Beautiful strong girls and grumpy gangster boys
I enjoyed watching the lovely Naomi Watts in the movie "We Don't Live Here Anymore",
but otherwise felt a bit conflicted about this story of two couples in
which one man and the other wife decide to stray a little. First, I
couldn't help but notice how this movie is basically a bigger-budget
version of your stereotypical film school student art film, stretched
into a full-length feature. Editing and acting at least were just as
pretentious. But at least there were a few interesting moviemaking and
storytelling techniques to learn, the least of which was not that if
you want to show that the two people rut-rut-rutting are not some dumb
proles but intelligent and educated people who just happen to be slaves
to great and dramatic passion, just add some deep cello music to
accompany them.
I wasn't entirely sure if I was supposed to feel anything for any of the characters, although I think Laura Dern was good as a tired and overworked wife trying to keep her family away from financial ruin. The writer or writers of this film, whoever they were, were apparently so lazy that they didn't feel like doing any research, so the main characters of this film are aimless English teachers in some liberal arts college. You know, just like about 80% of college professors in America, assuming I have now correctly understood the way things work from watching Hollywood movies. No wonder their educational system is reputedly in the shits. At no point of the movie did either professor reach out his window to yell at some fratboys who had pranked him, though. Come to think of it, that is one thing that I have never actually seen happen for real in my own eyes either.
On a more peppier fare with lots of smiles and empowering teenage girl power, I watched "Stick It" on the airplane on the way to Vegas. Basically this movie is a remake of "Bring it on", but set in the world of gymnastics instead of cheerleading. The heroine, a "bad" "rebel" teenage girl is caught vandalizing stuff with her X-treme BMX action. Instead of being sent to the juvie, she gets a second chance at a gymnastics training camp. Why, you may ask, but you see, this is because she is special because she used to be a promising teenage gymnast who then betrayed her teammates by walking away from the big competition. But no problemo, everybody will bend over backwards (heh) for her because she is the heroine, giving her a private space to train her new extreme routine for the next big competition. The other girls in the team (I could list the types but why bother) complain at first, but since this is not a democracy but a gymnacracy, they just have to grin and bear it and wait for some kind of turn or a big event to fuse them together so that in the big end everyone will work together, even the two unthreatening doofus boys who bring the comical effect to this film.
I don't know where the filmmakers got these people, but at least the lead actress actually looked like she was a real athlete. Perhaps they had used that technology that I once read of, digitally adding the actor's face on a stuntperson. I also sure didn't know that gymnastics routines are these days set to kicky hard rock soundtrack. But to sum up, this is not a bad movie at all, I could certainly think of several worse movies to try to kill time on a flight. The version I saw was probaby edited for airplay (lines like "that witch" etc.) so perhaps the uncut version has some of the girls having, uh, those "wardrobe malfunctions" one so often hears about these days.
I had read bad things about the romantic comedy "Must Love Dogs", but I certainly enjoyed this movie more than, say, Miami Vice. Diane Lane looks good for her age as a fortysomething woman who is looking for a man, and John Cusack is the way he always is except with a few extra pounds. Even though this movie is formulaic, I occasionally found it hard to decipher the motivations of the characters, let alone understand what Cusack's character actually does for a living, since we never see him do anything but work on the boat that he is building. He must be making pretty good dough, since he doesn't seem to mind at all having lost everything in a divorce and having to pay alimony. I guess that makes him the ideal man, at far as women is concerned. The basic truths of sociobiology and evo-psych can be pretty easily deciphered simply by looking at the entertainment that appeals to women.
As an amusing aside, when I was watching this movie I thought that it was about an older woman and a younger man, but according to IMDB, in real life Diane Lane is only about a year older than John Cusack, who has recently turned forty. Cusack, like Keanu Reeves and Michael Imperioli, somehow manage to look a lot younger than what they really are.
Whereas Cusack's character has only one friend, a horndog lawyer, Lane's character has a whole family of sisters and a charismatic father who has a whole slew of women following him. The fact of higher male variance is good for those males who happen to be in the right side of the Bell Curve. At one point of the movie, Lane's character laments how lucky men are when they age, but I somehow doubt that all those men who are in their graves or otherwise fallen out of society would feel this way, since they are ultimately the ones who tilt the supply-demand equation to benefit the remaining men. As another humorous aside, I honestly didn't know that Christopher Plummer played Captain von Trapp in "Sound of Music" until my wife mentioned it to me. Damn it, I always hate it when the great actors of the past confuse me by playing old people in the current movies, instead of being properly dead and stuff.
The original "Carlito's Way" with Al Pacino is a good mobster movie, and the chase that concluded the movie was really thrilling when I saw it the first time years ago. The straight-to-video prequel "Carlito's Way: Rise to Power" felt more like a pilot of a TV show. Young Carlito and his two fellow brothers in crime (one is an Italian mobster, the other cool a black cat played by Mario van Peebles) together form a multiethnic criminal gang and start spreading dope over the late 60's New York City. Nobody wears a zoot suit, but I guess that was a few decades earlier. A couple of people get shot, and for some reason, the mobster character does not seem to mind at all that his fellow mobsters are clipped. Hey, more turf for him. I guess that vow of omerta every mobster takes doesn't mean as much as it perhaps once used to.
Eventually as I predicted, Luis Guzman who was killed in the original movie as a completely different character makes an appearance. God damn it, are there really no other Puerto Rican actors working in Hollywood than Guzman? He's a fine actor and that, don't get me wrong, but it's like no matter what movie you watch, you are guaranteed to eventually see his mutt face.
Speaking of multiethnic gangs, I watched the Jackie Chan actioner "Rumble in the Bronx" again a few days ago. I had previously watched this movie in theater when it came out, and loved it then, but these days Jackie's "parkour" and other stunts are so routine that they just don't amaze as much as they used to. Even though this movie was playing on TBS, I thought that it wouldn't matter, since the Asian moviemakers don't really put any boobies or anything else like that in their movies that TBS would then have to edit out. Some dialogue was obviously edited for airplay ("he's a pain in the neck" etc.), though. Now, I don't know if certain ideas spread by osmosis, but I have to mention that when my wife was watching this movie for a while, she noted how strangely multiethnic the rampaging street gang seemed to be. You know, just like so often in the real life. Not.
A less romantic view into criminal underworld is provided in the movie "Four Brothers" in which four adult men who grew up in the same foster home come back to join forces to avenge the murder of their foster mother, the only woman who took them in when nobody else would. (After all, teenagers who nobody wants around are in reality misunderstood rebels who, if anything, are too good for their community that rejects them.) As for the rest of the predictable plot, I certainly never would have guessed that white cops are corrupt. The frozen surroundings were cinematographically quite different from the usual action film fare of palm trees and swimming pools with babes lounging around them, though, which at least made this movie visually interesting. I am also starting to understand better why Detroit is also in such shits, since apparently you can have full blown shootouts and the police just doesn't seem to care.
I wasn't entirely sure if I was supposed to feel anything for any of the characters, although I think Laura Dern was good as a tired and overworked wife trying to keep her family away from financial ruin. The writer or writers of this film, whoever they were, were apparently so lazy that they didn't feel like doing any research, so the main characters of this film are aimless English teachers in some liberal arts college. You know, just like about 80% of college professors in America, assuming I have now correctly understood the way things work from watching Hollywood movies. No wonder their educational system is reputedly in the shits. At no point of the movie did either professor reach out his window to yell at some fratboys who had pranked him, though. Come to think of it, that is one thing that I have never actually seen happen for real in my own eyes either.
On a more peppier fare with lots of smiles and empowering teenage girl power, I watched "Stick It" on the airplane on the way to Vegas. Basically this movie is a remake of "Bring it on", but set in the world of gymnastics instead of cheerleading. The heroine, a "bad" "rebel" teenage girl is caught vandalizing stuff with her X-treme BMX action. Instead of being sent to the juvie, she gets a second chance at a gymnastics training camp. Why, you may ask, but you see, this is because she is special because she used to be a promising teenage gymnast who then betrayed her teammates by walking away from the big competition. But no problemo, everybody will bend over backwards (heh) for her because she is the heroine, giving her a private space to train her new extreme routine for the next big competition. The other girls in the team (I could list the types but why bother) complain at first, but since this is not a democracy but a gymnacracy, they just have to grin and bear it and wait for some kind of turn or a big event to fuse them together so that in the big end everyone will work together, even the two unthreatening doofus boys who bring the comical effect to this film.
I don't know where the filmmakers got these people, but at least the lead actress actually looked like she was a real athlete. Perhaps they had used that technology that I once read of, digitally adding the actor's face on a stuntperson. I also sure didn't know that gymnastics routines are these days set to kicky hard rock soundtrack. But to sum up, this is not a bad movie at all, I could certainly think of several worse movies to try to kill time on a flight. The version I saw was probaby edited for airplay (lines like "that witch" etc.) so perhaps the uncut version has some of the girls having, uh, those "wardrobe malfunctions" one so often hears about these days.
I had read bad things about the romantic comedy "Must Love Dogs", but I certainly enjoyed this movie more than, say, Miami Vice. Diane Lane looks good for her age as a fortysomething woman who is looking for a man, and John Cusack is the way he always is except with a few extra pounds. Even though this movie is formulaic, I occasionally found it hard to decipher the motivations of the characters, let alone understand what Cusack's character actually does for a living, since we never see him do anything but work on the boat that he is building. He must be making pretty good dough, since he doesn't seem to mind at all having lost everything in a divorce and having to pay alimony. I guess that makes him the ideal man, at far as women is concerned. The basic truths of sociobiology and evo-psych can be pretty easily deciphered simply by looking at the entertainment that appeals to women.
As an amusing aside, when I was watching this movie I thought that it was about an older woman and a younger man, but according to IMDB, in real life Diane Lane is only about a year older than John Cusack, who has recently turned forty. Cusack, like Keanu Reeves and Michael Imperioli, somehow manage to look a lot younger than what they really are.
Whereas Cusack's character has only one friend, a horndog lawyer, Lane's character has a whole family of sisters and a charismatic father who has a whole slew of women following him. The fact of higher male variance is good for those males who happen to be in the right side of the Bell Curve. At one point of the movie, Lane's character laments how lucky men are when they age, but I somehow doubt that all those men who are in their graves or otherwise fallen out of society would feel this way, since they are ultimately the ones who tilt the supply-demand equation to benefit the remaining men. As another humorous aside, I honestly didn't know that Christopher Plummer played Captain von Trapp in "Sound of Music" until my wife mentioned it to me. Damn it, I always hate it when the great actors of the past confuse me by playing old people in the current movies, instead of being properly dead and stuff.
The original "Carlito's Way" with Al Pacino is a good mobster movie, and the chase that concluded the movie was really thrilling when I saw it the first time years ago. The straight-to-video prequel "Carlito's Way: Rise to Power" felt more like a pilot of a TV show. Young Carlito and his two fellow brothers in crime (one is an Italian mobster, the other cool a black cat played by Mario van Peebles) together form a multiethnic criminal gang and start spreading dope over the late 60's New York City. Nobody wears a zoot suit, but I guess that was a few decades earlier. A couple of people get shot, and for some reason, the mobster character does not seem to mind at all that his fellow mobsters are clipped. Hey, more turf for him. I guess that vow of omerta every mobster takes doesn't mean as much as it perhaps once used to.
Eventually as I predicted, Luis Guzman who was killed in the original movie as a completely different character makes an appearance. God damn it, are there really no other Puerto Rican actors working in Hollywood than Guzman? He's a fine actor and that, don't get me wrong, but it's like no matter what movie you watch, you are guaranteed to eventually see his mutt face.
Speaking of multiethnic gangs, I watched the Jackie Chan actioner "Rumble in the Bronx" again a few days ago. I had previously watched this movie in theater when it came out, and loved it then, but these days Jackie's "parkour" and other stunts are so routine that they just don't amaze as much as they used to. Even though this movie was playing on TBS, I thought that it wouldn't matter, since the Asian moviemakers don't really put any boobies or anything else like that in their movies that TBS would then have to edit out. Some dialogue was obviously edited for airplay ("he's a pain in the neck" etc.), though. Now, I don't know if certain ideas spread by osmosis, but I have to mention that when my wife was watching this movie for a while, she noted how strangely multiethnic the rampaging street gang seemed to be. You know, just like so often in the real life. Not.
A less romantic view into criminal underworld is provided in the movie "Four Brothers" in which four adult men who grew up in the same foster home come back to join forces to avenge the murder of their foster mother, the only woman who took them in when nobody else would. (After all, teenagers who nobody wants around are in reality misunderstood rebels who, if anything, are too good for their community that rejects them.) As for the rest of the predictable plot, I certainly never would have guessed that white cops are corrupt. The frozen surroundings were cinematographically quite different from the usual action film fare of palm trees and swimming pools with babes lounging around them, though, which at least made this movie visually interesting. I am also starting to understand better why Detroit is also in such shits, since apparently you can have full blown shootouts and the police just doesn't seem to care.
I actually saw Stick It, and I enjoyed it.
Posted by Half Sigma | 7:47 PM