I may have fibbed to a few people when I said I’d be doing a video review for this film. I apologize. I almost shot a video in my car moments after leaving the theater, but I was way too sleepy. Kudos to the theaters having earlier premieres than midnight. Some of us have work on Friday morning (that I almost slept through). But hey, this film declares summer is here!
IM3 picks up some time after last years mega hit The Avengers. Tony Stark is having serious anxiety problems, most of which stem from the events in that film. I say that so people who have admitted to me they haven’t seen IM1 or 2 can skip to Avengers just to get familiar with what’s going on so they can see this one. Anyway, besides Stark’s personal demons, he has a new villain to face by the name of The Mandarin. I had to run over to Wikipedia just to get a background on who he is and what he does. I’m not going to explain here. Kudos to the brilliant actor Sir Ben Kingsley. The plot mostly comes from the Iron Man story arc “Extremis” which for a while was on Netflix Instant. (more…)
To make my life easier as a lazy writer, the 2002 Spider-Man (and it’s sequels) will just be OSM and 2012 The Amazing Spider-Man will be TASM. Got it? Good.
While I already wanted to see this movie,Hugo’s five Academy Award wins over eleven nominations cemented my need to see this film ASAP. I now have a greater understanding as to why so many critics have been calling this past year and the nominees for Best Picture were all about the movies, besides the obvious.
It was my intention to write this review before the Academy Awards aired on Sunday night. I decided to run out to a theater still playing what was later awarded Best Picture of 2011 late Saturday afternoon, and to my surprise, I found myself in a packed theater. Sadly, due to the time I arrived, I had to sit in one of the seats close to the front. That was my only problem with this film, but it was my own fault.
I was and still am pretty excited about this movie since it takes place and is filmed in and around the New Haven area. FYI, I’m a Connecticut native and the Elm City is where I was born. However, I didn’t figure this out until later in the film when characters were throwing town names around and I had to run to IMDb and Wikipedia. The filmmaker is from New Haven and some scenes were actually filmed in his childhood home.
This is, or maybe was, a pretty good example of an “Oscar bait” film. In case you never heard of that term, it’s a film that has grade A acting, directing, writing, etc. It pretty much has to make critics swoon about some aspect of the movie if not the whole thing, and then come awards season, it racks up the nominations to various other awards and may get close, if not winning, the Academy Award itself.
