Got to see Much Ado!

The physical slapstick and Buffy running behind the main scene with a rocket launcher was hilarious.

I was underwhelmed by NF's Dogberry, but Keaton stole my heart with his Beetlejuice rendition of "Remember: I. Am an ass." But, Fillion did his cute Fillion thing. I just wish I knew the dialogue by heart, because his lines were the ones I had the hardest time parsing, especially when the rest of the audience was laughing over his dialogue.

Weird laughter for some of Sean Maher's scenes, maybe because they were filmed to be so incredibly evil and forboding?

I think the naturalness and the easy-to-follow delivery of the dialogue made it too clear what a ridiculous story it was once the Don John machinations came to fruition and all that followed. Like, how did any of the actions, subterfuges, and characterizations make sense or be redeembable to get anywhere close to a happy ending?

AA's delivery of "Kill Claudio" was chilling.

And I think FK had more of a chance to give off personality because he actually had lines. I liked Hero when she could speak, and she did what she could with her non-line scenes, but damn, she had a heck of a lot of screen time with absolutely nothing to say, darn you Will.

I adored the visual gags and how so many of the lines were handled, the interpretation. Like the lines being delivered during roughhousing, or the characters trying to control themselves while telling falsehoods.

In the end, this version made me long for a version that had characters and plot that made sense. I blame that on how accessible Joss made it.

If there's spoiler fonting that I should do, please give me a poke.

BTW, Katha Pollitt loves the Joss "Much Ado".

she seems hard to please.

Link?

[link]

Full Quote:

Katha Pollitt ‏@KathaPollitt 6h "Saw Much Ado About Nothing at Madison at Cinema. It was terrific! Great acting, loved the black and white. Go!"

Just a tweet, not a full review

Saw the new Star Trek, and I really really liked it, now to go read the white font.

I must have been in just the right mood to see White House Down, because I enjoyed it unironically and even teared up at the daughter waving the Presidential flag to call off the air strike.

Channing Tatum has come light years as a dramatic actor from where he was four years ago (i.e., a block of wood, albeit an exquisitely carved one, in the first G.I. Joe movie), and this time out I enjoyed his performance without benefit of being hypnotized by his bare chest. Not only did I enjoy a Jamie Foxx performance, but I also sat through a Roland Emmerich action movie without saying "OH COME ON!" once.

It helps, of course, that many of the supporting roles are filled by gifted character actors like Richard Jenkins, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Lance Reddick, and James Woods.

So after reading the white font on STiD, and while still having enjoyed the heck out of the movie, some things rang true for me in the comments.

I've read plenty of fanfic, and some it was truly brilliant in how it dealt with true alternate universes and married them well to canon, complete with callbacks.

So, yes, it could have been done better, and yes, the final part did seem too call-backy and referential and therefore hollow.

I appreciated that we were in a different universe, and that some things could come about again and yet happen differently yet still have echoes of another universe. But yet, it still could have been smarter.

I get why it was called Into Darkness, and I get the complaints that it felt less Star-Treky, and the entire movie was based on "this is shit we should not be doing, because this is not what we're about" and the moral quandaries therein. Which makes me absolutely positive that any subsequent movies will be more about exploration (talk about things that made me verklempt: the captian's code spoken at the end, which is the show's intro monologue).

I was actually upset many times in the beginning about how the characters were going in directions that were morally wrong, and I don't think that it was until this movie that I realized in absolute clarity that this crew, this ship, wasn't military. What with all the battles and fights. I finally fully comprehended that these people were signed up for discovery and science and knowledge and exploration. And that they'd never signed up for battle or violence in a tactical military sense. And in that way, this movie was awesome. (It also made me mad because Kirk was pulling this staff into combat without giving them the choice to get the fuck off the ship, but I suppose he circumvented that by making his away-team the ones supposedly caught up in any potential violence).

I just saw a commercial for RIPD. It looks like the premise is exactly like G vs E.

Man, I saw a preview for that, and I...am concerned about Jeff Bridges.