...this weekend (for financial reasons - I'll be visiting very fancy restaurants twice in the forthcoming weeks, Christmas shopping, oncoming overtime ban, etc), I stayed in and watched three DVD rentals, ELF, SPIDERMAN 2, and HARRY POTTER 3.
With mixed results.
ELF was okay, just a simple little kid's movie, elevated by the performance of the ever-reliable Will Ferrell. Contrary to what you might have heard, SPIDERMAN 2 is pretty mediocre stuff. Visually audacious, thanks to Sam Raimi, but overly sentimental, soapy slop otherwise. It shows how low comic fans' expectations are when they rushed to declare this the best comicbook film ever when on release. Oh, and while I'm at it, the 2 X-MEN films aren't all that and a bag of chips, either. Both turn their villains into 2D Bond-esque meglomaniacs (I really don't think Singer or McKellan really got Magneto), and both forego decent third acts for big special effects set-pieces.
Best of the bunch was HARRY POTTER 3, the first Rowling adaption to make a satisfactory transistion. The first two were blighted by a tendancy to just have their leads react to various CGI monstrosities, whereas this time, they actually, y'know, did stuff themselves. Instead of just gurn and scream.
This was my favourite book of the series so far, so that didn't hurt, either. It whipped through the book at a great pace, which is how the future films are going to have to advance through Rowling's next few ever-thickening texts as well. The sexy uneditable minx.