Archive for March, 2005
I’m finally starting to catch up my reviews! Only this one and another and I’ll be caught up.
I saw The Upside of Anger a couple weeks ago, but it left a pretty good impression on me. All I have to say is this: Joan Allen WILL get nominated for an Academy Award, if not win, for Best Actress. While I doubt it, Kevin Costner might get an Oscar nod for his great performance as well. Anyway, about the movie: Upside is about a man leaving his wife, Terry (Allen), and their four teenage daughters. While Terry vents and watches her life fall apart, her neighbor and former baseball star, Denny (Costner), attempts to court her.
Although this movie is classified as a drama (and rightly so because it deals with some serious issues), I found myself laughing harder than I have in a while at a movie. Allen’s reactions to the string of traumatic events that take place in her life are hysterical! Allen and Costner’s chemistry on the screen is really believable as well. The screenplay was not too predictable and the script was very realistic. The four teenage daughters, played by Erik Christensen, Even Rachel Wood, Keri Russell, and Alicia Witt all turned out great performances. I just hope Wood starts to take on some different move roles besides the dark, broody teenager. There really weren’t that many downsides to Upside. The acting performances were terrific, but while I don’t think the overall movie was Oscar-caliber, it’s close.
March 31st, 2005
Like most everyone else, I liked Dodgeball - liked it, but didn’t love it. I didn’t roll around on the floor laughing or anything, but I found it humorous and entertaining. To summarize, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story is about the (almost too) easy-going owner of a local gym (Vince Vaughn) winning back his gym by competing against a more well-to-do gym owner (Ben Stiller) in a Las Vegas dodgeball tournament.
The cast of the underdog team from the local gym supported the movie’s laughs pretty well. Vaughn didn’t get many jokes, since he played the love interest of Christine Taylor’s character. Stiller was funny, but only because of the incredible butt his character made of himself. I was generally disgusted by Stiller’s character, White Goodman, and I thought for a moment that he was doing a bad job acting, but then it clicked - he was exagerrating his character to make me not like him. Well, it worked - and that’s what makes this an underdog story. You get to hate White so much that you can’t wait for him to get beat at the end.
March 28th, 2005
If you are a fan of martial arts and oriental storytelling, then please rent Hero as soon as possible and you won’t be sorry. I would also highly recommend this to anyone that liked Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or anyone that is a cinematography buff. The story of Hero, without giving too much away, is the narrative account by a man that killed 3 legendary assassins that were out to kill the first emperor of China.
If anything, you should see this movie for some of the most breathtaking images that you will ever see on a movie or television screen. The martial arts are exquisitely done as well, a la Crouching Tiger style. What I mean by that is you will see the characters do things that aren’t humanly possible (like jump gracefully 50 ft into the air), but somehow believe that they just can because of who they are. The acting also seemed to be very good, but not great. One thing I have trouble with in watching foreign language films is reading the subtitles while trying to watch the imagery. But because of that, I got to really understand the dialogue and story, which was great. Finally, and I will repeat this if necessary - this is not your typical Jet Li film. Even though Li is in it, this is a very different type of film from the others in his portfolio.
March 28th, 2005
I’m going to make this quick. I like Woody Allen movies, and Sweet and Lowdown was no exception. The movie follows the short career of a 1930’s conceited jazz guitarist named Emmett Ray (Sean Penn). Along the way, he falls in love and marries a mute girl named Hattie (Samantha Morton).
Sean Penn and Samantha Morton both gave excellent performances. That’s not saying much for Penn since he always excels, but Morton took on the role of mute girl (i.e. - no lines or dialogue) and still projected a lot of emotion in her body language. I would recommend this movie to people looking for something lighthearted and original, and I would highly recommend this to Woody Allen fans.
March 28th, 2005
I have been getting up the courage for over a month now to make the move and switch over to my newly upgraded server OS. So, if things look or act funny or broken, they should be fixed soon. If you notice something strange, drop me a comment below.
The very first thing I did was, of course, bring my blog back online. That actually didn’t take nearly as long as I expected. My database, which was running under MySQL 3.23 ran just fine under MySQL 4.1, so no problems there. I also had to upgrade my photo gallery, but that wasn’t a problem either. The only big things left to do is to move over my awstats logs and set up webdav on apache. Gee, I hope I’m not giving away too much info on my system! 
I’ve got 4 movie reviews in my queue, and I hope to cram those out this Easter weekend. Until then…
March 24th, 2005
Ok, I am soooo overdue on movie reviews, so unfortunately, these next 4 might be lacking in quality and length.
I Heart Huckabees was an interesting movie that kept me pretty entertained, although I felt lost at times with all of the metaphysics mumbo-jumbo. The movie is about a young man, Albert (Jason Schwartzman, who is awesome), who hires a pair of existential detectives (Lilly Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) to solve the mystery of some strange, coincidental meetings he had with a tall African man. And that’s where to movie starts to get weird. Mark Wahlberg, Jude Law and Naomi Watts also star in the movie as having a connection to Albert’s coincidence and each have great performances.
I thought the movie’s content was really strange and sometimes hard to digest, but I think that’s part of what makes it entertaining. You aren’t just given some dialogue to listen to, but instead have to think about what has just been said. Also, the performances by the cast and the direction that was given was very well done. The movie starts out very silly, but starts getting a little serious towards the end, and that’s when the actors shine - especially Jude Law.
March 17th, 2005
Just thought I’d post this quick note about a site I found called Blogmap. It’s a free service that will let you see who has a blog near you, or browse for blogs in a particular location. It is very similar to A2B, but Blogmap will give you a little picture of where you are at (and possibly, who’s around you) or a little button (now under my Cooperation section) that will take you to a map of where you are and who’s blogging around you. The only caveat with this is that other people have to submit their blogs through the site in order for their blog to show up on the maps. So, what are you waiting for? Submit yours today!
March 7th, 2005
Since this blog is movie-centric, I thought it should be noted that Google now does move-based searches. Basically, just type in “movie:” proceeded by your zip code (to find movies playing at theatres near you), an actor, a movie title, a quote from a movie, or anything else, and you’ll get special results relating to movies that relate to your search string. Each result comes with an average movie rating for each movie based on reviews on the Internet. If you click the movie title, you’ll get a page that lists all of the reviews it takes into account and has very simple Gmail-like navigation and filtering. Go to their blog post to find out more info on how to leverage this new searching power.
March 2nd, 2005
I like Tim Burton movies, I’ll admit it. Usually, you’ll find that most people either like all of his movies or hate them all, because his movies are all very unique in style and taste. I think that’s why I like them - they are original, imaginative, and entertaining. But, Ed Wood, which most critics claim as Burton’s best work ever, I could have stood to never have seen. The movie is based on the true story of the cross-dressing Hollywood director, who is known to have made some of the worst movies of all time.
The acting in the movie was SUPERB, which I’m sure was due mostly to the direction of Burton. Martin Landou played Bella Lugosi and deserved the best supporting actor Oscar hands down. Johnny Depp played Ed Wood and also did a great acting job since he plays a character that seems to be so far removed from his true persona. There were more great actors in the movie, but it has to be noted that Vincent D’Onofrio had a short part as Orson Wells, and he was a dead ringer. Great acting aside, I just did not like the story at all and thought it was pretty boring. The only thing that kept me watching was the acting and wondering how Ed was going to finish his movie. I just hope Burton impresses me with Corpse Bride this year.
March 2nd, 2005
Saw was a great screenplay and original movie idea, had just the right amount of gore for a horror movie, but had some serious acting issues. The premise is basically that a serial killer has chained up two men in a large bathroom and tells them that in order to survive, they have to figure out a way to kill the other by a certain time. In the mean time, the police are trying to figure out who the killer is before their time is up.
I really liked this movie, but after seeing that it was shot on a tight budget in only 18 days, I appreciate it even more. The content of the movie is pretty dark, so check your stomach at the door before popping this one in your movie player of choice. I thought the writer, Leigh Whannell did a decent acting job as one of the men in the bathroom. However, Cary Elwes (who played the other man) did a relatively horrible job acting. I recognized him as Westley, my favorite swashbuckling hero from The Princess Bride, but he just didn’t cut the mustard on this flick. Aside from that, this was just a good old-fashioned horror movie with a twist at the end to make room for a sequel.
March 2nd, 2005
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