Big Screen: Incendies (en franรงais)

One of many recommendations I have gotten from Ebert Presents, my latest favorite TV show (thanks, Dad!). ๐Ÿ™‚

Two adult twins, living in Canada, meet with their lawyer after their mom dies, and are given two letters to deliver: one to their father (long gone, they never knew him) and one to a brother they never knew they had. The sister decides to accept the challenge and winds up in the middle east (filmed in Jordan but I believe this is supposed to be Lebanon) digging through layers of time to discover her mom’s younger days (which we see filmed). The brother eventually joins her. The mom was involved in Lebanese civil war, not just politically based but also religious.

This is one of those movies that while afterward there are any numbers of things you could nitpick apart from the plot, the setting, etc., the acting is so engaging that you 100% believe in it while you’re watching, particularly that of the actresses playing the mother and the daughter.

The ending is far more horrible than I remembered the review suggesting; as things begin to unfold, you start to realize there are only a few bad ways things could go…

Felt a little shellshocked at the end, but was really entranced the whole time. Despite various melodramatic tendencies, this totally worked for me.

Big Screen: Thor

Thankfully I was able to find a 2D viewing.

Fluffy superhero fun. Not up to Iron Man levels (oh, Iron Man) but certainly acceptable for what it is.

The Thor dude is quite pretty, don’t ya know. And Idris Elba is fantastic, but I couldn’t stop wonder whether he was wearing colored contacts the whole time? The actor playing Loki was suitably creeptastic.

And there you have it. Good summer fun if you need a couple hours of air conditioning in your day. ๐Ÿ™‚

Big Screen: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (3D)

The best use of 3D I’ve ever seen.

The inside-the-cave stuff in this movie is SO COOL. The cave itself, the drawings in the cave, the way those primitive artists used the 3D bumps and bruises of the cave to enhance their drawings, the calcite stuff that has formed over everything, creating the most awesome stalactites and glimey goopy stuff you’ve ever seen.

If only it was a silent movie….

I mean the narration has a lot of really dumb stuff. I went with two academics and they were both really frustrated by the things the filmmaker chose to talk about (and the things he didn’t). And there were some really REALLY ridiculous parts, especially in interviews outside the cave.

Like when the dude wearing reindeer-skin boots and poncho plays the starspangled banner on a flute made from the tendon of a bat? (I AM NOT JOKING.)

There was one cool interview — with these two people who are figuring out which drawings came when i.e., “so first there was this, then 10,000 years later someone added this, then 4,000 years later, a bear scratched this up here”…but a lot of the interviews SHOULD have been done in the person’s native language and subtitled (as a few were) b/c the ones done in English had a lot of places where the person was obviously struggling to find the right word and ended up sounding much less smart and insightful than they probably really are.

Thumbs up for getting to be inside the cool cave and the use of 3D and the really really cool stuff you see. The cave is AWESOME.

Thumbs down for the narration, most of the interviews, and some really ridiculous speculation. Including, especially, the albino alligator stuff which was just BIZARRE and out of left field.

Big Screen: Hesher

I think a lot of people are probably going to hate this movie. It’s certainly heavy-handed and over the top and JGL is doing one of those “so much against type that there are times you don’t believe it” roles.

But I really enjoyed it and really this is a movie about the kid. Not JGL, not Dwight (Rainn Wilson), not Portman. The kid and what he needs and how he grows.

It’s hard to watch, there is some ick. But not “scar you for life” ick, just uncomfortable.

Sci Fi: Aftertime, by Sophie Littlefield

Wow. Really good. Really.

Is this being marketed as YA though? Both the sex and the violence are, I would say, significantly more graphic than anything in, for example, the Carrie Ryan books, or the Hunger Games or Twilight.

I thought it was great but I did find myself pondering whether it could be recommended to my future 6th graders, who could read all of those others mentioned.

EDITED TO ADD: Steph assures me this is being marketed as adult. And who doesn’t want an adult version of all the dystopian YA that’s out there now? Go read it. ๐Ÿ™‚

Big Screen: Bridesmaids

SPOILERS AHEAD.

It’s true, I AM the only person in America who didn’t find this movie hysterically awesome.*

Yes, it WAS funny. Sometimes painfully so (as in laughing so hard your cheekbones hurt).

It was also really, really, REALLY STUPID and I think they made some really bad choices that made the movie nearly unwatchable to me (although, as I said, NO ONE ELSE seemed to mind at all). For example, I would have cut Every Single Thing to do with her roommates and living situation. None of those scenes were a) at all funny (gawd no) or b) at all connected to the “plot” such as it is.

Also: the only one way in which this is “Bridesmaids” plural is by including the other really dumb things like the “we all get food poisoning and puke/vomit/diarrhea into the dresses we are trying on” ridiculousness. This movie is really only about the one bridesmaid and I think eliminating all that stupidity would have been a better choice as well.

Sure, Jon Hamm and Melissa McCarthy were very good in their (unusual for them) roles. But both those roles really seemed like sketch comedy add-ons. Let’s throw in a really crass icky guy! Let’s have one of the girls be all butch and nasty but really have deep insights! That sounds good! (It was amazing they could make McCarthy look that unappealing, though, wasn’t it? She’s really quite a pretty girl.)

I have been listening to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcasts lately and I was just SO disappointed to hear Linda Holmes talking about how this is a movie that finally shows how she and her friends actually relate! That girls have inside jokes just as much as boys do! Really? THIS is the movie where you see that? I saw a movie where girls only relate to each other when they are talking about their relationships with boys.

I was not a fan. But given how the rest of the world feels about this? You probably will be.

*Actually a couple people I talked to this weekend also said they found a lot of it disappointing. But that was a month after I had seen this movie and been the only one with a negative opinion so far. So for the sake of this review, that conversation hasn’t happened yet. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Big Screen: Certified Copy

SPOILERS AHEAD.

I saw a review of this on Ebert Presents (my new addiction, thanks Dad!) and HAD to see it.
Juliet Binoche is really fantastic in it. Her emotions are so on the surface that there are parts where you find yourself cringing, but it’s fantastically played.

There was some discussion in the Ebert Presents review of whether you believe the conceit of the movie, or how you choose to interpret it: 1) are they meeting for the first time? Or 2) are they actually married and playing a “we just met” game in order to have a conversation about the state of their relationship?

T. and I both agreed it HAS to be #2. Has to be. If it’s #1, her character is completely insane. And we’d prefer not to think that, as it’s so, so, so well played.

Big Screen: Red State

Oh oh oh oh !!!! Oh, Kevin Smith fans, this movie is SO GREAT. You are going to LOVE IT when it comes out…in September? I think. Or October. It’s So.So.SO!! Good.

And non-Kevin Smith fans? This is an outstanding movie about a very topical issue. Seriously. I know that’s not what you’re expecting but it’s true.

I took a friend to see Kevin Smith live last year (or whenever, I don’t seem to have reviewed it here) and he returned the favor by taking me to this screening.

I really thought this was fantastic. Tightly edited, well-written, keeps you engaged and intrigued and worried…. John Goodman is fantastic. The creepy kid (you may know him as Cassidy from Veronica Mars) is fantastic. The directing is wonderful.

Smith is only going to make one more movie after this (seriously, that’s it) and when you see him talk (he did a Q&A after this) he is SO beyond self-deprecating about his skills as a director. He’s wrong, really wrong, and that’s too bad.

See this when you can. It’s well worth the $$.