Saturday, December 17, 2016

Doctor Strange (2016)

The latest Marvel-comic-movie is pretty good, about a talented and arrogant surgeon who teams with paranormal forces. Lots of stars power the cast with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead (he was last blogged for The Imitation Game), Rachel McAdams (Spotlight) and Michael Stulhlbarg (Arrival) as hospital colleagues, and Tilda Swinton (A Bigger Splash) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Martian) as denizens of the other-world.

This is the fourth feature for director/co-writer Scott Derrickson, who worked on the script with Jon Spaihts (co-writer of Prometheus) and C. Robert Cargill (who co-wrote an earlier movie that Derrickson directed and co-wrote).

I picked the wrong battle, maybe an hour and a half into the movie, to miss for a bathroom break because, when I returned, Jack told me I missed the obligatory Stan Lee cameo (his last one was in Deadpool). Here's the Deadpool cameo and here's the Doctor Strange cameo. For those of you who watched the movie in the theatre, I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you that the book he's reading is Powers of Perception.

The jangly music is by the busy composer Michael Giacchino (most recently in these pages for Inside Out) and you can stream the whole thing here.

A must for Marvel fans, this is averaging 90% from Rotten Tomatoes' critics and 89 from its audiences. We saw it ten days ago as a break from the moody little independent films. This is moody, too, as it turns out, but the special effects are fun.

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