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Weekend Movie Roundup

Great World of Sound opened here this weekend and I went to catch a showing. The character acting combined with the visual aesthetic of the film makes it feel like you're watching a well cut together documentary most of the time. This is a great vibe to have most of the time to pull in the audience but when things start to go sour you feel a whole lot more awful than you would if the film were setup as an obvious fictional piece. It was very well done and had many entertaining and worthwhile moments but the end of the film was, for me, quite a bummer. I really wanted to like Michael Clayton. I mean, a George Clooney lawyer drama with Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton and Syndney Pollack - what's not to like? Maybe it was the timing of when I saw it or maybe it was the film itself but I couldn't get behind the pacing and payoff. The acting was quite great, the film looked good and the characters / situations were believable but I have a hard time with movies that very slowly build for two hours and then have a fairly predictable payoff. The other folks that I saw it with disagree with my take on it so it's quite possible that I'm in the minority on this one. Yes, we rented Transmorphers hoping that the Transformers knock off would be just terrible enough that it would be amazingly hysterical. Unfortunately this was not the case. The movie certainly had its fair share of hilariously bad moments but mostly it was normal terrible moments. And for an 83 minute film it's a little annoying to not see any horribly rendered robots for the first 45 minutes. The trailer is really all you need.