Wreck-It Ralph

     This movie is updated version of Toy Story. Instead of your stuffed animals coming to life and having a whole separate, secret world, your video games do. It's a cute idea, and of course there is the growing and learning and blah that always accompanies children movies, but it fell short of my expectations.
    Part of the disappointment might stem from my intense hatred of Sarah Silverman. She is the worst. But I don't think that is entirely it. However, she is one of the stars by being a fellow outcast that leads to the defeat of the true evil character in this story, so it definitely relates to the movie as a whole.
    This was a cute movie, don't mistake me, I enjoyed it. But, it was not what I was expecting. My problem with children's movies is that I keep trying to hold them all to the same standard as Finding Nemo, Cars, The Incredibles, etc, yet, rarely does a children's movie meet those standards. I get it, not every movie can be as good as Finding Nemo, but man, I feel sorry for parents who have to sit through these movies over and over and over again. They are cute for seeing once, maybe twice, but they would be insufferable to watch as much as I'm sure a child would.
    Like I said, I feel like this is today's version of Toy Story. All of the children now are playing video games, computer games, cellphone/ipod games, and this movie brings them to life outside of the game. That is a cool idea, and it could have been a great movie. It just wasn't. The story was moving along very well, Ralph was sad, he was moving from game to game and causing problems. Jane Lynch got involved and had a pretty terrible back story. It was kind of cute. Then it stalled on one super sweet, high pitched whiny story. That's where things kind of fell apart.
    They tried to fix it by having the bugs be a continuous under current (no pun intended for those of you who have seen the movie, hehe), and connecting the original evil to the end, but it still just fell short.
     In the end, I give this a 6 out of 10. It was cute, just not up to snuff.

Zero Dark Thirty

     Kathryn Bigelow really likes her war movies. And why not? She's pretty good and them. The Hurt Locker was a pretty powerful movie. This one is a close second. There is a flaw, it is about 20 to 30 minutes too long. She moves along pretty well by covering 10 years in about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Then she ends by covering about 20 to 30 minutes in about 45. It is the climax of the movie, so lots of attention needs to focus on the details, I get it, but man, I was simply exhausted and this ending really made me remember that.

    I also did not appreciate the ending very much because it kind of ruined Osama Bin Laden's death for me. My understanding of what happened at the compound was that the Navy SEALs had no choice but to kill the people there, included Osama Bin Laden, however, that is not how the movie portrayed the events. Yes, they had to kill some people because they started shooting first, but they did not have to kill everyone there, and they certainly did not have to kill Osama. I'm going to leave it at that and not soap box. Be proud of me.

   Jessica Chastain did a great job. She was haggard, she was a bitch, a lot of bad things happened to her and her friends. She was obsessed. She was everything you'd expect a badass CIA woman who found Bin Laden to be. That being said, I definitely liked Jennifer Lawrence better, but that might be just because I liked her character more. I felt like Jason Clarke was truly the unsung hero of the film. He was fantastic. He played a completely detached CIA operative turned Washington suit excellently and really stole the whole show for me. He was the only character I actually liked in the whole film.

    Like I said, Jessica Chastain was a bitch. She was obsessed with finding Bin Laden, so I was not particularly surprised she did. I was not cheering for her to win, but I was interested in seeing how the whole story played out. Not because I wanted justice to be done, not because I empathized with her, not because I  wanted her to get redeemed and find success. I was interested in the story, not the characters involved in it. Aside from Jason Clarke, I really liked him.

    On the whole, this was well done. And the fact that I did not care about a majority of the characters, but still enjoyed the movie should speak volumes for this movie. Thinking about how that played out, I'm not sure that has ever happened to me before. It really was a good story that was done well under Kathryn Bigelow's proven direction.

    In the end, I give this an 8.5 out of 10. I'm glad I watched it; I will probably watch it again at some point and more than once; I will not own it.