Doctor Strange

Let's start with the bottom line:  I very much enjoyed this movie, and I definitely recommend it.  It provides everything you hope for in a Marvel superhero movie, including more humor than I had expected.  Benedict Cumberbatch turns in as strong a performance as you would hope, never breaking character and always burning with his usual intensity.  All of the other leads--Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mads Mikkelsen, Rachel MacAdams, and Tilda Swinton--also deliver good performances.

I never looked away, I was never bored, and I had a good time.  You can't ask for much more than that.

Having said that, the film has one big structural flaw:  it rushes to its ending and in the process skips what should have been a significant amount of improvement in the powers and character of Stephen Strange.  I don't want to spoil any of the plot, so I'll say only that from the first encounter between Strange and the antagonist, the film moves too swiftly and skips parts I would very much like to have seen.  It feels almost as if the first cut ran two and a half hours, so someone said, "Hey, this is a minor character, so trim back to two hours."  If that longer version exists, I'd really like to see it.

If you're a fan of the Marvel superhero films, or if you just want a fun movie with a lot of action and special effects, go see Doctor Strange.

Beach movies, 2015

As has become tradition, I've photographed all 21 of the movies we watched on DVD/Blu-ray while at the beach.  (We normally catch more films, but we also watched three UFC events while there.)

Click the image to see a larger version.

The list tends toward action, because Kyle and I are the only ones who stay up for every movie.  We also include whenever possible the rituals of watching Steven Seagal lumber through an action film and getting in the cage with Nicolas Cage.

The award for slowest film of the trip goes to Only Lovers Left Alive, which despite the mesmerizing Tilda Swinton was so amazingly slow that we worried we might be witnessing a vampire-oriented remake of The Assassination of Jesse James by please kill me now I can't watch this movie any longer.

The best entry in the group was also the most surprising:  The Voices.  Ryan Reynolds is magnificent in it, and director Marjane Satrapi does such a fine job that we were all hoping someone would soon give her a bigger budget.  Do not look up information about this movie; just buy it, watch it, and be prepared to be amazed.  (If you are squeamish, or if you don't like dark comedies, ignore that advice, and skip it.)

Next year, I hope we watch even more movies!