It was a busy week for movies for me and I didn’t really realize how busy until I started writing up this edition of What I Watched. Theatrically I saw screenings of Red Dawn, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 and Rise of the Guardians while at home I watched screeners of V/H/S, West of Memphis and This is 40. And finally, I watched David O. Russell‘s Flirting with Disaster in preparation for tomorrow’s Movie Club discussion.
With Twilight you already know what I thought and between Red Dawn and Rise of the Guardians, one was pretty good while the other was awful, I will let you know which one is which in the coming days as both hit theaters on Wednesday.
On the screener side of things I’ll keep my thoughts on This is 40 to myself for the moment, but I will say there are reviews out there that I disagree with entirely. West of Memphis is a great documentary and likely to be the front-runner for the Oscar Best Documentary (feature) category, particularly because it actually helped get one man off death row and two others out of jail for crimes they didn’t commit.
And V/H/S I watched last night and if I can find the time in the next couple days I will write a little more on it, but I will say it is one hell of a horror film with one troubling flaw… It’s two long. It’s essentially a group of horror short films as a group of people enter a house to collect a videotape for which they will be paid upon retrieval only to find several tapes throughout the house. Each tape they watch contains a different, horrifying story.
Had each of these short films been edited down by five minutes, the collective of directors including Adam Wingard, Glenn McQuaid, Radio Silence, David Bruckner, Joe Swanberg and Ti West could have delivered a film just over 90 minutes long and it could have become one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen. However, each segment is so long I couldn’t help but becoming continually bored despite how great each of them is.
Your turn now, what did you watch?
