This week had me make a couple of on-the-cheap pickups on iTunes with Godzilla: King of the Monsters for the near future while this weekend had me watching The Hustle. The film, clocking in at a fast 90-minutes, is one that was an easy bit of mindless fun that delighted in the right ways. I’ve long loved Anne Hathaway and will watch her in anything since she does enjoy playing junky roles like this and more serious things as well. I’m less a fan of Rebel Wilson but she’s had some good roles along the way that I’m always hopeful she’ll find more, especially as she shifts to producing her own works. This film is your basic con/grift thing going on with the two of them competing with each other as it goes bigger and more out of control. Let’s be honest, you can tell from the trailer that it’s not great. But watching with my daughter, we found ourselves laughing a good bit and having a great time together. So the film is a win in that category for me.
The great Star Wars rewatch continues and I actually slid out of the Clone Wars episodes for a bit as I needed a break from that run of it. What I did was reconnect with the original film (special edition, of course, since that’s what’s available on Blu-ray) and dove right into Rogue One as well. It’s enjoyable rewatching these since they’re so closely bonded together while also reading the current crop of Marvel Comics stories that take place afterward and help to tie them together a bit more. Mix in some of the novels, notably having just finished up the Tarkin novel, and I enjoy the larger threads that are woven through them. The films themselves continue to be a whole lot of fun and Rogue One ranks high on my list overall and has me excited for the Cassian Andor series to explore more of what went into securing rebels bases, such as the one we saw disused in The Last Jedi.
I also had a craving for some James Bond this week after reading some of the recent comics and opted for License to Kill. While not my favorite in general and not my favorite for this actor, it’s a solidly put together film that’s just too small in its worldliness to really capture attention. Anytime the films focus on Very American Stories they feel that way. Timothy Dalton has always felt to me the most accurate Bond in terms to how the books portray him and I wish he had at the time been able to do more period piece style Bond films rather than late 80s early 90s stuff. I do like that the comics pick up threads from this film, such as Felix’s loss of an arm, and have used that there to work the character in some new ways. The film is largely unmemorable in general but damn that’s a very young Benicio del Toro and I enjoyed Carey Lowell in this a whole lot as well.
