Holiday Whatnots

More holiday movies:

The Devil Wears Prada was good but Streep was in it much less than I remembered.

Never Let Me Go is an odd adaptation of an odd book. Both are well made but I’m not sure either are very good. We watched the film in two parts–the donor angle was dropped earlier than in the book and was too over-bearing to handle. My interesting discovery: Alex Garland wrote the adaptation.

Pulp Fiction was even better than I remembered it. With the years its white-hot cool has faded, and it’s easier to see the merits of the film more clearly. This is talent-in-spades moviemaking pointing to the way that talent will be squandered in nearly-as-good but equally pointless movies later on. I wish QT was interested in more interesting things.

Predators was pointless and boring. I honestly don’t know what anyone at any stage of this production could have thought would be worthwhile in what they were doing. That I can imagine some dark corner of geekdom loving the “lore” makes me hate geeks and any movie that makes me hate geeks is a big, steaming turd. The upshot is that the too-painful-to-watch hetero-love-angle made me realize how much the first movie was an unabashed and unapologetic sweat-based-bonding-in-the-woods man-bomb. I know: duh! Still…