Movie Reviews – February 2008

Here is what we saw:

Here are my reviews:

Paris, Je T’aime

This is a collection of 20 short film segments. All are about 5 minutes long, all are set in Paris and all have love as a theme, one way or another. Most are not too memorable, but there were 3 that deserve special mention. The first, I’m embarrassed to admit, involved mimes. Mimes are one of my all time hated things, especially those dressed like Marcel Marceau. However, this segment makes fun of the mimes so it is sort of ok. The ending is great. The second features Nick Nolte. Clever scripting completely fools you about what is actually going on and the surprise ending of this one is great too. The last one features Elijah Wood and is an homage of his part in Sin City. It involves his encounter with a beautiful vampiress.
Netflix – 3 stars

Knocked Up

An attractive career women and her older sister go to a club and meet a stoner. The career woman has a one night fling and ends up pregnant. Rather than abandoning the girl, the stoner rises to the occasion and the rest of the movie is about how they try to make things work through the course of the pregnancy. There are a couple of predictable, obligatory, and extremely tedious sequences, but the rest is ok, at times touching and sometimes even funny. There is one pretty good scene where the sisters go back to the club where the trouble all started, but the one is 8 months pregnant and the other is starting to show her age a little. Where once they were let in immediatley, they are now denied admission. The older sister reads the doorman the riot act and belittles him as being “just a doorman”. You think he is going to clobber her, but he takes her aside, agrees with her and in a heartfelt speech makes her feel like a heel. The outcome of the movie is happy as you would predict.
Netflix – 3 stars

Avenue Montaigne

Jessica, a girl from a small village comes to Paris and gets a job as a waitress across the street from a multistage theatrical complex. Three plots are due to collide in a couple of day’s time when there will be a piano concert, a play, and an art sale in the theater. Each of these events has a central character; the pianist wants out of the constant grind of concert performances, the actress is a successful television soap opera star but wants to be in the movies, and a self-made millionaire who’s dying of cancer is selling the art collection he has taken a lifetime to put together. Jessica is the glue that binds all these intertwining stories together along with a couple of smaller ones. The plot is a little predictable but it’s a sweet story. Subtitles.
Netflix – 3 stars

Amazing Grace

The story of William Wilburforce’s long hard battle to end the slave trade in England. Beginning before the American Revolution he is almost there but suffers a setback when the colonies rebel because talk of ending slavery at that time is almost considered sedition. After the war he has another try and eventually succeeds by using a seemingly otherwise “harmless” law to confiscate slave ships. The movie does not explain why England is in the slave trade but does not have slavery itself. Nice historical drama.
Netflix – 3 stars

Spiderwick Chronicles

Rachel and I saw this on a snow day when her school was closed. It reminded me a lot of Bridge to Terabithia. The goblins weren’t as visually frightening as they could have been, but their relentless pursuit and evil intent were pretty bad. The shape changing ogre could look horrible at times. Basically, the story is about a broken family that comes to live in the remote ancestral home. The mother is newly divorced and the kids resent leaving their friends in the city. One of the twin sons is particularly rebellious. He finds a disused dumb waiter and takes it to his ancestor’s secret study. There he finds a book that says not to open it. So of course he does. It releases all the supernatural creatures in the neighborhood. The ogre will stop at nothing to get the book and its secrets. With it he can destroy all the other fairies, pixies, goblins, etc and become the master of the world. The kids try to destroy the book but only the owner can do it so they go on a quest to find him. What do you think? Does the story end happily?
Theater – 3 stars

Across the Universe

Jude works in a shipyard in Liverpool and comes to America to find his father, a WWII GI who was unaware of Jude’s existance. He meets Lucy and her brother Maxwell and they move into an apartment with a whole cast of other free spirits. Set in the 1960’s, this is the story of some characters that have names that occur in various Beatles songs. All of them are fictitious but have some resemblence to real life people. The two main characters are Jude and Lucy, but there are also Maxwell, Prudence, Sadie etc. They are NOT the people actually featured in the songs. Various songs are arranged to keep the storyline going. Sometimes it is a later tune, then an early one, etc. It is quite skillfully put together. The first 20 minutes when the characters are being introduced and when you are figuring out how the whole song/plot mechanism works is a little slow, but after you have got it, the movie steps right along and is kinda fun.
Netflix – 3 stars