Brilliant. An instant classic. Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) is what you would normally call a grumpy old man but what he himself calls a genius who sees the bigger picture. He is divorced, living alone wanting to be isolated from all the imbeciles in the world when the young woman Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood) shows up at his doorstep, begging him to let her stay for a few nights. She has run away  from her family in Mississippi to start a new life in New York. Despite Boris treating her like she is an idiot, and despite the age and IQ difference, Melodie falls in love with Boris and they end up getting married. Everything is going well until Melodies’ mother unexpectedly pays them a visit…

Woody Allen has done it again: a theatrical masterpiece that is so wonderfully amusing through its intelligent dialogue and Boris’ never ending ranting about society and religion. Melodies brings an unexpected innocence into the equation which disrupts Boris’ life completely. It seems like Woody Allen has moved away from his European way of film making right back into his New York comedies.

Whatever Works definitely deserves a MovieCat award!

So this is the very first movie I watched in New York City (well…since 2006 anyways).

When I was sitting in the cinema with the Buddy Holly 3D glasses on, I realized that I knew nothing about the story of this film even though I had seen the trailer. I knew that it was about the 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen who flies his house to South America by attaching hundreds of balloons to it (a very brilliant man, I wish I had thought of that, than I would have all my stuff here…). What completely took me by surprise is the story that leads up to this rather unusual event. It starts with Carl as a young boy, wanting to be an explorer but being a shy and scared kid he only fantasizes about adventure. One day he meets little Ellie who actually plans on becoming and adventurer when she grows up. They become best friends, fall in love and eventually get married. She is everything to him and he his greatest dream is to make her happy and go on the adventure with her that they had been planning since childhood. But before they can finally go, Ellie dies. Carl is so upset about the loss of his loved one that he becomes a bitter old man. For Ellie, he goes on their big adventure alone. What he didn’t plan on was taking the little boys scout Russell along with him. 

So this is only the beginning of the story. The main part is, of course, the journey and what happens on the way to Carl’s dream destination. 

Up is made with so much love that it really goes right to to your heart. I was incredibly moved by Ellie’s death. I havn’t felt this sad watching a movie in a really long time. I know it is supposed to be a fun movie with a positive lookout to life because Carl finds a way to move on and live his life without Ellie but I found it mainly depressing, at least two thirds of it.  Disney/ Pixar always put so much effort and detail into their films that it is so lovely to watch them though. I guess if you are spending that much time working on it the film becomes very precious to the film makers and nothing is rushed or “accidentally” put in. I really think this is one of the best 3D animated films I have seen. If you havn’t seen it, go watch it!

I have never actually seen a Disney movie in 3D before (I don’t think I have seen any full length 3D film…just a short when I went to Universal Studios a long time ago…how odd…) but Up isn’t a film that has to be seen in 3D. It doesn’t really make good use of the effect. But it was still quite fun to have the feeling of almost being able to touch the characters.

I really hate flying. The only thing that keeps me going through a long flight are the films. So for me the worst thing that could happen is a really bad film (although I would still watch it to keep be occupied). 

Yes Man

Jim Carrey in another comedy. In Yes Man he plays someone who says “no” to absolutely everything. He has been at the same job in a bank for the past five years and his wife left him a few years ago and now has a new boyfriend which really upsets Jim’s character. One day he runs into and old colleague of his who convinces him to come to a seminar to become a “yes man” in order to start living his life. To his own surprise the seminar actually does change him and from now on he has to say “yes” to every offer that comes his way. 

The beginning of the film is completely flat. I mean, we get the fact, that he says no to everything, you don’t have to show it over and over again. Once he becomes a “yes man” things get a bit more funny. But the jokes are not very good, quite bland. The only really fun thing about this film is Zooey Deschanel. I am amazed at her ability to light up the screen in any movie. She is a really unusual actress. I think she should be in a lot more films! Other than her I don’t see a reason for watching Yes Man. 

Bride Wars

Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway play Liv and Emma, two best friends whose life dream it is to get married at the Plaza in Manhattan. Now that the time has finally come, there is one problem: Their wedding planner has booked the friend’s weddings on the same date. This means, one of them has to change the venue but neither of them is prepared to give up their dream. 

Bride Wars is a sort of amusing film but I just can’t understand this dream of the grand wedding at the Plaza. What is the big deal? I don’t even think the Plaza is particularly beautiful. How can two people be so utterly obsessed with getting married there? How can you even make a film about two people who are obsessed with getting married? The film is good enough to be entertained on an airplane, where there is really nothing else to do than watch it but not more than that.

Both of the movies were fairly bad but entertaining on a level that is good for flying-mood. I wouldn’t recommend watching them under normal circumstances though. 

I have got some exciting news:

I am moving to New York City next week to study at the Lee Strasberg Institute of Theatre and Film. I already did a term there during my time at University (I have a BA in Film Production from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, England) and wanted to go back to studying at the Strasberg Institute ever since. Now I have finally found the courage (and funding…) to re-apply and got accepted (again). I am staying for three terms this time and hope to learn a lot.

TheMovieNess blog will, of course, remain the same. I will just be sitting in New York while writing…big difference for me, not so big for you

X-Men: Wolverine

X-Men: Wolverine is a prequel to the X-Men series which I have only seen the first one off. I only watched Wolverine because of Hugh Jackman and he turned out to be the only good thing about the film. The story, apart from the usual X-Men setting of having mutants with special powers living on earth, is fairly ordinary. Two brothers drift apart because of differences in opinion and realize later that blood is still thicker than water when it gets really bad. I just think they could have come up with more than that. They created this entire world which is actually really cool (who wouldn’t want to have special powers?) and than write a story that a hundred other movies have already used. Weak! The special effects are quite good and Jackman certainly brings a cool-factor into the film but the story-line and dialogues ruin it completely. I do agree with Rachel on Rachel’s Reel Reviews though, seeing Wolverine naked makes it almost worth watching this film ;).

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The basic story: Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is born old and ages backwards until he is a baby. He falls in love with a young girl named Daisy (Cate Blanchett). This movie was so hyped with all its Oscar nominations and awards and its star cast so that I was really looking forward to seeing it. But I have to say that I found it extremely boring. The introduction with the old Daisy and her daughter is too long, Benjamin’s old age (or childhood), after he is born is even longer, his middle age still longer and once he gets really young (at the end of his life) it is hurried as if the film makers needed to end the movie quickly. The idea of the story (adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald) is quite fun and quirky but the script just didn’t milk it enough. The scriptwriters Eric Roth and Robin Swicord just didn’t seem to realize that the special thing about this film is that Benjamin ages backwards. How could they have missed this little detail? The main story and the longest part of the film is about his middle age, when he is basically just doing what everyone else is doing. He gets work, goes to war, falls in love, gets his girlfriend pregnant, things don’t work out and he leaves. Great, well done… What they should have focused on are his differences to regular people. Especially the beginning of his life and the end. To be fair, they did put quite a big focus on the beginning of his life but there is nothing really special about it. Instead of being a normal child he is born old and grows up in an old peoples home. But nothing ever happens. And the end of his life when he gets younger is so hurried and mostly about Daisy that it seems irrelevant. Plus, Brad Pitt hardly had to act, why is everyone so dazzled by his performance?

Twilight

Alright, so I knew when I watched Twilight that I was in for a teen-movie. But I thought, great, Clueless, for example, is on my top 100 list, plus I adore vampires. But again, the art of script writing seems to have faded into oblivion. So, the main vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) is supposed to be extremely cool and have lived for hundreds of years (I assume that this means he as accumulated some sort of wisdom) but the writers just make him say the most stupid things. After saving the lead girl Bella’s (Kristen Steward) life by pushing a big car away from her with his bare hands, she confronts him about it. His first reaction is “oh, you don’t know what you saw, you were in shock and confused at the time”. She doesn’t buy it so he says “well, nobody is gonna believe you anyway”. What?! What kind of vampire wouldn’t have a better excuse? And the dialogue just goes on like this throughout the entire movie. Do I really want to watch a film about a moron vampire? Well, that sounds like a fun comedy but not a wannabe serious teen movie. My advice to all screen writers: Think, then write!

After reading and loving the book Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates) I just couldn’t wait to see the movie. Especially with Kate Winslet starring in it. I have to confess that I knew who would be playing the leads in the film and already envisioned their faces while reading. The book is absolutely fantastic. I was astounded at the way Richard Yates described feelings and situations. He created a very real environment and makes the reader feel like they are right there in the New York suburbs.

April (Kate Winslet) and Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) move to the suburbs to raise their children, even though they really fancy themselves to be city folks. They always feel like they are special, above the other people around them. This is the thought they cling to while drifting more and more into becoming a typical suburban couple. When April sees no way out, she convinces Frank that they should fulfill their dream and move to Paris in order to become who they are really meant to be. 

I hesitate to call this a love story, it is really a story about hate. April and Frank not only start detesting each other but also themselves. Both of them are unhappy with their situation and their lives which makes them incredibly miserable and they take it out on each other even though they still seem to care for one another. They even want the same things in life but they just can’t get it together because they are blaming each other for there sorrow.

The movie is very good, even after reading the book, but the book (as it is always the case) offers so many more details about what the characters are feeling and thinking that I felt the movie didn’t really convey the entire story. I had a feeling that people who hadn’t read the book couldn’t possibly know what was going on.

What I thought was most striking about the story is how easily I could identify with the characters and how much I did not want to do so. I guess that most people feel that they are somewhat special and not many actually do fulfill their dreams in the end. Even though April and Frank are in a completely different situation to mine, I still saw an awful lot of me in them. And I think this is really the beauty of storytelling, to make the reader or viewer feel what it is like to be in the story and Richard Yates certainly succeeded in this.

Even though it is a painful film to watch, I absolutely recommend it. It is set in the fifties but it is dealing with a modern topic of a couple growing angry at the realization of not being special or who they thought they would be. I don’t think I have ever seen a film with quite the same subject matter. It goes unsaid that the acting in this film is phenomenal. 

Revolutionary Road really deserves to get a MovieCat Award for having and outstanding cast perform an unusual and at the same time very ordinary story.

Sorry I haven’t posted anything in so long. I have been watching films and will be writing reviews on them soon. I promise

I went to London over the weekend to visit some friends. London is such a great city and I always love looking for film settings there (the blue door from Notting Hill, pretty much every scene from Match Point and so on). While my friend and I were having lunch near the Columbia Road flower market this weekend, we spotted Keira Knightly and her actor boyfriend Rupert Friend. This part of London is so full of quirkily dressed people that they really didn’t stand out. Every other person there could have been a star. Its always fun to see actors in real life. Especially when they fit so wonderfully into their surroundings. It makes them more human. Keira looked a lot nicer and prettier in real life than in the films (I personally don’t like her as an actress) but she did look unnaturally skinny. 

The Woman in Black

We went to see the play The Woman in Black at the Fortune Theatre near Covent Garden. It turned out to be the 20th Anniversary for this play to be shown at that theatre. It is a ghost story about a solicitor who is trying to tell his family about a time in his life where he encountered a ghost a long time ago. A young theatre director helps the now old man to make the story more interesting for his audience.

The entire play consists of these two men and a ghost woman in black who only comes onto the stage occasionally. The actors have to be incredibly good to keep the audiences attention through the entire play, and they were. I didn’t actually expect to be scared in a play but it was quite freaky. A lot of it was down to rather loud sound effects and sudden appearances of the woman. It was a lot of fun watching the play and getting scared by it. What I also really enjoyed was that the producer came onto the stage after the play and gave a short speech because of the anniversary. He was really funny and it felt special to have seen the play that evening. 

Terminator Salvation

I got talked into watching this film by two of my old housemates from University (two boys as you can guess) and the film just really sucked (sorry Jon and Dave, if you are reading this…). I thought Christian Bale would be enough to enjoy the movie but he was terrible. All he did was use his intense dark Batman-voice and look tough. And then he hit a couple of guys. That’s it. And he is not even shown very often. It’s mostly about Sam Worthington’s character. Oh, and the story was: humans fighting against machines. This should not be the story of a Terminator film, because it is the setting. There should be a story around this setting. If I had a rating system, I would probably give this film a 1/5 (one for the special effects). Alright, that’s enough ranting, just take my advice and don’t watch it.

It seems to be blockbuster season at the moment. We had the choice between watching X-Men: Wolverine and Angels & Demons and chose the latter mainly because of the bad reviews that Wolverine got (even though the trailer looks excellent!).

Angels & Demons is a sort of sequel to The Da Vinci Code, which came out in 2006 and which was actually quite bad. I am saying sort of because the only way to tell that it is a sequal is that it has the same main characters. But everything and everyone else is different. I have read both books a few years ago and have to say up front that they are a lot better than either of the films. 

The Story: Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is a Harvard Professor of Symbology who receintly helped the French Police solve a case (in The Da Vinci Code) and is now contacted by the catholic church in Rome. The Pope just died and the sect the Illuminati are now threatening to kill the four Preferati (the favourites to become the next Pope). One is to be killed at different secret locations throughout Rome, each full hour starting at 8pm the same evening. At midnight, a stolen canister holding anti-matter will lose all its battery and will therefore explode and blow up the whole Vatican City and parts of Rome.

The entire film is like a major scavenger hunt. Langdon and a female scientist who was working on the anti-matter project are trying to find a path that leads to the church of the Illuminati while the Swiss Guard are not really helping them, even though they called Langdon to come to help. The only person who really seems to be on Langdon’s side, trying to help, is the Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor) who is in charge of the Pope’s office during the time of conclave. 

The subject of the story is really interesting. I love conspiracies, especially when they are remotely based on the truth. I always wonder how much of it is true, and how much is pure fiction. The film shows a lot of the Vatican City and Rome and sculptures in Rome that face a certain way and I really want to know where these sculptures are really facing that way or just put there for the movie. Also the things said about the Illuminati. I know the sect itself is (was) real, but I would love to know if the path Langdon is following is actually real of if Dan Brown invented it completely. 

Angels & Demons is a much better film than The Da Vinci Code, although I preferred Audrey Tautou as “the girl”. There is no love story what so ever in the second film (not that it is necessary), the scientist is purely there to help Langdon solve the case. She could as well have been a man. As expected, Ewan McGregor steels the show. He is absolutely brilliant as the Camerlengo. Without him, the film would be half as good. He brings a certain sincerity to his role and the movie which Hanks is lacking. Even though I liked the film, my advice would be to wait for the DVD to come out to watch it. Or even better: read the books!

Wanting an evening of light, fun entertainment, we decided to have a Tomb Raider “marathon” yesterday. I had seen both of them before (a few times, actually) but I still really like the films. 

In the first one, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Lara (Angelina Jolie) finds a mysterious clock that was hidden for her by her now dead father. When she finds out that the clock can control time once placed together with two pieces of a broken triangle at a certain time on a certain day at a certain place when all nine planets aline (which only happens every five thousand years) she just has to go and find this hidden temple. She is not the only one looking for a way to control time, the sect the Illuminati also want to have the device.

Best scene: It has to be the scene where she is doing some sort of relaxation workout on bungee-cords in her house which suddenly gets invaded by the Illuminati. She is up against hundreds of men who really don’t stand the chance against her. 

In the second film, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, there is even more on stake. Here, Lara is looking for Pandora’s Box which was supposed to have created life itself. She is working together with the British Intelligence and her ex-lover Terri Sharidan (Gerard Butler) to find the box before a scientist finds it who wants to sell it to the highest bidders to release a plague onto the world to rid it off, in his eyes, unwanted people. 

Best scene: Lara needs to get to the surface of the ocean, so she cuts her arm to attract a shark, then punches the shark and holds onto the sharks fin. Very impressive!

Both films are action-packed and full of mystery and intrigues. I have only ever played the game once, at my godfathers place, a really long time ago, but I think the films do the game justice. I love the character of Lara Croft. She is so rich that she doesn’t have to work and archeology is her main hobby. She is a tomb raider, not because she needs money or anything like that. It just seems to give her a kick. She is living in a huge mansion with her butler and a geek who takes care of the electrical equipment. As far as action films go, these are two of my favorites. It is really nice to have a woman as the main character of an action film. And she is a lot cooler, tougher and better looking than most of her male counterparts. Somehow the stories in action films are never as important to me as the main characters. But I do like intrigues so the stories of the Tomb Raider films suite me just fine .

Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft: I personally thing she is perfect for the role. Angelina can really pull the female Indiana Jones off. She looks exactly like the computer game version and I easily believe that she can do all those crazy things she is doing in the film (well, if anyone could do them, I think it would be her). She also has a certain arrogance in her appearance that fits perfectly for this rich, spoiled British woman who is risking her life just for a bit of fun. It is quite sad what is happening to Angelina Jolie lately…she used to be so cool and rock’n'roll (especially in Gina, Girl Interrupted and Gone in Sixty Seconds) and now she has become boringly mainstream. Wh

at a pity. But in Tomb Raider she definitely kicks ass!

Hi everyone, 

I am not sure how it happened, but I got nominated for best Lamb Banner over at the Large Association of Movie Blogs. This is so exciting! 

Please vote for me here! 

Thanks so much,

 Vanessa aka TheMovieNess