Category: Movies

Before Sunrise

I would never have expected myself to watch this movie. There was a long time when I disliked romatic love stories, but I have to admit that this story (again) is something between thoughtfulness and Hollywood romance: On the one hand, the whole story lives through its characters and their interesting dialogue; on the other hand, these dialogues are rather generic and not particularily intelligent. (“We are just a fraction of the people from 50000 year ago?” Huh?) However, I liked when they talked about personal things and their feelings, and… love – that’s so much better than talking about ‘bigger’ things such as politics, religion, or ‘humans’ in general.

Ah, Julie Delpy is oh so lovely. I love her! Not because she’s a good actress (after all she seems to be playing the same person all the time), but because of her looks: her slightly ondulated hair, her charming smile that gives off a very feminine air, her not particularily intelligent, but beautiful and kind of sophisticated eyes. She’s attractive and even though she appears mature (and therefore not at all innocent), you would never project any sexual desires on her. A sex scene with her does not feel like a sex scene XD She makes the way they flirt with each other so natural and not awkward at all.
And when she frowns, she looks like a woman who had never any problems in life and is able to spend all her time thinking about love. In some ways, she reminds me of Kate Beckinsale, who actually isn’t as charming as Julie Delpy. This brings us to “Serendipity”, another clichéd romantic love film which I *cough* like very much. That one is really stupid (similar to Notting Hill maybe), but I found it so cute! Awww~

There even actually were some scenes that made me laugh a bit. First was that “That’s so french, so cute!” and how La Delpy blurted out how she hates this so much, second was the scene with the poet when they picked “milkshake” as word. “Milkshake? I was gonna say ‘rooster prick’.” Hahaha. The poem was just like the movie: Good, in some ways, but not really a literature masterpiece.
By the way, the third scene was how Jess talks about monkeys and does that… err, monkey move XD
The fourth very entertaining one obviously was when they phoned their imaginative friends.

By the way, I do think that both of them are pretty clichéd. She’s not that french, but he appears SO american, at least to me, and therefore reminds of me of a certain person (my god). Probably this even is a by-product of his good acting skills *hrr hrr*

Err, I find myself unable to write some conclusion to this blog post. Maybe it reflects how the film itself didn’t really have a conclusion – after all, you don’t even get a glimpse of bout what happened afterwards. Luckily, there’s a sequel. *g*

PS. The DVD covers and posters for this movie are all so incredibly awful. >.< PPS. The review for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" comes tomorrow. I kind of need to sort my thoughts for it.

The Butterfly Effect

Actually I’ve watched this movie a few days ago (and to be exact, I am currently in the middle of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, because last time, I didn’t continue watching it after dinner). It’s quite difficult to describe my feelings towards this film. Because in the end, this film did not make me feel anything (haha).

The title says it – all in all, this movie was a lot like Donnie Darko. A young, good-looking protagonist, a girl he wants to protect, a sacrifice at the end, time travelling – everything. However, Kayleigh (oh, I love the sound of this name… it’s like “Imogen” – you would never have expected this accumulation of weird sounds to be a woman’s name) is blonde and slightly stupid while Gretchen is much cuter and fragile. Ashton Kutcher can’t be taken seriously as well (even though he didn’t play that bad in this one) and he doesn’t have even one ounce of Jake Gyllenhaal’s sex appeal which consists of an incredibly charming smile and intelligent looks. The actors are probably the reason why Donnie and Gretchen’s relationship were very touching and cute (and it was so nice to see them kiss *tihi*) while Evan and Kayleigh were just boring.
However, unlike most other people (I guess), I liked the ending. One aspect was that the Oasis song made me feel touched at that scene. The other is that I really think it was a good conclusion: The ending made clear that Evan realized that he is not supposed to be together with her and that it probably should remain that way. That’s a nice and somehow beautiful message in my opinion. The other ending (the director’s cut one) was absolutely gorgeous too. I can understand that it doesn’t leave the same bittersweet touch as the final version, but it’s much cooler and to most fans probably the better ending – after all, the producer feared that the director’s cut ending was too cruel and forced the writers to change it.

The movie itself was good and I was about to give it a rather good rating, because it was much more interesting than the other movies I’ve seen recently. But then I remembered how I felt while watching Donnie Darko: I sat right before the TV and couldn’t move my eyes away, I felt totally sucked into that world and oh my, how much I loved that suspense! The Butterfly Effect was nothing like that, that’s why I will probably always remember it as similar to Donnie Darko, but not half as good.

A little note about the logical problems of the movie: Who cares. In my opinion, the movie did a good job to illustrate the interesting subject of time travel and its questions, consequences and possibilities despite all the exaggerated, trashy and unlogical storylines. “Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo” (The Girl who leapt through Time), another movie I’ve watched this Tuesday with Milkmaster, was not half as good at this. But then again, I think Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo was a children’s movie and not to be taken seriously aside from its stunning animation quality.

I still recommend it though – Hollywood is able to do a good movie on the line between mainstream and indie.

Dangerous Liaisons

It really isn’t easy for me to explain the impression this movie has on me. Actually it turned out to be exactly like I have expected: I end up preferring the “Cruel Intentions” version since I don’t like the actors while I do admit that their acting was very good. Since everybody knows that this is the most reputated and obviously the best adaptation of “Les liaisons dangereuses”, I guess I will talk more about the bad points of it.

First of all, I think Glenn Close is way too old for that role. I don’t see any reason for a man to want to sleep with her, while Mme de Merteuil is one of the most charming and intriguing characters of the story.

Malkovich… Malkovich! Harr, I love him, but he’s one guy I would never sleep with either. He’s a great man for comedies and all, but he doesn’t really appear very charming to me. (Okay, Ryan Philippe isn’t the most charming guy either – and he’s a bad actor. But I thought you could feel his love for that stupid girl.)

And the rest: I didn’t quite like the end, everybody cried out loud, Valmont was way too violent towards Mme de Tourvel (violence is so… unclassy! XD) and the ending scenes were so… short. I also couldn’t quite follow the way Valmont actually seduced Mme de Tourvel. Ah well, maybe I just am not receptive enough towards this adaptation XD

Of course I admit that this version is much deeper than the teenie one (even though the novel is much more enlightning about basically everything, especially Mme de Merteuil’s background and intentions), but I still don’t really enjoy it. The best point of it was how the love between Merteuil and Valmont was depicted – I think they put a greater emphasis on this than in all the other versions.

In the end, I’m glad I have watched this movie because I have heard so much about it and wanted to watch it since ages. But I didn’t expect much and so I’m fine with watching a fairly good adaptation. (Now that I’m thinking about it… maybe I didn’t like the movie that much because I know the story so well already? *hrr*)

The Game

For some reason, David Fincher always gets incredibly uninteresting women in his movies. (I have only watched Seven and Fight Club so far though.) If Helen Bonham Carter wasn’t so sexually unattractive to me, I’d be sure I would have found her line “There are things about you that I like. You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re… spectacular in bed… But you’re intolerable!” very intriguing. Gwyneth Paltrow was still the best of them – and she had some “stupid woman in love” role. Some movie critic was right when he said that David Fincher’s world is predominantly male. What a sad thing that I didn’t notice it myself.

The fact that their names are a little bit similar (Milkmaster always forgets if it was “Finch” or “Fincher”), I always feel like associating Fincher’s movies with Lynch’s. Lynch, however, always features women as key figures – and even makes them protagonists in Mulholland Drive, for example. On top of that, his women are all very sexy. At the same time, Fincher’s movies are never confusing and the end turns out to be clear while Lynch, well, you know what I mean.

What I loved about this movie was the portrait of the main character (most definitely Michael Douglas’ achievement). Actually, his character feels a little bit like Ebenezer Scrooge O.o
What I disliked about this movie is that it actually wasn’t as suspenseful as the other Fincher movies. On top of that, it lacked the meaningfulness of Fight Club as well as the psychological intensity of Seven.

The end, however, was very good. This end was not soiled by Brad Pitt’s bad acting, but was into the hands of some actors who played their role well in the crucial scenes.

All in all, it’s sad, but basically this movie did not succeed in making me forget the unlucky events of this day. It’s sad on the one hand because I don’t feel better and and on the other hand because I think I can’t really give a serious, objective opinion about the movie – which I believe is actually a very good one.

PS. I like Armin Müller-Stahl. I know somebody who says he’s an arrogant idiot, but oh I like his acting.

From Hell

For all of you who knows the comic, this is obvious. The movie was completely new to me, I also didn’t know anything about Jack the Ripper or Stephen Knight’s theory about it (on which the comic and movie are based on), so I was able to feel lots of suspense during the whole story. I always had a little bit the feeling that Gull might be the culprit, but of course I wasn’t sure.
In the end, the story itself was pretty simple, but very well executed. Ian Holm is so lovely that I thought it’s another person who plays his evil side; and Johnny Depp is just priceless. When I saw him the first time (that was Sleepy Hollow, by the way), I couldn’t understand why the friend I went to the cinema with was fangirling about him the whole time. Today, however, I consider him one of the most attractive men in the world – I especially love his acting. A movie is worth to watch as soon as he plays the protagonist in it (see Pirates of the Carribean). He even is able to do the incredibly charming “I care about you” glaze. XD

In fact, I didn’t plan to watch this movie at all – I just saw it was on TV yesterday. And since everybody I know praises it and I was already captured in the suspenseful story, I had to watch it till the end (and now, today morning, I find myself unable to post something… meaningful *>.<*) A propos TV, the german dubbing is just awful. I will not watch Amores Perros today, because I fear the bad dubbing. I'm thinking about watching "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" though. Hm... should I? I'm seeing so many bad reviews about it on the net XD This movie actually made me want to read the comic, even though I know that the comic is completely different, of course. Who knows, maybe I'll really start to read comics now?

Sabrina

First of all, look at the nice colour the links have. A big load of appreciation for Momo please, who has worked on this without telling me! *hrr* Now my beautiful blog design is complete – and I most probably will never change this again! *harr harr*

Oh, another personal thing: My parents have bought two webcams, one for themselves and one for my grandparents – isn’t that cute? They are having a video conference with them now and are all delighted… oh noes! They want me to show myself too~

*coughcough* Sorry for the unrelated stuff. Now onto the movie:
Maybe one should not that Sabrina is the only Billy Wilder movie with Audrey Hepburn aside from Love in the Afternoon. Both are in my opinion rather un-Billy-Wilder-like and pretty similar: They both are comedies, mainly deal with the lovestory a young, poor girl and some rich guy, both have some fairy tale-like characterstics and a happy-end. (Of course. I didn’t really spoil you, you would have guessed this from the beginning *g*)

What makes Sabrina so great is not the (really generic) storyline itself, but the lovely characters, the stylish and funny setting and the gorgeously witty dialogues. It’s a pity that I didn’t blog about this earlier, because I have forgotten all the funny quotes I wanted to talk about XD Whatever.

Oh by the way, I was very pleased with Audrey Hepburn’s garderobe this time (like always, actually, but this time she really stood out). She has that incredibly slim waist that looks absolutely splendid in dresses. She even looks good in leggings! Aaah *___*

It was pretty annoying to write this post while listening to my mother phoning, so sorry for the, err, lack of content. Just a little side note on the “schedule”:
There is
* Breakfast at Tiffany’s
* The Children’s Hour and
* War and Piece
from my little REC-list left. Aside from these, I also want to watch “Charade”, which looks pretty interesting.
We will most probably begin with “The Children’s Hour”, because it is HARD YURI, even though they have the other movies at our videotheque.

PS. There is a Lubitsch special at the Babylon movie theater in Berlin. Maybe we will go and watch “Ninotschka” and/or “To Be Or Not To Be”. *_*

Festen (The Celebration)

It seems Shii was a little bit too early with this comment. On the day he posted it, I think we already watched Festen. However, I didn’t really found the time to blog about it. I’ve become lazy, I know.

For some reason, I prefer the german DVD cover over that picture you can see (for example) on the Wikipedia article of the movie. First of all, I don’t quite understand why that maid is on the cover (and not Michael or Helene, for example) because I think her role is pretty small after all. Also, the german cover gives away a feeling of “high class family” with everybody on the cover while this picture looks like some, hm, relationship-quartet.

I think it will be rather difficult for me not to compare the two first Dogme movies – but in fact, I think that Idioterne is completely different from Festen. If I didn’t know how closely they are related to each other, I would never have guessed. Idioterne really looks like a documentation while Festen reminded me a lot of Gosford Park – high class society and loads of scandals behind.

Compared to Gosford Park, Festen is much less epic and classy, but a lot funnier and shocking. Everytime Christian stood up, we had to laugh out really loud. The movie turned out to be nothing like we’ve expected, but what we got was gorgeous.

In the end, there wasn’t as much “meaning” behind the movie as in Idioterne and the story wasn’t all that original (if you look at Gosford Park, it seems all high class society families are – in some ways – related to sexual scandals), but the execution and the way the story was build up was much more than just suspenseful. The character portraits are truly insightful and the Dogme elements were perfect in order to put emphasis on the story itself. (By the way, I wasn’t annoyed by the bucking camera this time – maybe I’ve really gotten used to it?)
A propos Dogme, we noticed one slow-motion scene – this is a violation of the rules, right?

Now my expectations for the other Dogme movies have risen even more. I wonder if this is a bad thing… If you remember, I still want to watch “Italian for Beginners”, “Mifune” and “The King is Alive”.

Idioterne (The Idiots)

I love the word “Idioterne” for some reason. And I am in love with this movie. I’ve read here and there that people found this movie dragging and too slow-paced. Usually I also cannot stand slow-paced movies, but this one didn’t feel slow to me at all. Maybe I was too much into the whole subject, and to be honest, despite all the laughters, I’ve taken the movie pretty seriously.
Despite its simple storyline, I didn’t exactly found it easy to interpret the movie. I didn’t put much effort into analyzing it though. ^^;;; Basically I think this is a movie about not being like the others, some self-identification stuff. About what it means to be “idiotic” and how people perceive it, so it makes it definitely a socio-critical movie. I’m just not really sure in which way it exactly is socio-critical: Lars von Trier says that it is not about how the whole society is crap, and I don’t have this impression either.

We’ve managed to get the 2-disc edition from our videotheque and watched most of the extra footage as well – damn, that was insightful and interesting. It was especially interesting to get to know a bit more about Lars von Trier, even though these infos were about this movie and not about Dogville, my favourite of his movies so far. I haven’t watched that many movies and I definitely plan to watch “Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer of the Dark” one day, even though those tragic stories scare me off a little bit. I don’t like *really* tragic stories, just so you know.
Lars von Trier reminds me so much of Kafka, for some reason. They both seem so psychologically wrecked to me XD We watched the documentary about the ‘making of’ of the movie and ended up calling him Emo-Lars. Oh my! But his paranoic character must be one of the reason why he’s such a genius at making movies, so he’s forgiven. (Just like Kafka is forgiven for his emoness. *hrr*)

One other interesting factor of the movie obviously is the concept of Dogma 95. It started off a little bit difficult for me because I got a slight headache because of the camera, but I got used to it after about 10 minutes so it’s okay. All in all, I really like this concept – I also like the “set up some rules, it can be just anything” idea. Even though they don’t follow Dogma 95 anymore and have kind of grown out of it, I still think that this is a very original and creative idea.
We watched the trailer to “The Celebration”, the first Dogma 95 movie and were totally hooked. (Or at least I were.) Now I’m really really interested to watch more of these movies, namely:
* The Celebration
* Italian for Beginners
* Mifune
* The King is Alive
in this order.

Aaah, how great it feels to have finished these blogposts *haha* I feel like I’ve gotten a bit out of writing so that it takes me more time and effort to write these.

Wait until dark

Ladies and gentlemen, I am amazed by this movie. A little while ago, I used to watch the first 15 minutes of the movie, but stopped watching because Audrey Hepburn didn’t show up yet. For some reason, the beginning bore me a little bit. My parents however watched the movie until the end and I wonder if they have liked it. This is also the reason why I was a little bit unsure whether I should show this movie to Milkmaster who was (just like me) studying for exams. But we just couldn’t stop watching it! After awhile, it became so suspenseful, funny and enjoyable to watch!

The best thing of the whole movie is her blindness, obviously. And the fact that basically the movie revolves around their house and Susy herself despite her absence in the first 15 minutes. They were able to create so many hilarious, suspenseful and really, really original scenes because of that: She couldn’t see the dead woman in her closet, they deceived her with the telephone and always phoned each other when they pretended to call the police – and last but not least, the blindness determined every aspect of the way she fought these men.

As much as I liked Susy, I really disliked Gloria. What an ugly, unreasonable and emo girl *ugh* But of course, she found redemption at the end of the movie *harr harr*

About the title of this post: I have always known and recognized that Audrey Hepburn looks rather boyish with her slender figure and young face (and I really appreciate that), but she always appeared as a “Grande Dame du film” to me so that I could never perceive her as such. But it’s so great! that Milkmaster likes her too now – it helps me watching all her movies featured in REC *hrr hrr* So I don’t care about what he exactly thinks about her, the important thing is that he adores my favourite actress as well!
Now that I think about it, “Wait until dark” is the perfect movie to get him into Audrey Hepburn’s movies, because her acting performance is just top-notch in this movie. Before, I thought another movie such as Roman Holiday or even Two for the Road would be better to display her loveliness, but the princess’ or the loving girl’s role – even though they fit her – don’t show her full potential as an actress. This movie however is really challenging and makes up for the fact that her eyes don’t sparkle as much as in the other movies, imho one of her most important features.
Our videotheque also has “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “War and Peace” and the TV doesn’t show any of her movies in the near future, so these two are most probably our next picks. ^^

Dead Man

Recently, I have compiled a little list of what I could watch together with Milkmaster and ended up watching Dead Man.
At the same time, he copied down where the others are:

Blade Runner – 9/6
Adaption – 164/5
Amores Perres – 16/4
L.A. Confidential – 67/4
Capote – 17/5
Fargo – at the desk
Butterfly Effect – 65/8
Idiots – I’ve forgotten that, ugh, but it’s there
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – same
War and Piece – same

And now, there aren’t many Jim Jarmusch movies I haven’t watched yet. To be exact, it’s:
– Stranger than Paradise
– Down by Law and
– Year of the Horse
I’m not particularily interested in the last, but I want to see Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law. If by any chance I end up liking both of them, I will buy the Jim Jarmusch box. If not, well… I’ll buy Coffee & Cigarettes and Mystery Train alone. Maybe also Ghost Dog and Permanent Vacation, but I’m not sure. Ghost Dog is slightly too depressive at the end and Permanent Vacation a bit too… indie XD

To me, Dead Man was a little bit like Babel, just not as controversial: I have no idea what to say about it. There were parts of the movie I absolutely loved – and other parts that utterly bore me.

I loved the funny characters – Sally! Wahahaa! XD The others are great as well – especially the stupid trio. I even ended up liking the slightly sad end and the fact that Nobody died *snif*
Perhaps this is a movie that you will appreciate even more when you watch it a second time (I read that Jim Jarmusch paid very strong attention to the realistic portrait of the native american culture). Maybe I really should buy that damn collection box XD

What more should I say? Oh wait: Johnny Depp’s hair style in the movie was so perfectly random *g*