Even though the Oscars are this weekend, that doesn’t mean I can’t make time for movies at all. Check out what made the cut.
The Lost City – I, like Channing Tatum, wish this rom-com adventure would have kept its original name, The Lost City of D, but I’ll take what I can get. In this case, Sandra Bullock excels again in a rom-com, but this one came with an adventurous twist. She plays Loretta, a romance novelist whose become a dour hermit since her husband passed away a few years prior. She’s being forced on a book tour where her cover model, Alan, will also be in attendance. At her first event she gets fed up and tries to head home when she’s taken by some millionaire who’s intent on finding the actual treasure she references in her book. Alan sets out to rescue her, because it’s clear he has a crush on her, but things go haywire almost immediately. This thing had constant laughs and Brad Pitt was terrific as a handsome meditating former Navy Seal also trying to rescue Loretta. Go watch this if you’ve seen The Proposal at least twice.
Good Will Hunting – I know I was only six when this movie came out, but it still shouldn’t have taken me this long to see this cinematic classic. Will Hunting is an actual genius but lives his life working janitorial jobs or laying brick in Boston. He works, hangs out with his friends, and gets into trouble just to pass the time. That is, until a professor at MIT wants to change his life, but he needs the help of his psychologist friend, Sean, to keep Will out of jail. The work the professor gives Will isn’t at all challenging, but his encounters with Sean are mentally taxing for Will who uses defense mechanisms almost the whole length of the film! Will even manages to derail a great relationship with a medical student! Just when you think he’s bombed everything in his life, he learns to open up and decide what he wants for himself. A lot of really wonderful fleshed out stories in this film and it’s totally worth the hype, even almost 25 years later.
The King’s Man – I’ve already seen and talked about this great prequel to the Kingsman franchise, but I finally got my dad to watch it this weekend! Some of the people that pop up in this film, like Daniel Bruhl and Stanley Tucci, managed to delightfully surprise me again this time around, and I still thought Rhys Ifans as Rasputin was hysterical. This time though, my dad made me privy to the fact that the events in the film are loosely based on the events leading up to World War I. Obviously, some things in the film were purely fictional, but they used the war as an interesting backdrop to what went down. Pretty cool!
Greed – Since not that many new films were released this weekend, I wanted to go through things that have been collecting dust on my DVR. This Steve Coogan comedy jumped out at me right away. He plays a terrible, high profile fashion icon, Sir Richard “Greedy” McCreadie, who in the present is throwing himself a Gladiator-themed 60th birthday party. It also flashes back to how he became such a high-profile figure. Turns out he’d always been the worst. Overall, this really didn’t end up being my style, but I’ll still watch almost anything Steve Coogan is in. Maybe next time!