Reviews, Move Along
No spoilers, none. No depth either, nor point. Ah well, can't win 'em all. It's been a while since I last posted and I'm getting restless.
The Importance of Being Earnest:
A play based in a terrible pun! Where the seriousness of events and the seriousness of the characters' response to them is inversely proportional, i.e. "Of course I have a long-lost brother but how could you possibly have eaten that last muffin." It was so wonderful. I want to live in Victorian times, when I could've used all the "actually"s and "invariably"s and other unnecessary adverbs I wanted and been thought clever rather than verbose. Come to think of it, I want to live in Oscar Wilde's Victorian England where absolutely nothing matters except the things that really don't. I'll have to finish something of his now.
<3<3<3 for the actor (student, this was a student production) who played Algernon. I fell in love with an amoral glutton, that's how good he was. The women were also excellent. I liked second act, with its irregular parallel relationships, better than the first with its more-meaningless-than-usual-dialogue or the highly improbable third.
The Grudge is an unfair movie. It teases you with pieces of a tragic backstory that's never fully explained, it cuts every scene short just before it gets to the really creepy parts, and it has a non-ending. The direction is as unfair as the editing: Sam Raimi gets you to jump at everything, not just the genuinely horrific things like people missing half their faces but things like croaking noises. A cat streaked across an open doorway and I nearly died, that's how thick the atmosphere of fear was. Don't even get me started on excess hair or reflections in the window or little boys who just watch, always.
Horrific. Horror-ific! I'll have nightmares for weeks and I'm never, ever going to Japan (in other words, great movie go see it).
Ugh, I ♥ Huckabees. I'm not sure what it is about this movie I disliked - it's got some of my favorite actors and an excellent premise. There were really fantastic and memorable individual moments and everyone but Dustin Hoffman did a great job. Hoffman was... sort of frumpy in a please-pretend-I'm-actually-brilliant sort of way, except that he wasn't actually brilliant.
And that's the problem with the whole film, really - it tries to pass randomosity off as depth. It's a "deep" movie that isn't deep, just occasionally observant. The only even witty bits come from Jake Shwartzman and Jude Law (and Hubbard and Wahlberg), and anyway Douglas Adam did the whole "irregular detective" thing much better in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
Or maybe I'm just mad that Shwatzman's obsession with Law wasn't the gay love I thought it was. (;_;)
Speaking of gay love! There will be some in Oliver Stone's Alexander and I am looking forward to it very much no matter how those conservative people, the Greeks, hate the way it will "reflect badly" on their glorious past. Alexander's bisexuality is history, you insecure nationalists, and anyway his empire might have been Hellenic but he himself was a Macedon. I maintain that there is a difference because I'd lose my own identity as a Macedon if I didn't. (No, not really.)
I also want to see:
-Ray, about Ray Charles and his womanizing ways
-Alfie, about Jude Law and his womanizing ways (this seems to be the year for it)
-The Motorcycle Diaries, about Che Guavara and Roberto Grenada (it's also the Year of the Biopic)
I wanted to see both Hellboy and Shaun of the Dead but sadly missed my chance.
The Importance of Being Earnest:
A play based in a terrible pun! Where the seriousness of events and the seriousness of the characters' response to them is inversely proportional, i.e. "Of course I have a long-lost brother but how could you possibly have eaten that last muffin." It was so wonderful. I want to live in Victorian times, when I could've used all the "actually"s and "invariably"s and other unnecessary adverbs I wanted and been thought clever rather than verbose. Come to think of it, I want to live in Oscar Wilde's Victorian England where absolutely nothing matters except the things that really don't. I'll have to finish something of his now.
<3<3<3 for the actor (student, this was a student production) who played Algernon. I fell in love with an amoral glutton, that's how good he was. The women were also excellent. I liked second act, with its irregular parallel relationships, better than the first with its more-meaningless-than-usual-dialogue or the highly improbable third.
The Grudge is an unfair movie. It teases you with pieces of a tragic backstory that's never fully explained, it cuts every scene short just before it gets to the really creepy parts, and it has a non-ending. The direction is as unfair as the editing: Sam Raimi gets you to jump at everything, not just the genuinely horrific things like people missing half their faces but things like croaking noises. A cat streaked across an open doorway and I nearly died, that's how thick the atmosphere of fear was. Don't even get me started on excess hair or reflections in the window or little boys who just watch, always.
Horrific. Horror-ific! I'll have nightmares for weeks and I'm never, ever going to Japan (in other words, great movie go see it).
Ugh, I ♥ Huckabees. I'm not sure what it is about this movie I disliked - it's got some of my favorite actors and an excellent premise. There were really fantastic and memorable individual moments and everyone but Dustin Hoffman did a great job. Hoffman was... sort of frumpy in a please-pretend-I'm-actually-brilliant sort of way, except that he wasn't actually brilliant.
And that's the problem with the whole film, really - it tries to pass randomosity off as depth. It's a "deep" movie that isn't deep, just occasionally observant. The only even witty bits come from Jake Shwartzman and Jude Law (and Hubbard and Wahlberg), and anyway Douglas Adam did the whole "irregular detective" thing much better in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
Or maybe I'm just mad that Shwatzman's obsession with Law wasn't the gay love I thought it was. (;_;)
Speaking of gay love! There will be some in Oliver Stone's Alexander and I am looking forward to it very much no matter how those conservative people, the Greeks, hate the way it will "reflect badly" on their glorious past. Alexander's bisexuality is history, you insecure nationalists, and anyway his empire might have been Hellenic but he himself was a Macedon. I maintain that there is a difference because I'd lose my own identity as a Macedon if I didn't. (No, not really.)
I also want to see:
-Ray, about Ray Charles and his womanizing ways
-Alfie, about Jude Law and his womanizing ways (this seems to be the year for it)
-The Motorcycle Diaries, about Che Guavara and Roberto Grenada (it's also the Year of the Biopic)
I wanted to see both Hellboy and Shaun of the Dead but sadly missed my chance.