I have been on a big movie kick for the last couple weeks and I usually never make it to the theater.

Caught nearly the last showing of Gatsby in 2d and it really looked like it was suppose to be 3d unlike every other 3d flick I've seen this month. Worth it for the sets, clothes, and unintentional funny. I am a sucker for art direction.
I thought Iron Man was surprisingly good, although it helps to have no expectations walking in, for me at least. Half the time I don't expect a movie will be able to pierce my busy, distracted head, but it really pulled me into it with big budget movie magic and was super fun. Best of the three, I'd say.
I think I already ranted a bit here about Star Trek. Just give me more Cumberbatch and finish up season 3 of Sherlock. I may just go catch it again.

Oh, I wonder if I can still catch the Sapphires. That's not big budget but it is playing at the local "art" theater this week, and it turns out I will watch that O'Dowd guy do anything.

Pranzo di ferragosto is delightful.

Going by the Book is hilarious.

Open Range is surprisingly good.

eth, I feel the same way about Benedict Cumberbatch as I do Cillian Murphy. Thinking there's a definite "type" there (wispy, intense, charismatic). Anytime either of them is on the screen, I am mesmerised. I have a feeling Cillian Murphy maybe stepping into a similar role as Christopher Walken fulfilled throughout the '80s and '90s. He has that same kind of brooding intensity.

Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, otoh, is so damned elegant, even dressed as a beat cop. He's like the second coming of Fred Astaire.

I thought Iron Man was fantastic tbh, but then I do like my movies big, dumb and silly :)

I was thinking of watching the Fast & Furious franchise starting from the beginning. I've never seen any of them but now that they've hit #6 I feel like I'm missing out.

hmm, and on further research, it seems I should go ahead and watch Looper. My admiration for Josepgh G-L might actually cancel out my loathing of Bruce Willis.

Anyone else seen it and can comment?

I don't really have a type as far as I can tell and it's more that he seems to defy type so well. I don't think I even noticed him the first few handful of times he was in things I saw.

Maybe that's my type in actors: type defying or straight up weirdo. I don't know that Walken is really a type so much as his own thing, and I love that straight up weirdo.

Looper warning, JGL just looks weird so don't expect him to look like JGL.

As a movie comment, i think I was too distracted by the weirdness of the JGL look to take in that movie. I should probably watch it again, but also, I think I knew too much about it beforehand.

We really liked Star Trek, Iron Man, and btw Looper too. And I'm not a big G-L fan.

But the best movies we've seen lately are Mud and Beyond the Pines.

bearwife - my love for the Star Trek reboot franchise knoweth no bounds, and I was a loyal watcher of TOS as a kid.

sadly not everyone agrees, but then it's movies, not life or death or anything.

JGL for as young as he is has been around forever and ever; he's one of those Hollywood actors whose presence has sort of been pop culture background noise since he was a child actor in the mid 90s.

Beyond the Pines was good indeed. One we were surprisingly drawn in by was True Grit, to the point of watching it twice, but then I've always dug Coen Bros movies.

Speaking of Benedict Cumberbatch, if you haven't seen the Parade's End miniseries, it's well worth watching.

JGL did a great Bruce Willis impersonation in Looper, but the film wasn't all that, and I'm sick of that greyed-out vision of dystopian future, like people are going to forget how to dye cloth and mix paint anytime soon.

I thought JGL was excellent in The Lookout and 50/50. (Yes, and also in everything else he's ever touched, even the bike messenger film and that one where he's in a court-mandated psych facility for beating a kid nearly to death during a baseball game).

I liked the new Iron Man but it seemed like the de rigeur political moralizing about a certain kind of hands-off warfare that's currently hotly debated was just tacked on at the end pro forma and didn't really follow from what went before. I'm a big fan of the franchise, even though I'm bored with comic book movies in general. Superheroes are studio-safe, like westerns were in the middle of the last century. That said, Robert Downey, Jr. is a wonder, and I can never get enough Don Cheadle.

Another movie I saw within the last few months that really stuck with me is The Messenger. Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster are also together in Rampart, which is not a perfect movie but is one hell of a role for Harrelson.

Hugh, thank you so much for all these recommendations. I will especially have to catch Parade's End - I think mr. lfr is almost as big a BC fan as I am.

The mister has managed to catch what I refer to as "Masterpiece Theatre" fever from me (all the classic BBC TV series and soforth from my youth / teen years), having kicked off with the contemporary Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock and then from there onto the classic Jeremy Brett BBC versions, after which he tore through a bunch of other Mystery! series, then the entire Jeeves & Wooster 90's Fry and Laurie epic. He is a bit too young to really remember all these great 80s/90s classics from their first release so watching this stuff with him now is like being a tween/teen all over again. although I do have to admit that watching a few episodes of Poldark as a not-ten-year-old I was like ZOMG! The Hair! It's so 70's!!!

ahhh Joseph Gordon-Leavitt yeah...swoon. I could watch him in back to back infomercials all day. I just watched Dark Knight Rises tonight as a matter of fact! Bane was very wordy. I zoned out several times on him. I also didn't realize it was so long.

We caught Moonlight Kingdom on demand recently, it was highly entertaining in an artsy kinda way. No sex or extreme violence but both funny and dry and endearing all at the same time.

Bane was pretty wordy, but then I think he was sort of trying for a Che Guevara / demagogue kind of thing?

Ha, my husband was not 5 minutes ago reading something and said to me: "o hey! Bane was played by Tom Hardy, he was also in Inception!" And I was like, hmm, is Chris Nolan deliberately doing the ensemble thing? I remember reading somewhere else recently that both JGL and Cillian Murphy are on record as having really enjoyed working with Chris Nolan, so perhaps?

Thanks to you, I'm watching Batman or Moonrise Kingdom right after Veep right now. Both seen in a cursory rush previously. Let's see if i change my mind or plane my heels in the interim.

I do like Cillian Murphy, but I think i have already caught up on his ouvuer.

I do like ensembles, though. The Hal Hartley set will always be close to my heart, amongst many others.

It's just easier to know who you can rely on.

Oh yes, lonefrontranger, lotsa love for True Grit. Serious Coen Brothers fans here. We love most everything, but could probably live forever on Fargo and Big Liebowski and Millers Crosding.

Crossing.

Tom Hardy was also in the formulaic but outstanding Warrior, which left me weeping through the end credits.

We saw Before Midnight and liked it a lot. It really got us talking about our communication patterns, and other long-term stuff. But in a constructive way.

We saw Frances Ha, and I pretty much hated it. My take was that this young woman went through life with her head up her ass, and all of the people around her, including her friends, family and employer, patiently waited until she got her head out of her ass, and were there for her. In my experience, chances come and chances go, but chances usually do not just hang out waiting for you to grab them.

We also saw Love is all you Need, and enjoyed that one a lot more then we expected. A really pretty film.

Haven't been much for movies lately, but I'm reminded that we need to take the kids to Iron Man 3 before it leaves the theaters.

I had no idea the Coen Brothers™ had another thing out; I'll have to check it out.

I think latest Coen Bros offering is Inside Llewyn Davis, and we have not seen it yet.

I've been watching a lot of old spaghetti westerns lately. So far The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Fist Full of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. The Dollars movies are fun but G, B & U is really a masterpiece, much more epic and polished than I was expecting.

I liked last year's Dark Knight Rises but was a little distracted by the location shots since it was almost all filmed around here in Pittsburgh and my brain kept saying things like, "Hey that's not Gotham City Hall, that's the Mellon Institute in 5th Avenue."

The best new movie that I've seen this year is probably Upstream Color (by the Primer guy).

I usually don't have the patience to sit through a whole movie, but I did recently enjoy Haywire, because hey! chick kicking some serious ass plus I'm a Soderbergh fan. Guilty pleasure kind of thing though.