As I’m browsing through the new releases each week and putting all the interesting ones in new tabs, I make a little mental checklist. There are things that sound interesting, things that are interesting, things that will almost certainly be picked, and others that most assuredly will not be but that I think are important enough to at least mention. Every once in a while those last things get bumped up and I actually wind up picking them. We now find ourselves in one of those weeks.
Living now in close proximity to my parents means that me and the wife actually get the occasional date night without the child. Often that means catching a film at the local cineplex. Going to the movies was once an exceedingly rare occurrence, but now it’s a fairly regular event. I think I’ve seen more movies in the actual movie theatre this year than I did in the previous four combined. It is still tough to get to the city and their gigantic multiplexes showing every major movie that’s out, or the art-house one and their small, foreign flicks. Usually, we just hit the local place and see whatever looks the most interesting (even if nothing actually does).
I’d seen the previews for Kingsman: The Secret Service and it looked like another boring action spy flick (albeit a bit more stylish than your average actioner, and with a better cast.) But the Internet kept saying good things about it and my wife can’t say no to Colin Firth (and there was nothing else on the least bit interesting) so we gave it a go. Honestly, it was about as good as I expected it to be, which is to say not totally obnoxious.
I liked it well enough. It was entertaining. It had some cool style and didn’t take itself at all seriously, which makes it fun. The actors were good, and clearly enjoying themselves. The now-famous church fight scene was incredibly well shot, though perhaps a bit more gore-filled than I needed it to be. I appreciated that it was doing something different with the genre, though I’ve grown overly tired of action films for quite some time and this did not change my mind.
But here we are at Pick of the Week status. When you see what else is out this week, you’ll understand why. There just isn’t much coming around. So yeah, Kingsman: The Secret Service is a decent enough film, especially if you like action films, but one that I only pick because there’s nothing much else coming out.
The other two things of interest:
Thunderbirds: The Complete Series: I have the vaguest of vague memories of watching this in reruns as a kid. I was always a little weirded out by the marionettes. Looking at the synopsis now with its scale-model special effects, the aforementioned marionettes, and a crazy plot involving an ex-astronaut turned multimillionaire philanthropist and his five sons operating super rad ships to save the world and I’m kind of excited just thinking about watching this again.
The Strain: Season 1 Premium: I’ve read two and a half of the books and really rather enjoyed their pulpy horror (I’ve not finished the last one because I lost the cord to my Kindle and I’ve not gotten around to replacing it). I caught maybe five minutes of this series and was kind of aghast at its ridiculousness. It’s one thing to read about vampires with weird little stingers shooting from their mouths and quite another to see that actually visualized on the screen. In my imagination, I recognized it was a bit silly but could tone it down and move to the next sentence, but on screen it was so over the top in its weirdness that I just laughed. Still, I should give the whole thing a shot. Season one has previously been released, but this one comes with a cool little plastic bust of The Master. Plus lot of extras.
