Movie Night Roundup

Time for another movie night roundup! It’s been long enough since the first one that we’ve had several more movie nights at home, and even two trips to actual theaters. (I know. Whoa.)

Gravity
4/5

We saw this back in early October when we were in Charlotte and could leave Emma with my parents. I had really mixed feelings about it for fairly obvious reasons — I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stomach a movie where basically everything I’ve worked on for my entire career gets (very realistically) destroyed in seconds. Overall, I thought it was well done. The storyline was engaging and sure, there were a bunch of technical errors but whatever, it’s a movie. I would have given this 3 stars but it gets another whole star for the visual effects alone, which were AMAZING. This movie made space and spacecraft look more realistic than any movie I’ve ever seen.

Ironman 3
3/5

We never saw this in the theater so I was happy it finally came out on DVD and we were able to get it from Redbox. I loved the first Ironman and was pretty indifferent to the second. I thought this one was a little overly complicated, and Robert Downey Jr. spent a surprisingly small amount of time in the suit, but overall it was entertaining. It’s also interesting to see how they keep weaving the various Avengers storylines together.

Lincoln
3/5

Daniel Day-Lewis did a wonderful job as Abraham Lincoln, but overall I wanted to like this one more than I did. It was difficult for me to keep track of all the different characters, and I had difficulty following the dialogue at times. It did make me go read more about the real-life history of the 13th Amendment, so that was a nice unintended (or perhaps intended) side effect.

Ender’s Game
4/5

I read this book for the first time in college, and have read it several times since. This movie has been in the works for just about as long. I was somewhat apprehensive about how well it would translate into ~2 hours of screen time but I was very happy with the result. I would’ve liked a few more scenes in the battle room — those were my favorite parts of the book — but overall the movie was great. We saw it with a group one afternoon thanks to Erin’s husband Cory volunteering to watch Emma for a few hours.

The Prince & Me 2
0/5

I watched this over 3 evenings on the treadmill because 1) it showed up in my app as available for streaming and 2) I vaguely remember seeing the first one years and years ago. That one was cute enough; this one (not surprisingly) was utterly abysmal.

The Help
4/5

Another movie based on a book I read and really enjoyed…and again, I was pleasantly surprised at how well the movie makers were able to condense the story into a satisfying movie. Everyone was very well cast in their roles too.

Wreck-It Ralph
4/5

This was our most recent Saturday night selection and I liked it a lot. The “world behind the scenes” of video games was so clever! And despite the fact that Sarah Silverman usually really annoys me, turns out I don’t mind her in animated form.