'Get It Done'
A place to talk about movies--Old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Super Troopers, which I expected to be dumb and not funny.
It was nothing at all like the previews indicated, so while it's pretty dumb, it was also really funny. (I'd thought it would be a dumb movie about stupid characters, but instead, it was a dumb movie about characters who, for the most part, had at least half a brain.)
I was expecting Finding Neverland to be horribly maudlin, and it held back in a pleasant way. And Million Dollar Baby had a lighter touch than I was expecting.
Well, Amelie surprised me because when I went to play it, the disk was too scratched to work, and so I had to send it back to Netflix. But that's not the kind of surprise you meant, I'm sure.
Mind boggles at the crapulence:
Hayden Christensen and Mischa Barton to star in the Decameron.
Now there's a movie that needs some good supporting penguins.
Along the line of Super Troopers, which I want to see, Club Dread had surprising re-watchability, and is actually kind of cleverly constructed.
I loved Sideways, and didn't really know what to expect from it (not what I got, that's for sure).
I was stunned to not have huge hate for 13 going on 30. It was kind of charming, and it is easily the kind of movie I usually can't abide. (Surely others here hated it.)
Mind boggles at the crapulence:
Oh dear god. Let's have The Canterbury Tales with Paris Hilton and Tom Welling I say!
I was surprised at how much I disliked Mike Leigh's Naked but that was a while ago. (It falls into a category of movie which I can't abide, but which I think of as Actor Indulgences. Like, most Cassavetes or Last Tango In Paris. Whenever actors think they are being So Real, I think they are being So Actorly.)
I can't think of anything recent. I remember a number of comedies which looked generic on the outside, but had surprising quirks or intelligence or performance upon actual viewing: Housesitter (Steve Martin & Goldie Hawn) and Miami Rhapsody (Sarah Jessica Parker being a perfect female Woody Allen) come to mind.
Thirteen going on 30 was my last one, too. JohnSw. JG was great in it.