Please Turn off all Cellular Devices

For such a promising cinematic year, this was the least that I’ve gone to the theatres in ages. Mostly it was due to my lack of time and inability to sacrifice my home bound Friday night routine, but if there had been more exciting movies maybe I would have bothered to at least rent or download the ones I wanted to see. But that didn’t happen until about 2 weeks ago, when I realised that this blogpost was coming due and I barely had 2 movies that made the cut. So I commenced a two-week long movie-a-thon and watched all the movies that I thought looked interesting from the past year. As much as I love watching movies, the amount of backlog was so much that it cut into my reading and tv time so now I’m behind on those… Next year I am so not getting into this situation!

We’ll start off with a predictable hit; one who’s prequel made the list last year and which didn’t fail to disappoint as so many sequels do. I’m talking about Fast & Furious 6! Are you really surprised that I loved this movie? Hot cars, high-speed racing, and a cast of veritable hotties (so sad to hear about Paul Walker’s death last week, since it means that he won’t be in any of the sequels), what more could a girl ask for? I’m 99% sure that some of the stunts are totally fake, but it was so entertaining that there was no way that it didn’t make the cut!

The next film was a total surprise in how much I liked it. I had heard terrible reviews of We’re the Millers before seeing it, but it was playing at the cheap theatre and for an evening’s worth of entertainment $3 seemed like a fair price even if the film wasn’t great. Plus my mother was paying, since she’s decided that she likes to go see movies now that she’s retired. Besides how awkward it was sitting beside my mother while the characters almost-had extra-marital threesomes, laughed about enlarged phallus’, and watched Jennifer Aniston strip the movie was hilarious. Who knew that a stripper, a drug dealer, a runaway, and a dork pretending to be a real American family would be a smash hit?

Normally I think that magic of the card tricks variety (even the really fancy stuff) is so passe, but Now You See Me crossed the border between real magic that’s just sleight of hand and the complete suspension of belief that comes with urban fantasy stories like Harry Potter. I won’t wreck the ending for you, but I will point out that I knew something was up with that guy. You know the one that I mean.

Kings of Summer takes us back to the one year as teenagers when we all found our parents unbearable and wanted to run away. Most of us don’t actually go through with it (and settle for something dramatic like storming out to stay with our friends), but the boys in the movie do. They find a place in the woods to build a house, and spend the summer living like the Lost Boys, having no cares in the world, hunting things, and clowning around. Throughout their adventure I knew that they would have to go home eventually – after all, all children but one grow up – but I did not want the end to come like it did. Thank god that the snake (that I totally saw coming as soon as one of them found a shed skin earlier) didn’t actually kill anyone. Though I bet that the writer had that ending in place since it’s actually more realistic that a snake-bitten kid dies than gets to the hospital just in time.

Mafia movies aren’t usually my thing, but The Family is anything but typical. Each of the actors was perfect for their roles, and I was absolutely engrossed by their attempts to act like a normal American family living in France. It’s rather difficult to describe how amusing their hijinks are, so I’ll just tell you to go watch it for yourself!