movie weekend

This weekend I watched Narnia, Syriana, The Greatest Game Ever Played, and Hotel Rwanda(on DVD). Narnia started out really strong and I expected to be fantastic after just 10 minutes. At first the music and editing were great as well as the cinematography. The lines were good and funny. The story was pretty tight. but after about half way through it totally lost pace and momentum. It felt like the critical scenes weren't given the attention detial that some of the other scenes were. I also didn't care much for the aslan's voice (was that Liam Neeson?). Also I found it irritating how they kept trying to hide the violence in order to keep the PG rating. I mean, Yeah, I know we don't need to see blood but all of the cuts were too quick and hurried during the battle scene. It felt like they just wanted get through it quickly and it ditracted because instead being a monumental epic battle climax to the movie, it just felt rushed and nervous. Syriana I found to be almost totally boring and uninteresting. The problem with movies that have a political agenda is that they sometimes forget that they should be entertaining as well. The story moved way too slow and the payoff was minimal. everytime the story started to pick up and get excitting, they just slowed right back down again in the next scene. I thought Lord of War was a good entertaining movie with a political view point. Anyway, the race and battle to secure energy is an interesting topic but Syriana while decent, just fell short of being a good film. Hotel Rwanda was a good film. It addressed something I didn't know much about. I had heard about the attempted genocide some years back but did not really know the extent of it. It was an event largely ignored by the western media. I can remember hearing hardly anything of it at the time of the event. The film told an important and devastating story and it was a good film as well. The greatest game ever played was decent but I watched it at the dollar theater and they had messed something up with the framing of the projector. I could see a boom in shot for about roughly, half the movie. It was really distracting. At other times, characters were dropping out of frame. I don't know what the deal is with that but if I was the director I would surely want the final print to be cropped to the right aspect ratio even if I had the assurance of countless people that the boom would not show in the theater. Anyway, back to work.