Watched Captain America, The Green Lantern, Cowboys & Aliens, and the final Harry Potter.
Re-watched Down Periscope, hi there Patton Oswalt, being all quiet and background-y.

Cowboys and Aliens was an OK movie, probably a good flick for the big screen, just an OK flick for a home theater of less than heroic proportions. Plot holes the size of a bus, character’s whose primary motivations change on whims, and lots of stuff blown up real good. And grit, lots of grit. Sometimes I thought Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford were having a squinting contest.

Captain America was similarly engaging entertainment, fun in the moment, but nothing that will stick with me, beyond a vague sense of contented satiety.

The final Harry Potter, I will need to rewatch more than once, while not primarily occupied with Lego construction. It seemed to tie everything together, killing off characters left and right, while leaving some unscathed for the final epilogue scene, I’m sure satisfying in it’s mundane suburban fantasy to most fans, but for someone without the path of kids and family before them, it seems childish and hollow. Which is probably a good thing.

The Green Lantern was the least engaging of the weekend’s entertainments, with the oddly reminiscent of the second new Hulk film’s disfigured scientist sub-plot. Like many super-hero films, without a proper grounding in the mythos, too much of the film comes across as contrived and artificial. And the you-know-they-won’t-make-a-sequel-now, kiss of death, setup for the next crisis ending. I’m still waiting for the second Flash Gordon film; by the time they get to covering who picked up Ming’s ring, we might have the technology to bring back Freddie Mercury for the soundtrack album.

On re-watching, I found it still enjoyable, and was surprised to realize it also starred Eric Idle, funny what the mind forgets vs remembers. Anywho, the interesting bit to me was how, in the end credits, Eric and Robbie get a second credit line for the last drag-outfits they wore, as separate actors by their character names.

I wonder if any other movie does that.

Like when it can supply me with not just the name of a half-remembered tv-miniseries, but the entirety of it.  Mark Harmon has had a long career, even if I don’t realize it sometimes.

The film is just as over-the-top-silly as I remembered it.  Caricature villains, a rigid social structure under autocratic rule offered up as a impossible utopia to the messiness of a real world under democracy, doomed by the frailties of human ego.

And yet, it still manages to age remarkable well.  It helps that 90% of their time is spent on a liner built during WW2.

Most annoying plot hole is the whole “it’ll never work” rigmarole over the heat exchanger.  What exactly did the script writer think the difference was between a heat exchanger based on lava, and a scotch boiler based on oil?  Pointing out that simply generating more oxygen doesn’t remove carbon-dioxide would have been more believable.  Whatever.

I’m no expert on Buddhism, so I can only suspect that much of the movie’s “point” is showing how the monks need a more practical grounding for their faith, while the gangsters need some spiritual uplifting.

As with any foreign film, there are some idioms that are lost in translation, while other jokes are universally understandable.  I still don’t get the foreign student character, at least not past the most superficial layers.

I was entertained.