Banks
We were predisposed to like this film, as we are huge fans of all things Disney and enthusiastic fans of the movie “Mary Poppins.” But this film surpassed our expectations. The basic plot is the story of how Walt Disney convinced P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins series of books to let him…
-
Movie review: Frozen
We all went to watch “Frozen” last night. “Frozen” is the newest Disney animated movie and is roughly based on “The Snow Queen,” one of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. This is definitely one of Disney’s better animated movies (I’m excluding the Pixar movies from this comparison, as that wouldn’t be fair.) The story is…
-
Movie Review: Thor: The Dark World
We took the family to see “Thor: The Dark World” over Thanksgiving weekend. It got a thumbs up from everyone. The plot was pretty clever for an action-adventure film, a genre not known for its creative plotting. The acting was also surprisingly good. I find Chris Hemsworth as Thor a bit wooden, but Jim pointed…
-
Movie Review: The Fifth Estate
The Fifth Estate” has done poorly in movie theaters, but it stars Benedict Cumberbatch, so I indulged our 14 year old daughter in her obsession of all things Benedict and took her to see it last night. (Jim and our 12 year old went to see “”Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2”.) I was…
-
Monsters University
We are huge Disney fans, as most of you know, and we were all quite eager to see Pixar’s latest offering, Monsters University. While we were mildly disappointed that Pixar chose to release a prequel to a well established hit, it didn’t make us any less eager to see it. Prequels are sometimes more difficult…