Seeing as a lot of us likes to write and a lot of us likes to watch movies, I think it's only natural that we should have a film review thread where people are welcome to write their opinions of any particular film they just saw. You can be either praising or scathing but please be reasonable about it. It's okay if it isn't objective. Oh and try to write at least a paragraph if not two. It's not much of a review if you just said "Yeah, it was good.", now is it?

Also, please remember these are all opinions and they don't necessarily have to match yours. That being said, let us begin with my review du jour: Enough.

So yeah, I must have been one of the few lads in middle school who didn't want to kiss Jennifer Lopez's feet when she was still popular, probably because I was too busy worshiping Natalie Portman. But since I had to watch this movie for a university course, my pleasure with it had already dropped by several points. It didn't help matters that this is a story about a waitress named Slim, played by Jennifer Lopez, who allows herself to be swept by the handsome perfectly chiseled man, Mitch, played by Bill Campbell. Literally, we only see one scene of them together before surprise, they're married. I can only imagine what sort of problems this couple is going to have in the next future.

Problems they do have as it turns out that Mitch has been cheating on Slim with several women despite having a daughter. Slim is naturally upset but then just breaks into hysterics like a prepubescent girl trying to weasel her way out of going out with some disreputable friends on a Tuesday night. Listen, guys. If you want us to believe there is something genuinely wrong with the bubbly relationship you just spend ten minutes setting up, and yes there is something wrong if I'm supposed to believe they have a happy relationship that is set up in ten minutes, you're going to need to give us time to make it believable. Anyway, Mitch beats her up and proceeds to engage in a very chauvinistic lecture, saying how as a man he needs to be satisfied by many women and that as the main financial provider of the family, he sets the rules. Out of curiosity, I went to see who the screenwriter and to my utter surprise, it was a guy, Nicolas Kazan if you wanted to know. Who wrote Reversal of Fortune....then again he's written for some mediocre movies since then so who knows.

Anyway, after feeling miserable for herself for about twenty minutes, Slim decides to escape with her daughter, Grace, and get this, while she believes her husband is sleeping. Wouldn't it be better to escape when he ISN'T in the house. So to no one's surprise, Mitch ambushes her and starts beating her up. This fortunately alerts Slim's friends who were waiting to pick her up. So after a pseudo-emotionally charged scene, Mitch allows them to escape despite the fact the he has a gun and can quite easily justify shooting three strangers who just broke into his house.

And despite being content in letting her escape earlier, Mitch takes it upon himself to track down and well, let me go back on Mitch. When we first see him, he's quite the nice guy, handsome and charming. And while it is true many charming people turn out to be jerks when you get to know them, I don't think a lot of them turn out to be possessive psychopaths without any warning signs. Oh wait, we didn't get to see those so the change is quite jarring and unrealistic. And, oh yes, the police. Why doesn't Slim go to the police? Well to be honest, it's because they're bloody useless! There are some lines here and there where Mitch has friends in the police and that he's planted drugs in her bureau and some nonsense like that, but I think it's just so they can make it more dramatic. Not that it isn't melodramatic enough, what with the annoying pop songs and Jennifer Lopez constantly looking sad and miserable.

I wish I could stay here and pick how horribly implausible or how pathetically stupid everyone's actions are but what you need to take away is that apparently all it takes to get a new birth certificate is a pretty smile and saying that you lost it. There's suspending your disbelief and then there's this. Anyway so after one too many threats against her life, she has enough, ha ha get it?, and decides to learn Krav Maga, a martial arts I'm sure takes years to master but only takes Slim five minutes of screentime. She then runs off to Mitch's new house [SPOILER!!] and with the power of feminine fury and righteousness, she kills him. And then the movie ends on a high note with Slim and Gracie living happily ever after.

My only words are: Unbelievable. The plot is completely predictable. Everything in this movie is contrived just to give Jennifer Lopez's character enough trouble to look sadly in the camera for 80% of her screentime. And well, the acting is just stilted especially Jennifer Lopez who does in fact show emotion just to same tragic self-pity emotion. And that's not much better. Mitch, the supposed villain, has absolutely no motivation besides being an absolute jerk. The side characters either exist to give Slim trouble or to give Slim comfort with no real reason why. Overall it seems like a cartoonish exaggeration of what is no doubt a really serious issue. I'll end on this note. If I could remake the film, I would recast Summer Glau as Slim who learns Jedi Force powers and kills Mitch with her brain ten seconds after he hits her.



Btw don't get intimidated by the size of this review. It doesn't have to be quite this long. It's simply this movie was just horrible and offered a lot of things to complain about.

_________________

I was cured all right.

All right, to show I'm not just going to do negative reviews, here's The Devil's Backbone.

Guillermo del Toro is one of the many directors whom I'll gladly fling money to on a heartbeat, primarily because his movies look pretty darn nice. Not like the Avatar's "Oh-I'm-spending-two-hundred-million-dollars-at-this", but he does an incredibly job of juxtaposing fantasy and realism to create a breath-taking world. The same world that can later scares the pants out of me. This is the world that we have here in the Devil's Backbone.

We started with a young boy named Carlos who's dropped off an orphanage by his tutor to stay indefinitely. Not like he tell the kids, the jerk. As he tries to adjust to his life at the orphanage, dealing with a particularly nasty kid named Jaime, he discovers there's a ghost haunting the orphanage. However, we soon find out, in typical del Toro fantasy horror fashion, it's not the scary monsters we have to worry about, but rather the scary humans.

And the scary human is Jacinto, a man who was raised in the orphanage and now helps out every so often for manual labour. When he's not too busy being a jerk to the kids or having sex with the head of the orphanage, Carmen, he's trying to get into a safe with gold inside. What's interesting is that the movie sets up Jaime to be the nasty human we all have to worry about, with his constant rebellious nature and his smoking habits and his bullying when later he ends up being best mates with Carlos. For some reason, Jaime is scared of the ghost, Santi, and constantly denies his existence. But when Carlos finds a picture of him in one of Jaime's drawings, he becomes downright suspicious. By the way, I thought Santi was just unsettling. He wasn't scary or revolting as some other ghosts are. He just makes you feel uncomfortable and uneasy until you just really want to run away, which I think is the proper way of handling horror.

Outside, the Spanish Civil War still rages on and Carmen and the assistant administrator, Dr. Casares, think they ought to leave with the kids, since the gold is really a treasury for the Republican Loyalists (The not fascists lot if you don't know your history). Jacinto, the jerk he is, demands Carmen to give him the gold but gets himself kicked out. He then tries to blow up the safe with gasoline and with all the orphans still nearby. So he manages to set off the explosion before leaving, killing Carmen and most of the orphans and wounding the survivors and Dr. Casares.

Jaime finally reveals to Carlos what really happened to Santi. While they were out hunting for slugs, Santi caught Jacinto trying to get into the safe. Jacinto gets pissed and accidentally pushes the kid against the wall, severely wounding his head. Panicked, Jacinto does the next reasonable thing and hides the body in the orphanage's cistern. While the deed is quite horrific, I just couldn't help thinking if that cistern is where their water comes from.

So Jacinto and his mates come back after Dr Casares passes away from his wounds and proceeds to enslave and force the orphans to find the safe. Once it's found they lock the kids in a room while they try breaking into it. Jaime and Carlos realise that once they found whatever they're looking for, Jacinto's going to kill them so they decide to fight back with sharpened sticks as spears.

Jacinto finally finds the gold only for his mates to abandon him....because they were just too impatient? I don't know, those guys were about as well-developed as a rotting sack of feces. The kids lure Jacinto down the cellar where the cistern is and stab him before pushing into the cistern where he drowns. The kids later leave the orphanage. Jacinto's death scene was done rather well and much like del Toro's future project, Pan's Labyrinth, you wonder if this was due the gold weighing him down or the fact the ghost holding him. However, like Pan's Labyrinth, it ends on a happy ending...when it really doesn't. Honestly, one of the orphans have a broken foot. How long do you think he's going to last? And they're in the middle of nowhere.

Overall this was a fantastic movie. I was honestly more scared of Jacinto than I was of the ghosts, primarily because well, the ghost was a little boy and wasn't exactly going to slaughter the other boys like Jacinto was. The child actors in this movie were good and I rather liked Jacinto's actor. And of course, del Toro does a fantastic job with the cinematography and mixes the supernatural with reality.

_________________

I was cured all right.

Today's review: The Wind That Shakes the Barley

For me, war movies tend to rub on me the wrong way. Especially the American ones. It really does feel like someone poured pure concentrated jingoism and patriotism into these films until you're singing The Star-Spangled Banner out of your rectum when you walk away from the theatre. Even the ones where the young soldiers are being utterly maimed and destroyed, I just can't stop thinking that the movie is bashing me over the head with their deaths as if saying "Look, these soldiers DIED for your sins, you ungrateful twig." And to make matters worse, this is the American military we're talking about. The same military that has been cheerfully stamping down third world countries and setting up dictatorships in the name of freedom for the past fifty years or so. It's like trying to be inspired by a bully. Doesn't quite work out like that.

Which is why how American war movies turn me off, movies about people fighting in the name of the people and the oppressed turn me on. Movies like The Baader Meinhof Complex, The Battle of Algiers, or Michael Collins. Yeah, that's the real story of the underdogs. What I love about these movies is they don't try to whitewash themselves or seize the moral highground. They leave you to decide whether they should inspire you to lead the revolution or put on your jack boots. Today's film is a little different as in it doesn't want to inspire you. Just tell a little tale about two Irish brothers caught in a civil war.

Damien O'Donavan, played by the gorgeous Cillian Murphy, and his brother, Teddy, get caught up in fighting for the IRA in hopes of driving the British off Ireland. They run off fighting against their occupiers together with their other IRA comrades until the British finally gave in and signed a treaty. Well, like most Western treaties, they didn't exactly give the Irish what they wanted, thinking that a Irish Free State that still swears loyalty to the British crown would do nicely for them. Of course it doesn't and soon the Irish are split between the people who want a true free Ireland and the people who want to stick to the Irish Free State.

This movie is fabulous in its fair depiction of all sides (except the Black and Tans and really they were that horrible). It doesn't seek to demonise the Irish Free State or the Anti-Treaty Republicans. It even treats Damien's Marxist ideas as fair as Cillian Murphy talks about dividing the lands of the rich for the poor in his delicious voice. And this just makes the film all the more tragic because you can see both sides of the argument and just wish the two brothers could resolve their difference but really you know they can't.

The two brothers are just simply amazing. Cillian Murphy is his usual awesome self and his co-star Pádraic Delaney has amazing chemistry with them. They each play off each other and do a fantastic job portraying the tragic relationships between the brothers. One of the best scenes is when Damien is arrested by the Irish Free State and sent to the same prison he was held years earlier with his brother. You can feel the desperation in Teddy as he tries to plead his brother to save himself. At the same time, you know that Damien really wants to but can't because he has already given himself to the cause. The other actors were, well, they were okay. I felt that they were overshadowed by the two brothers.

Overall, this was a great film, depicting one of the less-known moments in history. It's somewhere on my top 20.

_________________

I was cured all right.

Today's review: Black Swan

It's been my personal experience that like violins and honey, the simple addition of Natalie Portman makes things...awesome. Closer greatly improved with the casting of Natalie Portman as a corner of the love square that plagued the movie. She and the visual effects were the only things enjoyable in the Star Wars prequels. Her as the scheming Anne Boleyn certainly made The Other Boleyn Girl interesting. And really, I probably wouldn't have looked twice at Anywhere But Here if it didn't have Natalie Portman.

I'm not quite sure why I like her so much. She's beautiful with the sort of beauty only graced to goddesses. She's talented, very talented under the proper direction and script. Her voice is pure sex on wings. She's rather intelligent, as evidenced by the fact that she graduated from Harvard while working as an actress. And well, she's just beautiful.

Which brings us to Black Swan, the latest mind rape from Darren Aronofsky. The beautiful Natalie Portman plays Nina Sayers, an aspiring ballerina with more mental cracks than the bloody Titanic, who gets the lead role in a new interpretation of Swan Lake. For those who are not aware of the story, it goes along the lines that a beautiful virgin gets turned into a swan, that only twoo wuv break the spell, that she's about to find that in a prince only for him to get seduced by the sultry black swan, and the swan queen kills herself. Under pressure by her overbearing mother and her own struggle for perfection, she soon caves in under the stress and the introduction of a potential rival in Lily, played by Mila Kunis, who couldn't be contrasted with Natalie any further.

The cinematography is excellent, ranging from wide angles of the company practicing to the close oners of Natalie as she struggles with her inner madness. In fact, I actually think the oners, and there are a lot of them, are the most impressive, comparable to those of Alfonso Cuaron's in Children of Men. They really help portray Natalie's descent to insanity.

The casting is particularly excellent, Natalie's mother doing a damn good job as the smothering mother yet having cracks of sanity as well. Vincent Cassel does his normal well-done job as the French intellectual jerk with an extra side of perverseness. They both do a fantastic job in closing on poor Natalie, pressuring, nudging, pushing her into perfection until that is really the only path she has left. Mila Kunis has fantastic chemistry with Natalie as well as on her own, irradiating the natural passion that Natalie lacks in her ballet performance as well as setting up as the reflection or projection of Natalie's darker desires.

Which brings us to Natalie Portman herself. People have acclaimed that this is her best performance yet and I have to agree. The transition from a fragile delicate flower into a passionate dark dancer is simply amazing and how she deals with the overwhelming insanity is unbelievable. The best performance comes when she finally transforms into the titular Black Swan and dancing with an intense passion that hypnotises the viewer.

Overall, another fantastic film in 2010 and if Natalie Portman does not win the Best Actress for the Academy Award, then the world has become meaningless.

_________________

I was cured all right.

^That wasn't really a review of Black Swan... only a praise of Natalie Portman.
Let's get the real review, please! I love ballet and have been wondering whether to see this movie when it comes out here in January but there might be too much Dorian Gray and changed personalities and selling your soul...

By the way, I've seriously thought about watching The Wind That Shakes The Barley after reading your review... and because the title is so poetic but I just can't.. can't keep my focus on a topic like that...

_________________
>>Be the change you wish to see in the world<<



Banner credit: Shadowcat & Nurrantiel Mashiara

Oh yes, I know. I'm just not finished yet

And do watch it!

_________________

I was cured all right.

Right since everyone and their mums are doing this, I was going to do a Best and Worst Films of 2010....but I just realised I haven't seen a lot of horrible movies that came out in 2010. Being a poor college student, I try to watch movies that are actually good when I see them in theatres. So for now, I'm doing the Best and Worst Films that I Saw in 2010. So...the Worst first.

1. The Room
If you have heard about this movie, then yeah, I really don't need to go there. Bear in mind, it isn't just bad. It's HORRIBLE. The acting is dull and complacent, the script is laughable, the characters are hideous and unlikeable, the plot is cliche and just dumb, and it's overall just revolting. It is hilarious though. I'll give it that.

2. The Boondock Saints
I know some people like this movie...I didn't. It honestly felt like it was trying to be like Tarantino and really failed at it. Watching the first time, yeah, the action scenes were great. But on a second viewing...ehhh, the characters are a bit bland, the story isn't too exciting, and I couldn't find myself liking the twin brothers. And since so much focus was put on them, not liking them is like dissolving the foundations of a building.

3. Avatar
Yeah, yeah, I bet you've heard this before. I'll just sum it up briefly. Boring story with boring characters covered by a pretty little blanket.

4. Enough
As documented in my first review here, I hated this movie. I hated it from beginning to end and if it wasn't for the fact that I had to watch it for a class I already loathed, I wouldn't have spared it a minute of my attention.

5. The Wicker Man (2006)
Do I need to go any further? One of Nick Cage's worst movies, not to say he wasn't entertaining. Because he really was. But the whole movie adds a lot of unnecessary schluk on an already good horror movie and it just makes it sink deeper and deeper. And as good as Ellen Burstyn was in Requiem for a Dream, Christopher Lee she is NOT in this movie.

6. Iron Man 2
It wasn't exactly bad per se just...disappointing. A little disappointing. Considering how wonderful Iron Man was, I honestly did expect more from this movie. Kind of like how the Dark Knight exceeded expectations after Batman Begins. It just fell short on that. Robert Downey Junior still has his charms and everytime he was on screen was awesome. And Samuel L. Jackson was a nice touch. And of course, Mickey Rourke. But I just felt the final battle wasn't quite climatic and some of the characters (Black Widow comes to mind) seems rather unnecessary as well as the romantic subplot.

Right for the good and trust me there's a mile long list of good movies that I saw this year so I'll try to limit to the top ten.

10. Machete
I mean, what can I say? This was an incredibly enjoyable movie. One that wasn't afraid of crossing lines. This is probably one of my favourite moments with Michelle Rodriguez. And why not, one of the most entertaining roles that Robert DeNiro has done. What I really love is just how this movie doesn't really take itself seriously. It honestly feels like Robert Rodriguez is doing this just for fun and is actively encouraging us to have fun with him. And in the end, it was a messy bloody fest but an enjoyable mess.

9. The Pixar films that I saw
This would include the following: Up, Toy Story 3, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles. Yes, shame on me, I haven't seen these yet until this year. Well, I wasn't much of a film-educated person then. So I am now and these films are just incredible. Pixar has a superb record of good animation, art design, story, characters, voice acting, and I hope many more fruitful years for them.

8. Spirited Away
Again, it felt like one of those movies that an aspiring film and anime enthusiast had to watch. Excellent animation and it really felt quite magical and fantastical. Something that I feel is really hard to come by these days.

7. The Devil's Backbone
I honestly feel ashamed I've put this movie off for so long because really Guillermo del Toro does an amazing job in this movie. Like I detailed in my review above, amazing immersion and atmosphere, inter-fused with reality and fantasy that makes for a scary yet amazing spectacle.

6. The Baader-Meinhof Complex
I know I'm supposed to be inspired by the actions and the struggles of the Red Army Faction but while I was watching this movie, I just couldn't stop thinking about all the hot German girls and how I wished our leftist organisation had them. That aside, this was a great movie for me, particularly given my political tendencies. Even if you don't agree with them, you shouldn't miss out on a chance to see one of the most controversial political groups to come out during this particular era. What I love is that the movie really does not glorify the Red Army Faction as much as some critics would like you to believe. The leaders are jerks, it's perfectly clear some of the members are a bit too trigger happy, and no one is portrayed as a martyr. It simply shows them as they are and leaves you to decide what to think.

5. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Now I already said how much I loved this movie but I'm going to say this again. Amazing chemistry between the two brothers. Just like how The Boondock Saints FAILED to impress me with the brothers, The Wind That Shakes the Barley does the complete opposite. The struggles that the brothers face between themselves and against the world really drives this movie and having a younger brother myself, drags me into the drama. Cillian Murphy does an amazing job and I would like to put this as a runner up - Breakfast on Pluto. He's absolutely wonderful in that movie as well.

4. Audition
This has to be one of the scariest movies I've seen this year. And I saw Alien and Psycho this year. After all this is Takashi Miike we're talking about. The last twenty minutes are just absolutely chilling and hair-raising. Now that I know three words that are going to haunt me. Kiiiiri kiri kiri.

3. A Clockwork Orange
Definitely one of the most influential books and movies that I've read and watched this year. It has helped me look at the world in a very new perspective as well as introduced me to the delightful Alex, who is portrayed so wonderfully by Malcolm McDowell. Definitely a classic film.

2-1. Inception and Black Swan
Honestly just go see it. See both of them. I don't need to say anything. Just go.

And that's it for me here. I hope you guys have a Happy New Year and remember these are movies I've seen for the first time in the last year. Not movies that came out in the last year. Maybe if I asked for donations, I could do a proper list of movies that came out in 2011

_________________

I was cured all right.