Opening Everywhere: Her, Lone Survivor, The Legend of Hercules
FilmDrunk Suggests: You can read Vince’s review of Her here (or here Her, her Here, huh?) and his review of Lone Survivor here. And if you’d like to read my review of The Legend of Hercules, well, you can wait til December, can’t you?
The Legend of Hercules
Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 0% critics, 57% audience
Gratuitous Review Quotes:
Cross-pollinated by sword-and-sandal flicks 300 and Gladiator, this Hercules can’t muster the visual punch of the first nor the character depth of the latter. – Scott Bowles, USA Today
This painfully feeble version of the strongman story fails on every level, from Lutz’s wooden acting to the styrofoam special effects. – Rafer Guzman, Newsday
Armchair Analysis: Oh Hollywood, your strange, stale habit of forcing us to accept the “hot, new flavor” as a star is getting really old. For every Chris Hemsworth, there are 10 Liam Hemsworths and short of a miracle, nothing is going to make Kellan Lutz suddenly become endearing to anyone but girls and women who scream when he takes his shirt off. And honestly, he’ll never be anything more to me than MARSH-MALLOWWWWS?
Her
Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 93% critics, 86% audience
Gratuitous Review Quotes:
It’s an odd, sad love story, combined with a meditation on technology as an accelerator of social loneliness. Not a small part of it seems to be an allegory of lonely guys and their fear of women. – Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail
Her shares a lot of themes with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, another story about the difficulty of moving on from relationships that once seemed destined to last forever. – Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald
Armchair Analysis: I’ve heard (Her’d? That’s wacky wordplay!) great things about this movie, and yet every time I see a commercial I look at my dog and shrug. I think it’s because of Joaquin Phoenix and how strange and irritating he is. I’ll still see it, because even ScarJo’s voice is enough to make me smile.
Lone Survivor
Rotten Tomatoes Scores: 74% critics, 82% audience
Gratuitous Review Quotes:
It’s hard to be all that you can be when you’re a corpse. In essence, the film admires the team but exposes the game. And the game is ugly indeed. – Tom Long, Detroit News
We might look through the movie toward appreciating what the actual men went through, but that alone can’t turn “Lone Survivor” into a satisfying movie experience. – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Armchair Analysis: No offense to anyone involved with this film, but there’s only one Survivor that I care about…