Movie Reviews – November 2008

Here is what we saw:

Here are my reviews:

No Reservations

An uptight head chef at a gourmet restaurant has her world turned upside down when her sister dies in an auto accident and her niece comes to live with her. While she is attending to the business of the funeral and getting her niece settled in, her boss hires a new sous chef who has an entirely different approach to kitchen management. Sparks fly. There are problems with the little girl, having mostly to do with the chef’s schedule and the fact that there is only fancy food to eat and nothing plain and regular. The new sous chef befriends the little girl and they become real pals. This draws the two chefs closer together and guess what, they fall in love. Happy ending all around. The plot was contrived but you didn’t care.
Netflix – 3 stars

Burn After Reading

A CIA analyst who is married to a monster of a pediatrician gets fired from his job and decides to write his memoirs. She is having an affair with a guy in the State Department. This guy plays around a lot and is also having an affair with a training instructor in his exercise gym. The gym instructor is getting older and is obsessed with having some plastic surgery which she thinks will change her life. Her boss is fond of her and likes her just the way she is. She is oblivious to that though. She also has another friend at the gym, another instructor and these two are not romantically involved. The monster pediatrician decides to get a divorce and is advised to collect all the family financial data and while getting it from the home computer also gets her husband’s memoirs. The lawyer’s secretary who happens to have the disk in her purse accidentally drops it at her gym. You guessed it, the same one where our friends work. They find the memoirs and think it is sensitive material and go about “blackmailing” the analyst. That’s where the action starts. Once going, it’s uncontrollable and mayhem follows. This movie almost made a 4. It’s very much like Fargo, Pulp Fiction, or Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Very crazy. We really liked this movie a lot.
Theater – 3 stars

To Be and To Have

This French documentary was about a teacher in a one-room school and his dozen or so students. He is retiring at the end of the year and the school will be closing. Various kids have their problems and he is trying to help them while he is helping them to learn. Kind of sweet and sad. Karen liked this movie more than I did. I had to get up and have a break from it for about the middle third. Very slow.
Netflix – 2 stars

Max

Max is an artist from Munich and lost his right arm in the trenches at Ypres during WWI. He returns and opens an avant garde art gallery. He is Jewish and pretty well off. A young Adolf Hitler comes around peddling his artwork and Max gives him some encouragement. But he wants Hitler to loosen up a little and paint with his feelings. Hitler has to remain in the army because he has no other income. They realize he is a pretty good speaker and they recruit him to give speeches, mostly against the consequences of the peace treaty. You can see trouble coming a mile off. The movie is a little slow but not too bad. This is a Hitler in development and interesting to see.
Netflix – 3 stars

Bolt

Bolt is a movie dog who has super powers in his films, not unlike Underdog. The production crew goes to great lengths to make Bolt believe everything is real. Through a series of screw ups, Bolt gets boxed up and shipped to New York from Hollywood and sets out to get back home to help Penny, his costar, whom he thinks has been kidnapped by the villain of the movies. On his way back he picks up a couple of sidekicks; Mittens, a cat and Rhino, a hamster. In his absence he has been replaced by another dog but Penny still loves our hero, the original Bolt. Along the way Bolt discovers he really doesn’t have super powers but there are some great gags when he tries one of his tricks and they really work. He saves the day at the end of course. The makers of 3D movies, especially animated ones just keep getting better and better. Not only is the 3D spot on, but the story is good. We try to take Rachel to every 3D movie we can. This was the latest.
Theater – 4 stars