Wasting time
Jun. 26th, 2007 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threemonkeysYes it is cold today. It was cold and wet yesterday. Wonderful conditions to be out and about. The thing is that yesterday I took my car in for a service. It needed some parts which had to come down overnight from Hamilton. So I took it back in today. What that means is a big chunk of time to kill in central Wellington. There is just so much time that even I can spend at bookstores. Well, OK that limit is determined by my feet getting too sore to be able to spend any more time looking at the shelf contents. So what I need is something to do where I can sit in a warm environment and be entertained. Yes I went to the cinema. I went to the new Fantastic Four effort as well as Zodiac - a choice dictated by session times as much as perceived quality.
I defy anybody to have any realistic expectation of serious merit in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. You have to know going in the door that it is going to be a piece of hi-gloss fluff. There are serious and substantial adaptations of comics but this isn't one of them. So how does it do within that constraint - is it still entertaining and diverting? It does not start well, being very wooden, but it warms up pretty well. It is very pretty with good visual representation and the story holds together (almost). What more could you want.
When you want to kill time, going to a 160 minute film is a good move. Zodiac is based on a book about a real life serial killer in the '70s & '80s. It has a very real feel about it. Characters coming in and dropping out, strange decisions, dead ends, police procedural constraints as well as personal stress and loss. It almost feels like a documentary. It is quite engrossing stuff, but at that length it does drag a bit at times. However when that happens you can amuse youself admiring the amount of work that has been done to make the period representation authentic. For that alone, it is worth watching. But because it is based on real life, don't go expecting a neat tidy ending.
I defy anybody to have any realistic expectation of serious merit in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. You have to know going in the door that it is going to be a piece of hi-gloss fluff. There are serious and substantial adaptations of comics but this isn't one of them. So how does it do within that constraint - is it still entertaining and diverting? It does not start well, being very wooden, but it warms up pretty well. It is very pretty with good visual representation and the story holds together (almost). What more could you want.
When you want to kill time, going to a 160 minute film is a good move. Zodiac is based on a book about a real life serial killer in the '70s & '80s. It has a very real feel about it. Characters coming in and dropping out, strange decisions, dead ends, police procedural constraints as well as personal stress and loss. It almost feels like a documentary. It is quite engrossing stuff, but at that length it does drag a bit at times. However when that happens you can amuse youself admiring the amount of work that has been done to make the period representation authentic. For that alone, it is worth watching. But because it is based on real life, don't go expecting a neat tidy ending.