Movie Tab II

A few re-watches and a new movie.

Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) -

"All the little devils are proud of Hell." Kafkaesque drama about an English schoolteacher getting sidetracked from his beachside holiday and being marooned in the middle of a rural Australian community. I think of this as a companion piece of sorts to Walkabout, though this is far more twisted. The cinematography's quite solid (even if some of the old-school camera trickery rings a little hollow) and the performances are honest - almost brutally so. It's interesting, but I'm hesitant to call it a genuinely good piece. Probably worth seeing regardless, though.

The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006) -

Still my least favourite Scorsese film. Even trying to forget the radical changes made to the Hong Kong original (especially making it all edgy and stuff), there's still plenty of stuff I don't like about the film. There's the acting (which never quite works whether it's Nicholson's phoned-in villain or DiCaprio's stunted anti-hero, to say nothing of the rest of the cast), the visibly erratic editing, the overbearing soundtrack. There's a couple of scenes that are handled rather well, but overall this is still a major disappointment in every regard.

Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988) -

Far from perfect, but it's my kind of movie.

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) -

The rating is either a little high or completely justified, but either way it was still utterly engaging and done with considerable polish.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975)



JUST my cup of tea. Surreal, dreamy, open-ended. Hello new top 10 favorite? Perhaps... I need to see it a couple more times before I award that distinction. It was as if Mr. Weir once took LSD and stared at a Renoir for hours and then put his trip on film, showcasing all the dark little corners he had explored in the process.

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Eat Pray Love (Murphy, 1975)


Julia Roberts, about to eat or pray.

BY PLANET NEWS / August 11, 2010

Elizabeth Gilbert's book "Eat, Pray, Love," unread by me, spent 150 weeks on the New York Times best seller list and is by some accounts a good one. It is also movie material, concerning as it does a tall blond (Gilbert) who ditches a failing marriage and a disastrous love affair to spend a year living in Italy, India and Bali seeking to find the balance of body, mind and spirit. During this journey, great-looking men are platooned at her, and a wise man, who has to be reminded who she is, remembers instantly, although what he remembers is only what she's just told him.

I gather Gilbert's "prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible" (New York Times Book Review), and if intelligence, wit and exuberance are what you're looking for, Julia Roberts is an excellent choice as the movie's star. You can see how it would be fun to spend a year traveling with Gilbert. A lot more fun than spending nearly two hours watching a movie about it. I guess you have to belong to the narcissistic subculture of Woo-Woo.

Here is a movie about Liz Gilbert. About her quest, her ambition, her good luck in finding only nice men, including the ones she dumps. She funds her entire trip, including scenic accommodations, ashram, medicine man, guru, spa fees and wardrobe, on her advance to write this book. Well, the publisher obviously made a wise investment. It's all about her, and a lot of readers can really identify with that. Her first marriage apparently broke down primarily because she tired of it, although Roberts at (a sexy and attractive) 43 makes an actor's brave stab at explaining they were "young and immature." She walks out on the guy (Billy Crudup) and he still likes her and reads her on the Web.

In Italy, she eats such Pavarottian plates of pasta that I hope one of the things she prayed for in India was deliverance from the sin of gluttony. At one trattoria she apparently orders the entire menu, and I am not making this up. She meets a man played by James Franco, about whom, enough said. She shows moral fibre by leaving such a dreamboat for India, where her quest involves discipline in meditation, for which she allots three months rather than the recommended lifetime. There she meets a tall, bearded, bespectacled older Texan (Richard Jenkins) who is without question the most interesting and attractive man in the movie, and like all of the others seems innocent of lust.

In Bali she revisits her beloved adviser Ketut Liyer (Hadi Subiyanto), who is a master of truisms known to us all. Although he connects her with a healer who can mend a nasty cut with a leaf applied for a few hours, his own skills seem limited to the divinations anyone could make after looking at her, and telling her things about herself after she has already revealed them.

Now she has found Balance, begins to dance on the high wire of her life. She meets Felipe (Javier Bardem), another divorced exile, who is handsome, charming, tactful, forgiving and a good kisser. He explains that he lives in Bali because his business is import-export, "which you can do anywhere" — although later, he explains she must move to Bali because "I live in Bali because my business is here." They've both forgotten what he said earlier. Unless perhaps you can do import-export anywhere, but you can only import and export from Bali when you live there. That would certainly be my alibi.

The audience I joined was perhaps 80 percent female. I heard some sniffles and glimpsed some tears, and no wonder. "Eat Pray Love" is shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat.

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"Loves them? They need them, like they need the air."

Um, what?

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I always knew Planet News was really Roger Ebert.

Whatever. That's my review, linespalsy. How do you like it?

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

This is the original version. I give credit where credit is due.

Right...

He obviously copied Sedai's formatting from the post above his, but forgot to change the 1975 of Picnic at Hanging Rock to the 2010 of Eat Pray Love. Rogert Ebert couldn't help him there.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Yes, I got that.

He obviously needs to pay more attention to what he's doing.

Maybe I was tired from having just written that fine, fine review. I still haven't heard any opinions about it. Just b!tching about my formatting.

It kinda works here, a sort of double-plagiarizing; the review and the format.

I was bitching about misinformation, actually.

Ebert's Chicago Sun review doesn't make me want to see Eat Pray Love. But his spelling and grammar are correct and he's still a good writer.


Is that what you want?

Neither of you could ever understand how a master like me works.

It's a joke, people. An obvious (but pretty funny) joke.

Yeah, it went over all our heads. Fiscal is the one who needs the lesson, not us.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 2008

Who knows why Fincher attempted this. It spans many more years than Zodiac, so it's going to be that much more realized and encompassing ? Wrong. Dead Wrong. It's not a disaster like I previously claimed, but it's really bitter cold and ponderous for a romance spectacle. If life really is as portrayed here, life sucks.





Love Exposure 2010 ?

The first half is the most fun I've had watching a movie for a long while. The second half I was begging to be put out of my misery. The beginning is nothing but a wild joy-ride of stunts and a tackling of important political issues like the surplus of hot asian girls. The second half thinks these anime characters are justified to lounge about in really long, patient scenarios.





Close Encounters of the Third Kind 1977

Wow, I did not remember this movie correctly. Spielberg has wrapped this story about a father not satisfied with his family, in a comedy sci-fi package. I think it's biggest success is that the movie unfolds very much in a single thought mindset, identical to that of it's central player (Richard Dreyfuss). Even calling Dreyfuss a center is a stretch though, this isn't an intimate movie in any of Spielberg's usual ways. Which is unfortunate, because that's what the man does best. This is spectacle over everything, a showcase of old special effects.





Shutter Island 2010

Not as strong as the first time, but some fine performances keep this afloat. Brilliant back and forths between Leo and Jackie Earle Haley / Ben Kingsley / Mark Ruffalo. The island's atmosphere has nothing on the cast and Scorsese's knack for surreality is almost absent here.





The Ghost Writer 2010

How long can Polanski make McGregor jump at shadows ? Two hours. It's descent is well done, fine tuned sophisticated performances - the kind Polanski built his name on. The deep dark mystery that McGregor unravels is so faceless and unthreatning, that it's more of a funny sitcom watching him cause a bunch of ruckus for nothing. The ending is good for a nice big laugh.





Three Kings 1999

A great premise dissolves into a cheesy middle east action movie, quickly.

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Clearly it wasn't that obvious. I take it he copied Ebert's review and pasted it here?

I rarely read professional movie reviews in general and I never read them about movies that I have no interest in seeing.