Sunday, December 29, 2013

Airplane flicks

Pacific Rim: Interested to see this as a lot of my progressive friends have been hailing it as a new, racially and gender conscious direction for action flicks. My take: it gained points for having a great romance storyline-- rather than the hero having to Win The Girl or Rescue The Girl, the girl and the hero grow together and come to love each other as a consequence of events-- and for having a decent multiethic cast and a nice meaty role for Idris Elba. It lost points for killing off the sole black character in the third reel (seriously guys?) and for having only one major female character. Otherwise: enjoyable, but basically like Neon Genesis Evangelion without the Jungian psychology.

World's End: SF as metaphor, with weird events in a small English town serving as a bassline to Simon Pegg and his buddies working through their issues about growing up and getting old. Nicely dystopian, but is there some sort of rule that every British production now has to employ David "Stemroach" Bradley in some role or other?

Movie count for 2013: 72