3:10 to Yuma 👍👍
Solid movie. It understood itself well and had a consistent and good quality ending. It was more difficult to predict than I had previously expected too. The movie sets you up for certain events that you expect to happen but don't - which is a nice change of pace.
3:10 to Yuma is about an old-west outlaw (Russell Crowe) who is captured, but needs to be escorted to a nearby town to catch a train to prison. The main escort turns out to be Christian Bale - a local rancher veteran who lost his leg at war.
The movie outlines one of many problems with keeping law-and-order in the old west. The good guys were constantly outmatched all the way through this movie - and civilians got dragged into law enforcement by their desire to maintain order.
It wasn't an amazing movie. The plot was fairly linear and didn't contain any real philosophical message. In short - the plot was just about 1 level deeper than what was on the surface. But it was fun, well acted, and well written. I can definitely recommend it.
Disney's Robin Hood 👍👍 for under 10.
Rewatched this old classic from my childhood. I had many fond memories of this film and thought it might be fun to reconnect with that. I would still hum the tunes from this film ~20 years after I used to watch it, so at least I knew I'd be in for good music.
No. This is a movie from before the days of Pixar, back when children's movies were for children only. There's not a whole lot in this film for adults (obviously that's not the intended audience). The music was also a cut or two below what I had remembered. All in all it was an unpleasant experience to take the film that I had loved so much and watch it at a point in my life where it was more tiresome and ADD than charming and fun.
I still maintain that this is a good film for children, though it's not even perfect for that. As a child I'd never have noticed, but this movie barely does lipservice to the morality of stealing. I don't have a problem with stealing
back property, but they could have made it clearer to children exactly what justified Robin Hood's theft. Instead they made it easy to take the socialist view that theft is justified when people are suffering - which is definitely something I'd want to be careful about exposing my hypothetical children to.
I still have to give this film two thumbs up based on how much I enjoyed it as a child. But watching it as an adult and comparing it to modern children's movies like Finding Nemo, The Increadibles, Monster's Inc., or Wall-E, it's clear that we've moved a step closer to perfecting children's movies since Disney's reign.
Serenity 👍👍
In keeping with the thumbs up theme today, I re-watched Serenity last weekend. I had watched it before and had mixed feelings about it, but when I watched it previously I had not seen the television show this movie spawns from (Firefly) - so I had no investment in the characters, or in the particular... flavor of the show.
Watching Firefly is definitely a pre-requisite to watching Serenity. Firefly is a short-lived television series that lasts only 14 episodes. It was killed off primarily because the episodes were originally aired out of order - which made following the show very difficult and killed ratings. It is a quality sci-fi TV show, though, and is available to watch for free anytime on Hulu.com. I very much enjoyed the show and was quite shocked to discover that it had been cancelled so early. Its popularity translated into the full-feature film "Serentiy", but Serentiy suffers the burden of covering the entire television show's grand plot in just one film - which it does an admirable job of. The problem is that you don't get much time to be invested in the characters since the plot is constantly being pushed further.
The first time I watched this movie, I had trouble getting attached to any of the characters. That lack of attachment led to a fairly lukewarm review. After watching the television show the attachment was there - and so the movie simply laid out the solid, creative plot that the show's writers had envisioned. I wish that they had not been required to cram their creativity into one film, but I'll take what I can get.
Reccommendation: If you liked Han Solo, you'll like Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly, and Serentiy. Definitely watch the 14
Firefly episodes before watching
Serentiy. All of this is available to you today at no additional cost since Firefly is free on Hulu.com and Serenity is available on "Watch Now" on Netflix.
I thought it was going to be a B-Movie, poking fun at itself. It was just a horribly made TV movie. Avoid. I don't give this out often...... "F"
For $17, I might have to make up for that any grab it on BR.
