Letters to Juliette
This is a new romance, solidly in the “chick Flick” category. It stars Amanda Seyfried as Sophie, who is a fact-checker—and fledgling writer—working for the New Yorker, and engaged to a self-absorbed chef, who is in turn obsessed with opening his new restaurant in NY city. They decide to take a ‘pre-honeymoon’ (a bizarre concept) to Italy, a journey which turns into a thinly disguised business trip for future-hubby. This leaves Sophie, our heroine, with a lot of time on her hands.
She visits a tourist hot-spot in Verona, called, I think, Juliette’s House. It is a small courtyard where women from around the world go to write notes and letters to Juliette—apparently some kind of patron saint for the broken-hearted— about husbands and boyfriends, and recalcitrant and disappointing men in general, and leave them posted on an ancient wall. Sophie discovers that the city maintains a bevy of women who work full-time answering the letters, as Juliette. Then, by chance, she discovers a letter they have overlooked—for the last fifty years. She answers that letter, and in so doing, draws the author, Claudia, back to Verona to find her lost love. She is sixty-five now, and a widow. Accompanied by her grandson, a tight-sphinctered, proper, and thoroughly unpleasant Brit, Claudia and Sophie set out to find Lorenzo, her lost love. Claudia is played by Vanessa Redgrave, still beautiful, and brilliant, after all these years.
The body of the movie revolves around the humorous and poignant search for Lorenzo, while Sophie and Charlie, Claudia’s grandson, go from prickly antagonism to reluctant attraction. Naturally, just as they’ve given up the search, they find Lorenzo by chance, and old love is rekindled, while new love—ill-timed and inconvenient—is blossoming as well.
I wasn’t really liking this one for about the first third of the movie. But three things swayed me in the end. One, the absolutely beautiful locations and scenery, all shot in Italy, where light is supernatural and architecture sublime. Second, the writing rises above the formulaic nature of the story. After all, how many ways are there for people to fall into—and out of—love? And third, the casting and acting rise above the merely adequate and enter the realm of surpassing entertainment.
Lorenzo (the real Lorenzo) is played by Franco Nero. For those of you who are not familiar with that name, let me refresh your memory. The last time Redgrave and he worked together was in 1967, when she played Lady Guinevere and he played Sir Lancelot in the musical, “Camelot,” which also starred Richard Harris as King Arthur. Maybe you don’t like musicals, which makes you a philistine, but this is one of the best of all time—maybe my favorite. The two of them glow with chemistry in that movie, and it is still there in this new one.
I cannot reveal the ending, but suffice it to say, there will be tears of relieved joy. Amanda Seyfried has a noticeable presence on screen. (She plays the about-to married-daughter of three possible father’s in that peon to ABBA, Mama Mia!) Not to mention the biggest eyes since Leslie Ann Warren. Her obsessed fiancé makes himself intolerable in a fine job of supporting actor, while Charlie, played by Christopher Egan, turns in an excellent job as he goes from antagonistic spoiler to reluctant beau, while managing to maintain his core personality—no easy feat. The ladies in the group with which I went (ranging from 35 to 60ish) all agreed that Nero is even more virile, and better looking, than he was in his younger days. He also has the bluest eyes since Paul Newman.
So, despite a marked lack of interest, I’m glad I went. It is a good movie, if inescapably derivative. It manages to rise above its own cliché-ridden inertia to draw us into the captivating world of the well-crafted and believable characters.
It is rated PG-13, for adult themes. There is no skin or sexual content, and no profanity. There is the Italian countryside, which is almost enough to make me sell my guitar and take Nita for a visit. She loved it by the way. All four of the girls did.
If you are a die-hard Bruce Willis fan (get it?) or John Wayne aficionado, or think Arnold Schwarzenegger should have gotten an Oscar for his role in the Predator, this movie might not be for you.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Movie Review The Losers
Movie Review: The Losers
So my Nephew and his friend Rob and I went the next day and saw the one I intended to see in the first place.
A crack military special ops team is betrayed by a madman with apparently limitless resources and a penchant for inappropriate sarcasm. That’s pretty much the plot. We have the usual 7 guys and a hot girl (Zoe Saldana), all with nicknames and pasts. She bankrolls their return to the states and they agree to take out “Max”-the-omnipotent-bad guy.
There is nothing to recommend this movie, but I liked it. The bad guy is so bad we are willing to allow anything as long as it leads to his untimely demise. Max is purchasing a new weapons platform which destroys everything with some kind of sonic thing-a-ma-jig. He intends to sell it and start a war “for the good of America.” The good guys, whom everyone assumes are dead and have had their reputations tarnished, have hearts and even hints of personality as they plot to take out Max. Is the girl betraying them? Are they being set up again? Will Roque kill the Colonel? Will Jensen (Chris Evans aka The Human Torch) be the next Steve Perry? All will be revealed for about ten bucks.
As always, with little plot one must substitute lots of action-slash-mayhem and-or comedy. This has a good deal of the first and a little of the second. It is pretty good for the genre, and if you like unending violence and explosions like me. I give it a genre-specific 8, and a general 6.
It is rated PG-13 and should be R. For the violence obviously, but also a few “love scenes” in which we get to see a good deal more of Zoe and her antics than is appropriate for any PG-13 movie.
Zoe Saldana is the biggest name in it (Uhura from the New Star Trek, and what’s her name in Avatar), so you know the budget wasn’t what we might call “large.”
Spoiler alert:
Max is eventually killed in a really fun and highly unlikely way, and Roque does not manage to kill the Colonel. In fact he “dies very badly.”
So my Nephew and his friend Rob and I went the next day and saw the one I intended to see in the first place.
A crack military special ops team is betrayed by a madman with apparently limitless resources and a penchant for inappropriate sarcasm. That’s pretty much the plot. We have the usual 7 guys and a hot girl (Zoe Saldana), all with nicknames and pasts. She bankrolls their return to the states and they agree to take out “Max”-the-omnipotent-bad guy.
There is nothing to recommend this movie, but I liked it. The bad guy is so bad we are willing to allow anything as long as it leads to his untimely demise. Max is purchasing a new weapons platform which destroys everything with some kind of sonic thing-a-ma-jig. He intends to sell it and start a war “for the good of America.” The good guys, whom everyone assumes are dead and have had their reputations tarnished, have hearts and even hints of personality as they plot to take out Max. Is the girl betraying them? Are they being set up again? Will Roque kill the Colonel? Will Jensen (Chris Evans aka The Human Torch) be the next Steve Perry? All will be revealed for about ten bucks.
As always, with little plot one must substitute lots of action-slash-mayhem and-or comedy. This has a good deal of the first and a little of the second. It is pretty good for the genre, and if you like unending violence and explosions like me. I give it a genre-specific 8, and a general 6.
It is rated PG-13 and should be R. For the violence obviously, but also a few “love scenes” in which we get to see a good deal more of Zoe and her antics than is appropriate for any PG-13 movie.
Zoe Saldana is the biggest name in it (Uhura from the New Star Trek, and what’s her name in Avatar), so you know the budget wasn’t what we might call “large.”
Spoiler alert:
Max is eventually killed in a really fun and highly unlikely way, and Roque does not manage to kill the Colonel. In fact he “dies very badly.”
Movie Review Kickass
Movie Review: Kickass
An interesting thing happened with this one. As some of you know, Nita and I have sold the Las Vegas house and are relocating to upstate NY in July. Friday was the day the movers came and Nita had gone to SLC to babysit grandkids while their parents flew to ash-covered England to defend his dissertation, so I was alone. Even Frankie the trans-gender cat had flown to NY. It had been a busy, taxing, emotionally-trying and physically demanding two months and the end was suddenly in sight. I was experiencing a strange mix of emotions and with an empty house on my hands (no comfy-chair, no television) I decided to go to a movie. I chose The Losers, a PG-13 action formulaic thing. But when I got to the theater that movie had flown my consciousness and when I saw Kickass on the board it somehow clicked that I had intended to see that one instead. Don’t ask me why. I knew a little about it from a review I’d read and had no intention of seeing it. It was rated R and admitted to very strong language.
So I watched all the trailers (my favorite part) and was shocked and confused when Kickass started and not the movie I thought I was seeing, the title of which was escaping me. So that’s why I’m reviewing Kickass.
A little background. This movie is based on an underground comic (which I did not know and is always a warning flag), or “graphic novel” as the wanna-be writers and artists prefer they be called. Ostensibly it is about a 17 year old boy, a non-entity, who—like virtually all teenage boys—fantasizes of being a super-hero (among other things.) He discusses the idea with his two non-entity friends as he stares longingly at “the girl” who is an unobtainable beauty several casts above his own motley station. Except he decides to do something about it and orders a costume online. So far we have a fairly mainstream coming-of-age story. But then we switch scenes to a mob boss and his model family life. Someone who looked like Batman has beaten up a couple of his drug mules. Then we switch to an idyllic father-daughter scene, he middle-aged and she 12 or 13 and smallish, pony tails and big eyes and wearing, interestingly enough, a bullet proof vest. They exchange endearments. She asks if it’s going to hurt. He smiles and says yes, about like falling off a bike and shoots her in the chest with a large handgun. She falls down, he helps her up and asks what she wants for her birthday. Her answer? A Balisong—one of those Pilipino knives that have two hinged hilts and can swivel around like a hooker-loose can opener. He gives her a matching set.
Back to the boy. He is in his costume, has named himself Kickass, and is out prowling the streets looking for bad guys. Mind you, he has no training whatsoever, is not strong—is not even particularly bright. And is pretty much a coward. He is living the fantasy though. He gets the crap kicked out of him. He does it again and 3 thugs put him in the hospital for 6 months, during which half his skeleton is enhanced with metal. The x-rays look like Wolverine. The result, which we might think magically turns him into a one-man crime fighting wave, only serves to make him able to take a beating for longer periods of time.
Now the plot thickens. The father daughter team are actual crime fighters on a vendetta against the mob boss. It’s a long story. The dad (Nickolas Cage) is insane but functional and has been training himself and his daughter for her entire life to one end—killing everyone involved in his pregnant wife’s suicide. They are killing people wholesale—brutally, heartlessly and with ruthless efficiency (one of the four main tools of the Spanish Inquisition). All of which gets blamed on the ineffectual Kickass.
Enough. The movie takes a strange twist at that point and becomes a blood fest. I would compare the violence and gore with Reservoir Dogs. That’s right. If you don’t know what that means, count your blessings and make sure you never find out.
We go from teenage angst to deadly serious comic levels of mayhem, all the while maintaining the original level of familial repartee and comic-bookish writing. And somehow, it all works. It is, on several levels, a good movie—in the sense that it is well done. The language is unbelievably profane. The killing is rampant, über violent and graphic, and the vengeance is never justified. It’s as if Some Kind of Wonderful meets Napoleon Dynamite meets the afore mentioned Reservoir Dogs meets Goodfellas.
I do not recommend this one in the strongest of tones. Some of you will definitely want to see it and you know who you are. The fight scenes are wild and wooly, the little girl is a human dynamo with a filthy mouth, able to take out a dozen grown, hardened thugs without breaking a sweat—and she doesn’t just knock them out—she turns them into hamburger. Her outfit is eclectic to say the least and her moniker—Hit Girl—appropriate.
Every single character in this film is a broken, emotionally stunted, irretrievably disturbed person.
But the action is intense, viscerally exciting and unending. There’s a lot of misplaced creativity in it. Rated R for strong language and violence beyond the pale.
An interesting thing happened with this one. As some of you know, Nita and I have sold the Las Vegas house and are relocating to upstate NY in July. Friday was the day the movers came and Nita had gone to SLC to babysit grandkids while their parents flew to ash-covered England to defend his dissertation, so I was alone. Even Frankie the trans-gender cat had flown to NY. It had been a busy, taxing, emotionally-trying and physically demanding two months and the end was suddenly in sight. I was experiencing a strange mix of emotions and with an empty house on my hands (no comfy-chair, no television) I decided to go to a movie. I chose The Losers, a PG-13 action formulaic thing. But when I got to the theater that movie had flown my consciousness and when I saw Kickass on the board it somehow clicked that I had intended to see that one instead. Don’t ask me why. I knew a little about it from a review I’d read and had no intention of seeing it. It was rated R and admitted to very strong language.
So I watched all the trailers (my favorite part) and was shocked and confused when Kickass started and not the movie I thought I was seeing, the title of which was escaping me. So that’s why I’m reviewing Kickass.
A little background. This movie is based on an underground comic (which I did not know and is always a warning flag), or “graphic novel” as the wanna-be writers and artists prefer they be called. Ostensibly it is about a 17 year old boy, a non-entity, who—like virtually all teenage boys—fantasizes of being a super-hero (among other things.) He discusses the idea with his two non-entity friends as he stares longingly at “the girl” who is an unobtainable beauty several casts above his own motley station. Except he decides to do something about it and orders a costume online. So far we have a fairly mainstream coming-of-age story. But then we switch scenes to a mob boss and his model family life. Someone who looked like Batman has beaten up a couple of his drug mules. Then we switch to an idyllic father-daughter scene, he middle-aged and she 12 or 13 and smallish, pony tails and big eyes and wearing, interestingly enough, a bullet proof vest. They exchange endearments. She asks if it’s going to hurt. He smiles and says yes, about like falling off a bike and shoots her in the chest with a large handgun. She falls down, he helps her up and asks what she wants for her birthday. Her answer? A Balisong—one of those Pilipino knives that have two hinged hilts and can swivel around like a hooker-loose can opener. He gives her a matching set.
Back to the boy. He is in his costume, has named himself Kickass, and is out prowling the streets looking for bad guys. Mind you, he has no training whatsoever, is not strong—is not even particularly bright. And is pretty much a coward. He is living the fantasy though. He gets the crap kicked out of him. He does it again and 3 thugs put him in the hospital for 6 months, during which half his skeleton is enhanced with metal. The x-rays look like Wolverine. The result, which we might think magically turns him into a one-man crime fighting wave, only serves to make him able to take a beating for longer periods of time.
Now the plot thickens. The father daughter team are actual crime fighters on a vendetta against the mob boss. It’s a long story. The dad (Nickolas Cage) is insane but functional and has been training himself and his daughter for her entire life to one end—killing everyone involved in his pregnant wife’s suicide. They are killing people wholesale—brutally, heartlessly and with ruthless efficiency (one of the four main tools of the Spanish Inquisition). All of which gets blamed on the ineffectual Kickass.
Enough. The movie takes a strange twist at that point and becomes a blood fest. I would compare the violence and gore with Reservoir Dogs. That’s right. If you don’t know what that means, count your blessings and make sure you never find out.
We go from teenage angst to deadly serious comic levels of mayhem, all the while maintaining the original level of familial repartee and comic-bookish writing. And somehow, it all works. It is, on several levels, a good movie—in the sense that it is well done. The language is unbelievably profane. The killing is rampant, über violent and graphic, and the vengeance is never justified. It’s as if Some Kind of Wonderful meets Napoleon Dynamite meets the afore mentioned Reservoir Dogs meets Goodfellas.
I do not recommend this one in the strongest of tones. Some of you will definitely want to see it and you know who you are. The fight scenes are wild and wooly, the little girl is a human dynamo with a filthy mouth, able to take out a dozen grown, hardened thugs without breaking a sweat—and she doesn’t just knock them out—she turns them into hamburger. Her outfit is eclectic to say the least and her moniker—Hit Girl—appropriate.
Every single character in this film is a broken, emotionally stunted, irretrievably disturbed person.
But the action is intense, viscerally exciting and unending. There’s a lot of misplaced creativity in it. Rated R for strong language and violence beyond the pale.
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