Remember when reading the book used to make you excited about seeing the movie? I used to love watching the film in English class after finishing one of the classic novels we had just finished. It was always interesting to see how a filmmaker’s version of a movie differed from the vision that I had formulated in my mind. Nowadays, if I am made aware of this with enough advance notice to see the film, I’ll try to read the book. To say I do this as many of my English teacher friends would be a lie. Still, recent books that I have been able to read before seeing the movie were The Martian (a great film, but even better book) and The Maze Runner. I also recently read Paper Towns, which I disliked so much that I will skip the movie.
Also, a few years ago, I read In The Heart of the Sea. With apologies to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, this was THE most descriptive book I have read in my entire life. I had no idea when I read it that a film version would also come, and I am super excited to see this Ron Howard-directed movie when it comes to theaters in a couple of weeks. In any case, the movie rarely lives up to the quality of a good book. It’s impossible to condense the essence of a great book into a two-hour film. Recently, I’ve seen a couple of movies where I’ve wanted to read the book afterward. These have included American Sniper, Room, and Amy Koppelman’s novel I Smile Back. There is a difference, however. American Sniper was my number one movie of 2014, while Room is pushing for that spot on my 2015 list. I Smile Back was a book that I could see myself loving and relating to better. The movie, however, was highly disappointing.
Guillermo del Toro. Some people love the movies he has directed. Some people don’t love them. I am starting to land in the second group. I know he found his early cult following with movies like Hellboy and Hellboy II while also receiving critical accolades for films like The Orphanage and Pan’s Labyrinth. For me, his movies aren’t must-see (I’ve had Pan’s Labyrinth on my list of movies to watch for years, but each time I might want to watch it, I put something else on instead). Hellboy and The Orphanage were both okay, but del Toro is no early M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs). While Crimson Peak has received mostly positive reviews (69% on Rotten Tomatoes), it hasn’t resonated with audiences. Its marketing campaign has hindered its genre identifier, such as humor, mystery, suspense, romance, or drama. This movie attracted del Toro’s best-ever cast ensemble (Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, and Tom Hiddleston. Still, with an estimated budget of $50 million and only half of that amount accumulated in revenue from the first two weekends, Crimson Peak might barely break even. This movie is by no means great. It was an okay watch, but my life certainly would not have been altered if I had not seen it. I absolutely will never watch this movie again. It certainly is not a horror film, so even though the previews look scary and are categorized as such, you won’t be scared. If you like del Toro’s other movies, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by this one. If you’ve never seen one of his movies before (other than Pacific Rim), I suggest watching either The Orphanage or Pan’s Labyrinth at home and base your decision on your fondness for either of those movies.
I recall seeing A History of Violence in theaters for the first time in 2005. It was not what I was expecting at all. The movie was decent, but it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. This was also when I started to get into the Oscars. I remember being flabbergasted when William Hurt (The Doctor, Children of a Lesser God) received a Best Supporting Actor nomination. At that time, my issue with his nomination was that he appeared in only one scene (basically the last scene in the movie). To warrant this acclaim, you needed to be on the screen for more than 15 minutes. As I watched it again (for just the second time ever) last night, I realized that he didn’t deserve the nomination, not because he was only on the screen for 15 minutes, but because his performance sucked. He was such a minor character that anyone could have played this role, and it wouldn’t have affected the movie. If anybody deserved a nomination for this movie, it would have been Viggo Mortensen (
The Road
The much-anticipated Steve Jobs exists so much as a single entity that we may forget that the 2013 Ashton Kutcher Jobs movie ever existed. Steve Jobs has been a much bigger hit with critics (85% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes versus 27% rotten) and audiences (the 2015 movie earned more than half of what the 2013 movie grossed in its first week alone). While neither Kutcher nor Michael Fassbender (