We haven't been to the cinema this week. A couple of weeks ago husband inadvertently clicked on something at Amazon and received a free month of Amazon Prime, which includes access to their library of films and TV shows (similar set up to Netflix). We've been exploring the freebie opportunity, using Roku, and have found lots to entertain us. We've binge-watched a season each of
The Good Wife and
Justified (starting from season where previous rental DVDs ended). We've just begun watching season 1 of
Warehouse 13 - new to us. It's a fun sci-fi/fantasy series with echoes of
The X-Files, and
Raiders of the Lost Ark. We also found a couple of decent movies, as well as one we considered not so decent and decided it did not deserve the acclaim it had received.
One of the most enjoyable films was
Hachi- A Dog's Tale. A tale about a dog? I can never resist one of those, never have been able to since first seeing
Lassie Come Home, long ago and far away when I was very young.
Hachi was a new one to me. It's based on a Japanese true story of a lost puppy, found and cherished, with much doggy loyalty in return. The story reminded me a lot of an old Scottish doggy story,
Greyfriars Bobby.
Tears are almost always par for the course in doggy movies - a foregone conclusion. Gratuitous sentimentality abounds, tissues will be to hand, and were essential for
Hachi!
The movie we didn't much like, but struggled complainingly through because, well, "Scorsese can't be too bad can he?" (Yes!) :
The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort. Talk about gratuitous - not sentimentality this time - soft-porn-ish sex scenes, one every few minutes it seemed like. Boring repetitious bad language, the word "fuck" loses all impact when repeated again and again... and again as part of every sentence uttered. The film is based on Jordan Belfort's memoir, so presumably it is at least partly true. Even with Scorsese at the helm,
The Wolf of Wall Street, for us, didn't come anywhere near the quality of Oliver Stone's 1987 film
Wall Street, with Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko.
On we go then, there are lots of freebies still to sample!
