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It’s been so long since I’ve written a blog post. I was stuck in Hawaii and Los Angeles for a few weeks. Now I’m back and needed to post these reviews of the movies I saw while shipped out to Marinette on work. I don’t remember much, so I’ll just blurb these three films.

Cinderella is the live action Disney flick. Someday your prince will come. It’s the film that only Disney can make. It made me want to puke, but that’s what a Saturday in Marinette would do to you: go see Cinderella.

2 of 5 stars.

The Second Best Marigold Hotel is just as good as the first one. It’s serviceable for a Sunday afternoon. It was more of the same, but with more Bollywood dancing.

3 of 5 stars.

Get Hard made me dumber after I watched it. Plus, it had a lot of gay-tred in it. It was trying to make pretend that it was scary being gay. Not sure why, but it was the worst. Please, don’t watch this movie ever even if it comes on Comedy Central. You will be dumber afterwards.

1 of 5 stars.

Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) had opened in my neck of the woods last October/November. It was only playing in 2 or 3 places around town; down at the arty theatre and its off shoot, the slightly well to do theatre uptown. Then it was showing at the whitey mall in the suburbs near me. I was planning to catch a viewing when I took the day before Thanksgiving off. When I checked the listing on that Wednesday morning, the film was gone. I was unable to catch it. I believe it played for only a week there, and I was unable to catch it.

It won the Oscar for Best Picture last month.

Now its on BluRay and DVD, but I had to watch it in theatre. In the last few weeks, its been playing right next door in its victory lap. I went this past weekend. I was finally able to catch it.

The film revolves around an actor whose starred in a trilogy of superhero films about Birdman some years ago. He wants to be a more legitimate actor, so he writes, stars, and directs an adaptation of a Raymond Carver story on Broadway. Except his past haunts him as well as the present difficulties in staging the play. His cast gains a “ACTOR.” His show is lacking funding. The critics are readying to rip the show to shreds. And he’s only hearing Birdman egg him on. Is he crazy?

Maybe, he was. The story suggests it isn’t reality, but a figment of the lead’s imagination. The Birdman follows him around. He floats in the air in his tight-whiteys. He exhibits telekinesis. He was crazy!

This one winning the Best Picture fits the trend of ‘meh’ that the last few have been. It doesn’t knock you out as a film. It doesn’t scream classic. Let’s give it another few years and re-evluate if it is any good. Maybe in a decade.

All I know is I saw 2 of the 8 Best Picture nominees and this was the worst of the two.

3 of 5 stars.

Still Alice was a horror movie.

That’s not what you say about the film which won Julianne Moore the best actress Oscar, but it was very horrific.

Moore stars as the eponymous Alice, a young Columbia professor who is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She’s in her early fifties, but she inherited the disease from one of her parents. The film follows her descent into the horrors of this disease. It was especially tough for her character, because she was an intellect.

It was also tough on her, because she could pass it along to her 3 children, two of whom took a test to discover if they had inherited it. The youngest daughter didn’t, and she kept leading a care free life coming back to help her degenerating mother.

I had a friend who went crazy. He became erratic and delusional. When you looked into his eyes, you did not see him there. That is frightening like the Alzheimer’s in this movie. The person you know is gone but is still physically there. They are living ghosts.

3 of 5 stars.