May 4th, 2009
Recent movie-reviews
Even though I publish my movie-reviews on my blog, I’ve seen so many films – for being me, anyway – i.e. three, that I have to write them up here.
Bill Hicks airs this best: “Bill’s review: piece of shit.” Straight up! This film is a clown-school reject, a copy of “Sex And The City” mixed with “The Devil Wears Prada”, albeit with no allure whatsoever. Plot: an airhead who shops too much without being funny at all is the star of this “comedy” where she constantly evades getting caught up in her lies regarding her spending, while spewing jokes that aren’t really jokes, e.g. “You speak Prada?” and being shit. Oh yeah, while finding love through an Englishman who’s her boss. How exotic and feministic. See “Shooting Fish” and forget this never happened.
“Juno”
“Alternative. Alternative. I’ve gotta be alternative and still appeal to people who don’t know who Dario Argento is. Do like ‘Garden State’ crossed with ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ except for the horror being switched for quick comedy. I can’t believe I just thought of Polanski and not Troma or something just as alternative and/or cool!” I guess those were the words of the scriptwriter. This film is fair, brings a couple of laughs and is quite coherent, and apart from the odd good music there’s not that much laudable in this box; I can’t get over the feeling that the film-makers have tried too hard to make this film feel all fresh, so much that they kind of overlooked the factor that made Ricky Fitts the great character he was in “American Beauty”. Watch “L’Avventura” again, I say.
“Boy A”
A young man is released from prison following ten years of incarceration for his involvement in killing a ten-year-old girl. A supervisor aids him in surviving in the outside world, of which he knows surprisingly little, yet this doesn’t help much as media condemns him as a monster (the favourite term English tabloids use when describing children who kill) and desperately tries to find him. Even though I think this film is needed, I also think it is more evidently than eloquently written, not allowing what I think would be letting the viewer think for her-or-himself using more subtle methods, thus letting in more breadth and humanity. To its strength, the film is very well-played, has excellent Kubrick-esque cinematography (just see the courtroom imagery and I think you’ll see what I mean) and is singular in more ways than one. It is interesting to see that while adults who kill children are often – in the USA, according to report from the documentary “When Kids Get Life“, viewable for free – children are often utterly condemned, as is the famous case with Mary Bell.
