Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

12/21 The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies
12/12 The Homesman
12/7 Mockingjay part 1
12/5 Penguins of Madagascar

11/28 Rosewater
11/15 John Wick
11/8 Big Hero 6
11/8 Interstellar

10/26 Book of Life
10/23 Fury
10/20 Maze Runners
10/19 Kill the Messenger

9/4 November Man

8/3 Guardians of the Galaxy

7/29 Hercules
7/24 Monty Python Live (mostly)
7/24 Lucy
7/18 Sex Tape

6/22 Chef
6/10 A Million Ways To Die In The West

5/30 Godzilla
5/24 X-Men Days of Future Past
5/2 Peabody & Sherman

4/3 Captain America: Winter Soldier
4/3 The Grand Budapest Hotel

3/23 Divergent
3/12 Three Days to Kill
3/11 Philomena
3/10 Pompeii
3/3 Non-Stop

2/6 Monuments Men

1/28 jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit


I would have to say that, overall, the best movies that I saw were (in no particular order): Monuments Men, Philomena, Grand Budapest Hotel, Chef. Honorable mentions to Rosewater and Homesman. There were lots of good action movies including Three Days To Kill and November Man. The two Avengers movies, Captain America: Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy were both excellent, I was amazed at how well CA:WS integrated with Marvel's Agents of SHIELD on ABC, but I guess that's an advantage of everyone working under the same corporate umbrella. Hobbit: 5 Armies was an excellent conclusion to the series and I really think Jackson provided an excellent interpretation of Tolkien's bed time story.

Funnest Movies: Penguins of Madagascar, Big Hero 6, Book of Life, Sex Tape, Chef, honorable mention to Million Ways to Die in the West. Half are animated, that's interesting. I've seen Big Hero 6 twice and will definitely be buying the DVD. Oddly I haven't picked up the DVD for Chef yet.

Biggest Disappointments: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Mazerunners. I used to be a fanatic for Tom Clancey books, I was really in to military fiction at the time and thought Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising were great. But he so Mary Sue'd Jack Ryan that I stopped buying him long before Clancey passed away. Mazerunners: well, it didn't make sense to me. Yes, it's YA, but I want some sort of logic, and some times the stupidest things can break suspension of disbelief for me. For example, the new runners are injected in to the world by this freight elevator that seems to be 30 stories tall or more, yet when they escape, everything is at ground level. So they bored down umpteen stories, then over to the compound, then back up just for an elevator? I won't be bothering with the subsequent movies nor the books, whereas I'm a big fan of the Hunger Games series and enjoyed Divergent and am looking forward to more of those.

I need to add a Disappointment tag for Hobbit, but it was an instance where the 'print' was bad. The digital copy had an audio distortion in the end credits that made it sound like the film wasn't tight around the sound pickup head, but since almost everything is digital these days, that makes no sense. Apparently the cost for a new print to fix this is rather formidable, so it will be a flawed print for as long as they're showing this in Boulder.


I think the releases for 2015 that I'm looking forward to the most would be the new Avengers: Age of Ultron movie, I can't remember if the new James Bond movie is '15 or '16. And there's a new Godzilla movie coming from Japan which should be cool, but again I don't know if it's for this year or next. And I think Luc Besson has another action movie due, but the title is not coming to mind. Yes, they're mostly mainline pictures, but Kurosawa and Itami are dead and Miyazaki is retired, and it seems like Joss is the only American film maker anymore who is on the 'must see' list.

Next Up: I think tonight will be Night At The Museum 3 or possibly The Interview. I know the latter will be a very uneven and not very good movie, but it still looks like a lot of fun. NATM3 will be bittersweet since I think it'll be one of the two last appearances of Robin Williams in film, the other being something called Absolutely Anything, due in late June, which also stars most of Monty Python as extra-terrestrials. That could be quite strange.

Movies Read & Books Seen, August through October

Movies:
10/31 Ender's Game
10/19 Captain Phillips
10/4 Gravity
10/2 Don Jon
9/23 The World's End
9/7 Percy Jackson/Sea of Monsters
8/26 The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
8/18 Paranoia
8/16 Elysium
8/9 Wolverine
8/2 The Heat

Books:
10/12 Directive 51, John Barnes
10/4 Ender's Game
9/5 Norse Code
9/5 finished Vorkosigan

Read on for detailed commentaryblathering:
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Having said all that, it looks like my reading of fiction is going to be severely curtailed for the next few months. Too much education-related and hopefully job-expanding reading to do. Of course, if Weber or Bujold or Doctorow or Sir Pterry come out with a new book, that's all subject to change.