Had a moviefest

Was off work yesterday and today, and had a cold for the last few days, so since Friday night through till the moment I write this, I've watched:

Mystic River
Well acted, good script, quite dark. However, when I saw the title, I was thinking of A River Runs Through It, which is an entirely different type of film.

The Horse Whisperer
Beautifully shot, acting OK, Kristin Scott Thomas is always easy on the eye. And man, could I retire to Montana - what a lovely piece of the world.

Breakin' All The Rules
Comedy with Jamie Foxx (how old is that guy? Here he's pretending to be 25, and in Collateral he seemed a lot older). Pretty funny, battle of the sexes with Jamie having been dumped by his girlfriend so he writes a book on how to have the perfect break-up without creating a stalker. Then he falls for his cousin's girl, and his cousin meets this golddigger who's aiming for Jamie's boss, who ... and so on, and so on. Had a good few laughs, but not an outright laughfest.

Frasier Series 2
Finally watched the last few episodes, after I had a glut of watching it when I first bought the DVD series. Excellent timing, never-fails-comedy. Series 3 is sat there waiting for me ;-)

Secret Window
Mr Cheekbones himself has continually impressed me each time I see his films, but this one let me down. I knew the plot already, as I'd read the short story by Stephen King which this is based on. Depp played an OK role, but somehow the film never quite hung together very well. How is that the of all the Stephen King-based films, the only ones that have ever worked well have not had a hint of supernutual or crazy-psycho-killer content? Dolores Clairborne, Stand By Me, Misery (OK, she was psycho, but believably so), The Shawshank Redemption. Compare those to Carrie, Dreamweaver, or the atrocious Children of the Corn films. OK, there are a couple of supernatural/psycho films that worked: The Shining, Hearts In Atlantis, The Green Mile, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. And yet his novellettes (kind of long short stories) are superb, no matter what theme they're on. Ah well...

Instinct
Anthony Hopkins plays an anthropologist who has been missing for 2 years in Africa, and is found after killing several game keepers. He's extradited back to the US, and you see that he's basically become a gorilla - shuffling, not speaking, panicked by shrill alarms, strong, etc - then thrown into a hard-core prison for nuts, and Cuba Gooding Junior is the psychologist assigned to get him to talk and do his psychological assessment for the courts. What ensues is that Hopkins sees something in CG Jr, and opens up, developing the film into an interesting insight about freedom, control, and the prisons that we build for ourselves. Their's a scene where you see Hopkins being accepted by the gorillas which is just superb, and which then turns into shock as one of them is shot right in front of his eyes by the game keeper/poacher. This shocked me - it's a well shot, touching, and painful view of man's gradual and horrific eradication of an intelligent, family-based, gentle species. With all the people I've seen shot in films over the years, nothing has affected me like this....

LA Confidential
Again, it's my old syndrome of "I don't like films about cops and robbers (or gangstas), but OK, I'll watch this one... oh, it's not as bad as I thought... what an excellent film". I've almost watched this one loads of times, and eventually thought I should bite the bullet. And what a great film. Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, and Guy Pearce (yes, from Neighbours!), play 3 cops in 1950s LA, caught up in a hotbed of corruption within the police force. Although I started out not liking all three of them, eventually you see other aspects to them and I started to sympathise with them. Supported by James Cromwell, Kim Basinger, and Danny De Vito, it's a good solid cast with an also solid script. Although how Kim got an oscar for it, I'll never know. She plays an OK part, but it's nothing to write home about. And Russell Crowe, who I normally can't watch, played as good a role as he did in The Insider.

Cinema Paradiso
Pure class. A coming of age film about a boy in a small town in Sicily who befriends a projectionist, his father figure in the absence of his father. The boy grows up, falls in love, and leaves town when his girlfriend's parents forbid her to get involved with him. Not much really happens beyond that. It's just a fantastic little film about life in a different era - no swearing, no violence, no nothing apart from people doing the things that every day people do. Excellent, excellent film. It seemed to go on along time, although I never felt bored.


Whew...

What shall I do today, I wonder?

posted by Blakey UK @ 8:45 am