Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Movies - the listing part 3

Alex and Emma – just rubbish. I’m a fan of rom-com but it helps when the two leads a semblance of chemistry. Just shit.

ElizabethTown – just awesome. Crowe has done a movie about the beauty of failure, set in the heartland of America. The roadtrip at the end seems a bit long and tacked on but still a great film

Serenity – I did a crash course in Firefly/Serenity for Supanova. I can understand why it failed as a series and why Stealth made more at the box office. Its just disjointed and inconsistent. I’ll probably do a longer post about it later.

V for Vendatta – technically and thematically perfect but something was missing. It dawned on me I just didn’t care about Evey or V that much. And has Portman always had that mole on her cheek?

Constant Gardner – its nice when they make actual thrillers, as opposed to the pap that has 1.5 car chases and “a shocking twist!!!”. Its even better when they make films that are relevant. Smart, moving and exceptionally well put together. And I always considered John le Carre to be just another airport bookstore author, but this does make me consider picking up his books.

40 year old virgin – Just cheap and nasty; like a zgrade film for the comedy set. It felt like it was made by a bunch of arts students making shit up as they went along. The basic structure was solid but repeated scenes of people arguing and swearing for no reason was lame; seeing a 60year old Indian say motherfucker would have been funny if I was 9. A lot of set ups no pay offs.

Harold and Kumar go to White Castle – I’m a massive fan of Dude Where’s my Car (its perfectly written, every set up pays off, some jokes 3 or 4 times). It is genius. I had been hanging out for this for awhile (its by the same director) and it too passes mustard (on little square burgers).

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – Yeah Yeah (reminded me off the Big Lebowski in terms of devices and influences)

Just like Heaven – An Emma flick which was very meh.

Small Soldiers – Sunday arvo film watched while I was sick. Like most Joe Dante flicks it can’t decide what it wants to be (comedy? action? kids flick?). It was kind of violent for a Sunday 12pm movie, what with nail firing machine guns and whatnot. There was a lot of ’hey its that guy from that show’ (david cross, phil hartman, that guy from, you know, that show). It also had Kirsten Dunst which is always nice.

Like Mike – Again I watched this as I recuperated from the flu. It had Crispin Glover in and the bigheaded kid from Jerry Macquire. It was ok.

Honey I shrunk the kids – I was hung over and it was raining. I’m pretty sure I saw it as a kid but I don’t think it left an impression on my because I didn’t recognize a single thing.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is it Honey I Shrunk The Kids that has that scene where the kid does CPR and someone asks, "Where'd you learn that?" and he replies, "French class"?

Mark Selan said...

yes

then at the very end the younger brother gets the joke "ohhhhhhh french class!"

then we all laughed. good times. good times

Anonymous said...

OK, we gotta talk. You pan '40 yr old virgin' and 'Serenity/Firefly' but... praise 'Dude Where’s my Car'??? I'm speechless.
Maggie

Mark Selan said...

i was slightly harsh on Virgin and Serentity, they weren't awful but disappointing. Moreso, with Virgin as i was expecting Serenity to drive me nuts.

And get past the stonerness and kutcherness of Dude, it is a genius comedy flick.