More Movies

I tend to be one of the easy movie watchers who seems to be satisfied with anything other than plotless and shapeless narrative structures. Examples of completely plotless and shapeless narratives would be parody films like Scary Movie, Epic Movie, Date Movie, and the related. Yes, I have watched the first two Scary Movie installments, but after that, each subsequent scene that ticked past made me want to bash my head straight into a brick wall. Epic Movie and Date Movie are, by far, much worse.

Instead of criticizing films I do not like, here are two that I watched recently that are not the best, but provided me with some decent entertainment for the one, two or so hours.

Marley & Me

Both my parents read the semi-autobiographical book before watching the movie, which sort of surprised me since I'm usually the one doing the reading. So they go, "Jeff, did you get a copy of Marley & Me yet?" and off I go hunting for the movie.

I think this film hits current or previous dog owners much harder than standard dog lovers. Well, that was a rhetorical statement, of course, since SPOILER WARNING: the eventual death of Marley towards the end of the book and movie brings up memories of my own dog ...Highlight that if you dare.

Cute, funny, touching. I would say those three words sum up the film. In my opinion, they focus a bit too much on Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston (playing the couple who owns Marley) in the first half of the film. At first I thought the film should have been titled "My Wife and Me... and My Dog on the Side," but fortunately it improved towards the latter half.

Vexille: 2077 The Isolation of Japan

This one's a CGI animated film directed by Fumihiko Sori (who directed the Japanese Ping Pong film, which I don't know how many people are familiar with). Although the plot is easy to follow - Japan withdraws from the U.N., goes into a decade long isolation, technological advances skyrocket, androids are everywhere, threat to global peace, etc. - I expected a CGI film to have better visuals. Instead of liking the character designs and special effects, I was more interested in the backgrounds.

With a budget of $10,000,000 (no wonder), compared to many other CGI animated films (usually in the nine-digit zone), I guess whatever they happened to produce was whatever they were capable of managing. Watch it if you like sci-fi, fantasy stuff in general.