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1/5 stars
I want my 2 hours back.
I’m not sure what this movie was supposed to be. It had moments that were fun, moments that were funny, moments that were touching. However, these moments didn’t seem to come together in any meaningful way. I’m shocked that this movie was nominated for any awards. I definitely can’t recommend it.
4/5 stars
Will Bloom only knows his father through one tall tale after another. As a child, he enjoyed his father’s tales, but over the years he finds them tiresome and longs to know his “real” father. When his father becomes very ill, Will returns to work out their differences.
Big Fish was a fun movie with the tall tales weaved through the story of Will and his father. I kept finding that I wanted to believe the tall tales, and I could almost believe them.
3/5 stars
I honestly don’t know how to rate this film.
It is a documentary following Mark Borchardt, an amateur filmmaker, who is trying to make a feature length film. This has been his dream. Though he can’t find the funding for the movie, so he decides to first finish a short film he had started a few years earlier (Coven, pronounced coe-ven). In the process we meet his friends who have starred in some of his teenaged efforts and his family who have financed some of his film efforts. (Though after $10k, his father was done supporting him at all). He still lives at home with his mother. He has three children, though he is not still seeing the mother. He has a girlfriend who looks old enough to be his mother (though we suspect that he’s older than he comes across). His uncle Bill is a sad old man living in a trailer with nothing in his life. It is finally Uncle Bill who comes through with the money to finish Coven.
Andrew’s comment was that this movie was like watching a very long episode of Judge Judy. Almost true, though we don’t actually have to see the white trash surroundings on Judge Judy — just the people who come out of such circumstances.
It’s hard to rate because on the one hand, it was a well-done documentary. But on the other hand, it was just so depressing that I couldn’t recommend the film to my friends.
Coven itself was a confused mish-mash of potentially scary images that never really comes together into a coherent story.
3/5 stars
This was a fun, fluffy movie about Ramu, an Indian (the country, not a Native American), comes to New York to become a movie star. Instead, he finds success as a sex guru, spreading his philosophy (borrowed from a porn star) to the masses. The random scenes mirroring an Indian movie (seen at the beginning of the film) with a big dance number are hilarious. Lots of fun, but likely soon forgotten.
3.5/5 stars
While I was hoping for a good sci-fi flick when I went to see this movie, I certainly wasn’t expecting much. I’m not usually a big Ben Affleck fan, nor do I particularly like Uma Thurman much. (One might ask, then, why I went to see Paycheck in the first place.)
If I ignored the science in the movie (which I usually have to do, even though it’s really hard), it was actually a good thriller. Neither Ben nor Uma annoyed me as they usually do, which might be due to John Woo’s direction, or maybe I’m softening up. This was a fun Saturday afternoon flick.
4/5 stars
I went into this film not expecting much more than another Tom Cruise vehicle. Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised. Cruise is a true American hero recruited to help train the Japanese forces to combat the Samurai. He is captured during the first battle between the ill-prepared Japanese army and the Samurai, and is forced to live among them until the winter snows pass.
This one definitely needs to be seen on a large screen.
4/5 stars
This fun and touching film is based on a true story. The women of the Rylstone Women’s Institute in North Yorkshire decide to have a fundraiser to benefit the hospital where Annie’s husband spent much of his last weeks. But their usual calendar of the sites of North Yorkshire generally does a woeful business, so they decide instead to make a pin-up style calendar. The catch? These are ordinary women, not the young, hot girls usually seen in such calendars.
Definitely recommended. Fun, funny, and even touching, though not sappy. It’s even more fun to think that this was based on a true story.
3.5/5 stars
In the 1930s, half-breed aboriginal children are taken from their homes and trained as domestic staff to save them from having to live between two worlds. Molly, Daisy and Gracie are three such children. However, Molly escapes with the two other girls in tow. They trek 1,500 miles across the Outback, following the rabbit-proof fence (constructed across Australia to keep the rabbits contained), since they know that the fence runs near their village. Mr. Neville, the legal guardian of all such half-breeds according to the government mandates, has a tracker and local authorities searching for the girls the entire time.
This was a good film, though somewhat depressing.
3.5/5 stars
I recently realized that I had never actually watched Planet of the Apes from beginning to end in one sitting. I’d certainly seen bits and pieces of it while dial-spinning on a Saturday afternoon, and I knew the basic story, but I wanted to put it all together.
I was surprised by how unlikable Charlton Heston’s character was in the beginning of the film. I also hadn’t realized that the original mission of the crew was to test relativity (i.e. the twins’ paradox), but thought their return to Earth two millennia after leaving was some kind of accident (I must have been mixing it up with Buck Rogers!).
Overall, it was entertaining, even 30 years later. I also think I agree that it’s superior to the recent remake starring Mark Wahlberg (though I quite enjoyed the new one, too).
5/5 stars
I don’t know what I can say about this one. The final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy upholds the excellent standards set by the first two. I must confess that I never finished reading the trilogy (I stopped somewhere in the middle of The Two Towers), so I don’t know how close the ending was to the books, but I was satisfied. I’d heard some complaints on the numerous “endings” to the movie — just as the screen goes white, the audience thinks the movie is over, and then another final scene comes up. I can see the point, but I was glad that all the ends seemed to be tied up. (You’ll know the ending is really coming when the screen goes to black instead of white).
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