This weekend is all about TV (Breaking Bad series finale, new season of Homeland starting) but we have watched a few movies leading up to it:

Drinking Buddies (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was fun to watch…it was low-budget and improvised, so it felt authentic. The chemistry between Jake Johnson and Olivia Wilde was scary. This isn’t a movie that would play in megaplex theatres. It’s too real.

I’d read World War Z recently and liked it, but know it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the movie that’s just come out (imdb | rotten tomatoes). The always-brilliant Oatmeal, for example, compared the two this way (but you shouldn’t read it if you plan to eventually read the book):

Still, Nellie loves her zombies, so we watched it. It wasn’t terrible, but it obviously lacked the nuance and sweep of the book. For the record, though, I didn’t remember Brad Pitt doing very much shooting himself. He throws a lot of things and makes several distressed phone calls.

Turning completely in the opposite direction last night, we went to the Lightbox to see Watermark (imdb | rotten tomatoes), the new documentary by Jennifer Baichwal and photographer Edward Burtynsky. Much like Manufactured Landscapes it’s predominantly visual, building on Burtynsky’s latest project about how water has shaped us and, more recently, how we’ve shaped water. It’s stunning and intriguing and more than a little worrying. Burtynsky said in a Q&A after the film that he wanted it to land somewhere between a Michael Moore-style polemic and a purely visual piece like Samsara, and I think it worked.

.:.

Photo by Bill McIntyre, used under Creative Commons license