Just watched Mud last night.

I wasn't expecting to either, since I only found out about the movie existing literally 10 minutes before I started watching it. But in hindsight I can see why this movie does not have the level of exposure something like Cloud Atlas would when it first premiered. (almost all of the previews before the movie were for independent films for instance)

I'm going to try and give my impressions of the film without giving away too much of what the story entails, a big part of what pulls you in is not really knowing where the plot is going or what it is meant to do. The themes are always apparent, but never in a way where the final outcome is clear-cut or even the least bit predictable. It actually reminded me of Cloud Atlas in that sense*(or at least from my bias of Cloud Atlas being the last movie I saw right before Mud), except instead of being a bunch of pretentious interconnected stories of ultimately no substance, it is a simple singular story that drives your curiosity naturally through the subtle and interconnecting interactions with very down to earth characters.

Just when I was starting to think it was impossible for a film to see a nationwide release without it being some idiotic mainstream chump-fest. Or maybe I am just biased because of how familiar the characters and scenery were from my own upbringing. (Although I am not really at all similar to any of those characters themselves, I have grown up around such people all my life. I don't think it is this bias that makes the characters so identifiable, but it certainly gave me some strange deja vu when it came to the establishing shots and the overall impact of the settings and scenery.)

Oh yeah, and if you got no other reason to check it out, you do eventually get to see Matthew McConaughey shirtless.

*(at least it WOULD have if it wasn't for Cloud Atlas with the whole "starting the film by showing the end of every single sub-plot" thing)

watched this gravity movie that just came out. saw it in 3D, which i'm told adds to the experience, but wasn't something i found particularly heart-stopping, though i do not have much of a fetish for floating pens(every scene in the entire movie has a floating pen coming at you[the ][/the]) so i may not have been the target audience here.
 
reasonably fun as light entertainment, and they fill the sequence of events just tight enough so there isn't a ton of room for the movie to get too stupid, but not enough for there to be anything particularly worthwhile or interesting going on outside of stuff just breaking. pretty much the whole drama of the movie comes from the fact that sanda bullock's character is an incomprehensibly poor astronaut who isn't really good at anything. the science of it all is actually in the ballpark of rather good most of the time, the physical impossibilities not something that should really lose anybody, even if, at the end of the day, the movie could not really happen. the special effects editing and composition was actually unusually good most of the time, but that's pretty much all the movie really has going for it.
 
i dunno, it's really just a spectacle movie, nothing terribly important or sincere going on. worth watching if you want/need a ride, otherwise not something you're really missing out on. i recently had a more interesting/engaging/rewarding/informational/fun experience just searching youtube for chris hadfield's doing-neat-stuff-in-space videos, which is pretty much the same thing as gravity minus stuff breaking or anybody's buttocks the central element of the mise-en-scene.

I could not imagine gravity being an entertaining movie, I got bored to shit watching the trailer. OH NO SHES SPINNING IN SPACE OHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK

haha, that is kinda what it comes down to as well. i thought it was generally a rather dumb experience, but i personally thought it was neat seeing a semi-earnest attempt to convey the physics of space, movement and that kind of thing, in a dramatic situation, even if it was not all that scientifically accurate and was occasionally extremely stupid(the first guy who dies does so while inexplicably bashing himself against the outside of the space ship, the only possible explanation is that nasa is required to bring barely-functional psychopaths with severe behavioral disorders on their space missions). i like that sort of thing for the same reasons i like watching videos of actual astronaut stuff, even some of the more mundane stuff. if that doesn't do it for you, this movie goes from being rather uninteresting to totally worthless to you. basically, you're right, you're not missing out.

yeah i liked mud a bunch. got me interested in matt McG so i checked out a lot of his recent movies. not all so great but i'm keeping an eye on what he's doing now. killer joe was interesting and he's got that true detective hbo series coming up next year which might be something.

I never saw ashton kutcher steve jobs, and have no intention to.
 
But the most recent thing I have seen is Antitrust, and I have to say I found that potrayal of steve jobs one that I could not only appreciate, but one I myself could personally identify with. At least as far as run of the mill fucked up thrillers go.

Last movie I saw what battle of Ender. It was cool!

Watched this All Is Lost movie that Robert Redford made over a weekend. It's a reasonably inoffensive movie, but that's just about all you can say about it. Violently uninspired and unmoving. An almost-neat factor is that it's essentially a one-man silent movie, short of a brief introductory narration and some scattered bits of profanity throughout. This may have been a neat experience in the hands of a skilled dramatic actor, but Robert Redford isn't really a skilled dramatic actor. The core drama comes solely from the fact that Robert Redford's character is EXTREMELY OLD and not particularly good at anything, which failed to accomplish much of anything since Redford's drowsy, passionless performance undermines the possibility for any more drama than the rest of the crew could muster.
 
The direction of the film is really unusually banal, to the point where I feel like there was some raging nihilistic intent to the movie that the director wasn't quite articulate enough to convey. It's this hyper-realistic survival movie that feels less like a work of creativity and more like one of those movies comprised of found footage from a camera that somebody forgot to turn off and abandoned. I don't like this style of filmmaking anyway, ones that do little more than give you an impartial view of something rather than the film actively endeavoring to create its own reality, but this film takes it to a different level. It got too obsessed with the fact that it's a silent movie and worried so much about information getting conveyed in a realistic manner that it forgot to really express anything interesting or dramatic or emotional. I guess that could have been the point, deliberately leaving all that up to the imagination of the audience, but I genuinely don't need to watch a film to have that sort of experience, I can get that out of reading interesting wikipedia articles. I hate dropping his name unnecessarily, but I remember hearing Werner Herzog snidely call this sort of filmmaking "The Accountant's Truth", and I haven't seen a movie where this is more applicable.
 
I guess my beef with this comes more from a style of filmmaking I see as being unnecessarily detached, and an actor I see as being fantastically over-rated, but like I said, it's still pretty inoffensive stuff. It's not a BAD movie, and apart from Redford's stunning lack of basic stage presence it generally seems to accomplish what it aimed to do, I just don't think it aimed at doing anything but convey basic information. I guess people who are in the mood for it could have a vaguely useful experience with the movie, but it's a matter of what you've elected to bring to the film, nothing useful will be provided for you.