Movie Madness

As I think I mentioned before, I took some time off work this week in the interests of saving my sanity. (Well, OK, it might be a bit too late for that, but the experiment was highly successful in other ways, anyway.) And I decided to take advantage of my expanded lazing-around time by doing something I hadn't done in a depressingly long while: renting some movies.

So, here's what I watched:

Pirates of the Caribbean: I must be the last person in America to have seen this movie, and I'm sorry now I didn't go catch it on the big screen when I had the chance, because I bet it would have been even better viewed that way. But, even on the small screen, this was a lot of fun. Not exactly the endless cavalcade of over-the-top swashbuckling I was, for some reason, expecting, but lots of fun. There's a wonderful main character in the person of Captain Jack Sparrow, there's some great touches of humor, the visuals are impressive, and, most surprisingly of all, the central plot conceit is actually really, really good. There's a major plot twist that I'm still mildly confused about, but I can't bring myself to really care that much. Glad I finally got around to watching this.

Lost in Translation: Like I said earlier, I only got to watch the first half of this before the disc crapped out on me. Grrr. But what I saw of it, I very much liked. It's a very low-key comedy, with the kind of naturalistic dialog you seldom see in movies (and even more seldom see done well), so if you're going into it expecting belly-laughs and polished wittiness and wacky action, you're bound to be disappointed. Me, I kinda like low-key once in a while, and this is low-key done really, really well. Maybe one of these days, I'll actually get to find out how it ends.

Big Fish: This movie was so damned near perfect in damned near every way, that I find myself hard-pressed to say anything specific about it. So I'll just say that it was delightful, moving, thought-provoking, funny, off-beat, visually well done, and just generally very, very much worth watching if you have any soul or imagination at all. I'm really glad I got around to watching this one.