I guess our DNA leads us to binge-movie-watch in the month of December, because we went on a tear this weekend. The most recent four:

• Olympus Has Fallen (imdb | rotten tomatoes): actually, Nellie watched this one without me a while back…I just watched it one evening while I was sick, but recovered sufficiently that I could look at a backlit screen without puking. Anyhoo: it was far from a great movie, but it was an order of magnitude better than the pile of Die Hard-thieving shit that was White House Down. Usually film violence seems either brutal or stylized to me, but in this one the violence felt brutal and stylized.
• Still with locations central to Greek mythology, I was a little disappointed with Elysium (imdb | rotten tomatoes). The acting was too stilted too often — also, what the Jesus was with Jodie Foster’s accent? She speaks fluent French and was made up to look like Christine Lagarde…but then for some reason spoke like a bad-SNL-skit caricature of a French person speaking English — and the effects, while usually pretty stunning, drowned out the story.
• I wasn’t sure what to expect from Don Jon (imdb | rotten tomatoes), Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut. It ended up being less funny than I expected (down to my mistaken impression from the trailer, not a weakness in the movie…it was still quite clever) and more heartfelt, in spite of the subject matter. I’ve continued to think about it for the last day or so, and it gets slightly better in my mind each time.
• From the light and fun Don Jon we take a massive turn toward Prisoners (imdb | rotten tomatoes), which was intense and creepy. I really liked it, but probably couldn’t recommend it to my brother with kids. Or anyone who considers Hugh Jackman a heartthrob and wants it to stay that way.

.:.

Photo by Takashi H, used under Creative Commons license