Netflix: Harvard Man

This is one of those movies with so many absurd plot twists and coincidences that you just have to decide to GO WITH IT if you don’t want to be driven crazy.

Harvard b-baller (Adrien Grenier) is sleeping with Girl A (the daughter [Sarah Michelle Gellar] of a mafioso) and Girl B (his philosophy professor [Joey Lauren Adams]). When he needs $$$ from Girl A and fixes a b-bball game to get it, the FBI (Rebecca Gayheart and Eric Stolz!) comes after him. Fortunately Girl B is currently engaged in a menage à trois with those same FBI agents and is able to help him out. There’s also an LSD subplot and lots of (actually interesting) philosophy lectures and musings.

It’s a quite a (wackjob) trip but I found it very entertaining. Plus it starts w/ a fairly hot sex scene. So there you go.

Big Screen: La Vie en Rose

Wow, Edith Piaf’s childhood was really awful. Not sure, at least from the way the movie played it, whether she ever really got over it. Thought the movie was very well done, some really impressive performances. Wondered about the point of the timeline jumps. Is the end meant to be more profound since we keep returning to it over and over? In some movies (Memento, Run Lola Run, etc) the nonlinear progression of time has a reason. Here, it didn’t seem to add anything to the story.

Well worth seeing. A long movie that didn’t FEEL long at all – unlike other recent viewings, two and a half hours passed by without notice.

Big Screen: Ocean’s 13 (or #3)

All three of these movies suffer from an overabundance of slickness. The boys are all nice enough to look at, but otherwise it’s a lot of posturing. Felt this entry in the series actually lacked some girlie action (i.e., actual “relationships” as the Ellen Barkin character is just a mark and not anyone Linus actually cares about) that might’ve made it more human.

Entertaining enough for a nice air conditioned break from the heat, but nothing special.

Big Screen: Pirates 3

Better than Pirates 2, not quite as good as Pirates 1, but certainly enjoyable. The “many Johnnies” scenes were entertaining, but I could have done without them: they didn’t really lend anything to the plot (and certainly added to the overall length of an already long flick).

The ending was actually quite poetic and lovely. A half hour (or more) shorter and I would be wholeheartedly in favor.