May Movie Reviews

I ended up seeing all four "big" May movies last month (no, I don't consider "Sex And The City" a big movie), and was gonna review all of them, but never found the time. (I did review "Speed Racer" earlier, and ended up deciding I liked it a little more than the initial review implies.) Since I don't have time for decent reviews, here are some synopsii, in order of how much I liked them:

1) "Iron Man": I wasn't really expecting to like this one; I've never read the comic book, and I'm not a big Robert Downey, Jr. fan, but this one was really good. It combined good manly action with a surprising amount of humor that just made for an really enjoyable movie experience.

2) "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull": My third favorite of the four Indiana Jones films ("Last Crusade" is my favorite, then "Raiders"), the movie suffers only in comparison to the previous good films in the franchise. The action is good, Harrison Ford does a great job, but let's face it -- "Crystal Skulls" just don't match up to the Holy Grail or the Lost Ark as the subject of a good quest. Had this been a stand-alone movie, it might have made the top of my list for May, but loses out only because I had a nagging feeling that it could have been much better.

3) "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian": I actually liked this film better than the first one in the series. I thought the story flowed more smoothly, and the kids weren't nearly as annoying; I really liked how they quickly brought the story up to speed and effectively showed how returning to their own world after their first Narnia adventure changed the Pevensie children. I was disappointed with how they portrayed Aslan in the first movie; in this one, they didn't back away from the Jesus parallels, they accepted them with open arms. That, and a more "believable" story to work with, made this one a really good film.

4) "Speed Racer": The more I think about it, the more I enjoy it; my earlier review is here, and nothing much has changed, although I've convinced myself in hindsight that the good overweighs the "blah" enough that I'm raising my rating to a 4 out of 5 -- the same as the other three movies.