What Hec said, and then the second time I saw it, I made Juliana and Suzi stay while I went to pee.

It spent a lot of time on world-building and lore and triangulating the relationships and making the characters murkier.

From where I was sitting, it spent a lot of time on special-effects-driven set pieces, and with no attention paid to character or story development at all. Your "murkier" is my "made both inconsistent and incoherent for the sake of cheap laughs and filler."

Trailer for Scorsese's The Departed, the American remake of Infernal Affairs: [link]

Huh. For some reason, I thought Matt Damon was playing the undercover cop and DiCaprio the mole in the police. It's the other way around. The trailer's not really singing to me, but then, I loved the original A LOT. Not sure how much of Tony Leung's soulfulness DiCaprio would be able to capture.

I stayed the first time (with much protest from my friend who wanted a cig), skipped the second for a restroom break.

I agree with what Hec said about building a fandom. Murkiness abounds, all for the purpose to lead into the third movie.

From where I was sitting, it spent a lot of time on special-effects-driven set pieces, and with no attention paid to character or story development at all. Your "murkier" is my "made both inconsistent and incoherent for the sake of cheap laughs and filler."

I'm sitting with Jessica. Because of the time spent away from character development, I found I didn't care about the characters at all. For me, movies and tv are about character and I was disappointed in this movie.

RE: Pirates - I loved the muddling up of the characters. And, I know it was kind of bloated but so was the first one. It was all good by me.

A friend at work thought the ending was abrupt, but I thought it was just right. I liked the way familiar characters kept popping up in unexpected places.

I saw both Scoop and Monster House today, and was quite surprised that I liked Scoop much, much, MUCH more than MH. MH is probably the better-made film, but it takes a turn in the third act that would have made me walk out if I'd been there alone. (As I had no interest in sitting out in the hall waiting for DH, I stuck it out, but it never redeemed itself.)

Scoop was the only Woody Allen comedy I've really liked since probably Deconstructing Harry. (Sweet & Lowdown and Match Point not being straight comedies.) It's not great by any stretch of the imagination, but it's pleasantly diverting, and Woody himself is funnier than he's been in years. The jokes are mostly recycled material from his older, better (early, funny) movies, but they're well-told and fun to watch. The main problem here is that he's obvious going deaf, and so the timing of the dialogue is all about half a beat slower than it should be.

I can't really talk about my issues with Monster House without spoiling it, so I won't. In the third act, something is revealed that changes the film's entire worldview in a way I found unforgiveably offensive. I'm sure it was unintentional, but that just makes it condescending rather than malicious. Like I said above, the only reason I didn't walk out was because I didn't want to spend the last half-hour of the movie sitting in the hallway waiting.

Incidentally, my current theory about Pirates is that it was a movie designed for fandom. It spent a lot of time on world-building and lore and triangulating the relationships and making the characters murkier. All fandom fodder.

I agree. I think that they knew the audience this time around and really played up those things that they thought that audience would like. I still need to see it again.

Scorsese's The Departed, the American remake of Infernal Affairs

The interesting thing about that movie, based on the trailer, is that Scorsese cast two Boston actors on purpose, because even academy award-winning actors cannot reproduce the accent to save their lives. Jeepers. (What's more, Damon's, which is studied, is in tiny ways going to sound different from Wahlberg's, which is not studied. But that probably won't be as obvious as the awkward blatting of all the other actors.)

And no, of course Leonardo DiCaprio cannot do soul like Tony Leung can do soul. Also, he towers over Matt Damon. The confrontation scenes are going to be interesting.

I stayed for the scene at the end of PotC2. It wasn't worth it, mostly because I knew that was going to happen when I saw the dog get left behind. As we were leaving, the kid behind me was talking about it to his dad, and I turned and said, "You know that means they're going to eat him," and the kid went whoa. My not!boyfriend told me I was evil, and I said like you didn't know that already. The kid thought it was cool, though.

I'm not going to decide if I liked Potc2 until I see PotC3. Kind of like how I withheld judgment of Matrix2 until the story was wrapped up in Matrix3, at which point I decided they were both crap. I hope that doesn't happen this time. In any case, nothing will kill my love for the first ones.