By http://www.impawards.com/2023/guardi...hree_ver2.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72394795
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 - (2023)
Rewatch - this time at home.
Guardians 3 can't match the pure brilliance of the first movie, but it's a whole lot of fun all the same. The comedy is still working, and so is the creature design and overall artistic flair when it comes to Galaxy-building. Rocket's story is genuinely touching, and powers the whole film quite well - there are more future viewings left in this one (in my younger days, I'd have watched this many times already.) There's so much backstory behind all of the characters and the universe they live in now - is this really going to be the last
Guardians movie? From what I've heard, a future one is possible, but it would be centered on different characters - which to me wouldn't be a
Guardians movie really. I come to see Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Nebula, Mantis and Rocket. This was a good time, and very easy to lose yourself in - I've upped my rating from last time because not only had it lost nothing with a second go-around, I think I enjoyed myself even more than the first time.
8/10
By IMPAwards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33246497
Extremely loud and Incredibly Close - (2011)
My biggest problem with
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that pretty soon into it I'm turned off main character Oscar (Thomas Horn) and his father Thomas Schell (Tom Hanks). I mean, I really don't like them very much. Thomas is one of those eccentric parents who invents his own brand of parenting to counteract what seem like autistic traits in his son (interestingly, the doctors never end up giving the kid a diagnosis of autism.) Does this include putting him in danger? I thought it did. The son, Oscar, is himself an extremely annoying kid - rude, brash, dishonest, pushy, demanding, insensitive and sometimes even cruel. The kindly old man played by Max von Sydow actually has to flee the area to get away from him. I know, I know - this movie's saying to me "Yeah - but
autism!" I don't know. Stephen Daldry and screenwriter Eric Roth (who adapted Jonathan Safran Foer's novel) don't do a good job of getting us to side with these characters. They're tugging away at our heart strings, but with painful fish-hooks. They're trying to calculate "cute" and "mournful" but getting "exasperating" and "galling" instead. One of the worst Best Picture Oscar nominees I've ever seen.
4/10