My oldest daughter came home from college for the weekend, and insisted that I not see Doctor Strange without her. I talked to the rest of the kids about it, and one by one they each decided they wanted to see it too.

On opening night, in 3D¹.

I was $75 down before arriving at the theater, and then we bought snacks². I tweeted my forlorn hope that I was somehow going to have $110 worth of fun in the next two hours.

When the film ended, we all had smiles on our faces. We talked Marvel Cinematic Universe stuff until late, and the kids’ opinion was that this was the best Marvel movie³ to date.

My own opinion is that it’s not the best, but it’s certainly quite good. We got to see Benedict Cumberbatch play someone who grows into a sense of personal responsibility, and by the end we got to see a Marvel superhero who not only warps reality, he also chews scenery.

Doctor Strange clears my Threshold of Awesome, and I’m quite excited to see more of Doctor Strange in upcoming films.

¹The 3D turns out to have been worth it. I’ll be seeing it again in IMAX 3D just for that experience. But I’m waiting for $5.00 movie day, because ouch that first showing was ‘spensive.

²Theaters generally do not get a cut of ticket sales for the first two weeks it’s out, and sometimes it’s even longer. They depend on concessions to keep the doors open. I always buy concessions because that money (for the local cinema chain) stays in town and creates jobs.

³They have seen all of them except the Edward Norton/Tim Roth Hulk movie. We are now collecting the Blu-Rays, and we’re two Caps, two Thors, and a Hulk away from having all of them. Oh, and the first Avengers film. We have that on DVD, so Sandra says it can wait.

The trailers for the latest Tom Hanks Treasure Hunt, Inferno, looked kind of silly. The line “I left you a path… the hardest one yet” suggests that somebody has created a puzzle for Professor Langdon, and is deliberately leaving the fate of the human race in his hands.

Fortunately, the trailer is misleading.

As archaeological puzzle-solving goes, Inferno has almost nothing to offer. As a spy thriller, however, it works pretty well. Tense moments, cool action scenes, and a twisty, fun plot. It deploys some tired tropes, and then nicely explains why these things could actually happen here.

It doesn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, but I did have fun.

I took the advantage of $5.00 movie day at the local cinema to see Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from an espionage/action movie, down to the last trope, but I enjoyed it a lot.

My favorite bit was seeing Cobie Smulders‘ name in the opening credits, and before I could fully squee out, up came Aldis Hodge‘s name. Smulders is Maria Hill in the Marvel films, and Hodge was Alec Hardison in all five seasons of Leverage, and let’s just say I was far more excited to see those actors again than I was to see Tom Cruise¹.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back doesn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, but I liked it, and I think fans of the first film will, too. As will fans of Smulders and Hodge, who kind of made the movie for me.

¹ I like Tom Cruise movies, and I enjoy his work in them. There are a lot of them, though, so my excitement gets spread a little thin. 

I’ve only seen parts of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and it’s been so long since I saw 1960’s Magnificent Seven that I can’t recall any of the particulars beyond the presence of Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen.

Contextually, then, I’m well suited to appreciate Antoine Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven for what it is, rather than for what it’s a remake of. I didn’t actually get around to seeing it until it had been out for a full month, but I’m glad I saw it in the theater. I really enjoyed myself (in part, perhaps because I was seeing it with my friend Alan.)

The film didn’t need that much help from good company. I loved the performances from Vincent D’Onofrio, Chris Pratt, and Haley Bennett, and I thrilled at pretty much every one of the scenes that establishes how deadly our heroes are. I also liked that they were each distinctly different, and not just in terms of diverse casting—they all dealt death in different ways.

In classical tragedy people are brought low by their flaws. Here, however, our heroes can die simply because there just aren’t enough good places to hide from the bullets¹. They can also die heroically, of course, and I won’t spoil who does what. I will, however, say that this remake does not improve the survival odds for the Seven².

In the final analysis, of course, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is a groundbreaking piece of cinema, while Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven is just a cool cowboy movie. Still, I liked it.

¹ I believe there were too many bullets. The Gatling Gun in use in the film used a 40-ish round box magazine, which required the gunner to stop firing and reload. The Model 1881 Gatling Gun’s “Bruce Feed” mechanism (which they did not use in the film) would have allowed for continuous fire of roughly 400 rounds per minute. And even that might not have been enough for all the bullets I saw.

² The survival percentages of our heroes are equally not great in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai³ and John Sturges Magnificent Seven⁴ . Both of them round up to 43%. 

³ “In the end we lost this battle too. The victory belongs to the farmers, not to us.”

⁴ “The Old Man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We’ll always lose.”