Sleeper Hits

If you haven't noticed by now, you soon will... Erin and I love movies. We don't really watch much TV, unless we're hooked on a specific show (currently Heroes, used to be addicted to Lost until it fell off in Season 3), we play a lot of board games, and sometimes we'll just chill and read books, but a lot of the time we watch movies. The past several days has been no exception.

Monday morning, since we were both off for the holiday, we caught a matinee of Spider-man 3, in preparation we watched Spider-man on Saturday night and Spider-man 2 on Sunday night... needless to say, we were excited to go see the latest installment. Later on Monday we watched Arthur and the Invisibles, a kids movie that just released on DVD, also one that we were excited about.

Utlimately Spider-man 3 had too much going on, a few things that didn't make sense, and a couple things that just down-right annoyed me; a really good movie, but certainly not on par with the first two. Arthur and the Invisibles was even more disappointing, the movie is partially live-action and partially computer animated. The animation was fantastic and the plot was good, if a little recycled; but much of what happened to the characters was just too cheesy, and the dialog was very, very weak (this coming from a huge fan of kids movies with notoriously weak dialog).

The "sleeper hit" for the week though was a movie we watched last night... we weren't too excited about this movie and only watched it because we had it around and hadn't seen it before. The title pegged it as a cheesy love story but Win a Date With Tad Hamilton ended up being really good. It didn't exactly earn "favorites-list" status, but we really enjoyed it. It was funny, pretty original (about as original as a love story can be), and had some great acting. Topher Grace did a great job and Kate Bosworth was adorable, and believably sweet/naive. The movie also pulled off something I don't remember seeing before; it had two complicated love triangles with an ending that made you happy, but involving all characters that were likeable and honorable. With the exception of two annoying side-characters, every single person in the movie made you like them.

Here's to hoping that Fantastic 4 II, Shrek the Third, Harry Potter 5, Bourne Ultimatum, Ocean's 13 and Transformers don't let their hype get my expectations up higher than they can deliver, cause I'm already pretty excited for them all.

Labels: movies, super-heroes

posted by Brett at 9:19 AM