I’m trying to catch up with movies that I haven’t seen because I was too young (or not even born yet) when they came out. Since Woody Allen has been making movies since the 60’s, a lot of his films fall under that category. Here are two of his films that I have seen over the past couple of weeks.

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1992)

True to it’s title, this film is actually about crimes and misdemeanors. It is also about what is morally right or wrong.  What can be called a crime. If no one finds out that you have committed a crime, can it still be called one? Or is there a God watching you at all times and therefore you will always be guilty? There are quite a few story-lines going on at the same time that all end up being connected at the end. It is a brilliantly told story with very funny and intelligent dialogue (is it actually necessary to point this out in a Woody Allen movie?).  It reminded me a lot of Woody’s recent Match Point, which I now feel like re-watching for the 200th time.

Love and Death (1975)

I hadn’t heard anything about Love and Death before watching it and was quite surprised that the setting of this movie is in the early 19th Century Russia. The language as well as the acting are a mix of old, probably reminiscent of Dostoyevski and the likes, and Woody’s typical modern “babbling”. Also very funny dialogue although I didn’t think the slapstick comedy was necessary in this film.

I can’t wait until his new movie You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger comes out in a few weeks.

I missed Grand Torino when it was out at the cinema and finally managed to watch it. Due to the reviews and ratings, I had pretty high expectations and thought for the first hour or so that they would be let down. But Clint Eastwood pulled it together for a grand finale.

Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is an old Korean war vet who is very set in his own ways. He just lost his wife, is generally unhappy and unfriendly and hates his Hmong neighbors. Over the course of the movie they change his mind about them and greatly influence his life. Of course.

I thought that the beginning of this movie was rather weak. It was slow, full of clichés and just not that interesting to watch. But as the movie went on, I got more into the story. The characters stayed somewhat on the surface but they did their job to tell this story. I was very impressed with the ending though. The film suddenly completely sucked me in. I didn’t expect it and it was slightly over dramatic but I thought it was a great end to this movie. I only wish the entire film could have been on that level.

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I’ve been wanting to see this movie for a while now. As you probably know, I love Emma Thompson. I think she is a fantastic actress and the scene in Love Actually, where she just found out that her husband is cheating on her, makes me want to cry every time I see it. That’s how great she is. I’m also a big fan of Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s work. But then, who isn’t?! Will Ferrell is one of the few actors who I really can’t stand. He seriously irritates me. But I was going to overlook that fact and enjoy watching Stranger Than Fiction anyway.

That was before I saw the first few minutes of the film. I didn’t like the opening sequence and it only got worse from there. The plot: A writer is writing a book about a man who is going to die. The twist: The man actually exists and the writer is now going to kill the actual person. Sounds somewhat intriguing, doesn’t it? But it’s not. Stranger Than Fiction turned out to be one of the most boring films I have ever seen in my life. Not only was it dull, it was also over acted (who would have thought!) and cheesy.

I’m not even sure why I watched it to the end because I kept wanting to turn it of. It didn’t manage to capture my attention at all but I don’t turn movies off. Ever. So, I watched it. I would give it a zero star rating but that seems kind of harsh, so the one star is for the effort of coming up with an unusual plot.

My advice to you: Don’t watch it. You will never get those two hours of your life back!

I’ve said it before but I just needed to say again just how breathtakingly beautiful this movie is. Ever since I saw A Single Man at the cinema I have been waiting for the DVD to come out so I could watch it again.

In my last review about this film I wrote mostly about the beauty of the film and the fashion. What I didn’t really touch on at all is the “moral of the story”. The main character George (Colin Firth, who should have won the Oscar for his performance in this film) is planning to kill himself on this particular day that we are witnessing. He has been suffering for eight months, since his lover Jim (Matthew Goode) died in a car accident and doesn’t feel like he wants to go on living any longer.

Now that he is sure that he will only live for one more day, he suddenly opens up and starts living again after all this time. It is really a film about “what would you do if you only had one day more to live?”. George does all kinds of things that he wouldn’t usually do and starts enjoying himself again.

I don’t know if you guys know this feeling but I often think that living in New York City robs me of real emotion. There is so much going on that I rarely have a moment to think about anything and weeks can go by without me feeling any real joy or sadness. I get sad and happy, of course, but I never have enough time to truly let any emotion in. I blame it on the city but I guess its just my life style. What I am trying to say is, that in a way I am jealous of George. He has this absolutely amazing day where he re-discovers himself, the world and his lust for life. I would love to experience a truly special day that stands out completely.

If you haven’t seen it already, rent A Single Man! I stand by my former rating:

And please keep voting, I really appreciate it:

Pretty much everything about this movie is perfect. The costumes, the hairstyles, the cinematography, the story and it is just over all a very beautiful film. The only problem is, its slightly boring.

Gabrielle, nickname Coco (Audrey Tautou), and her sister (Marie Gallain) grow up as orphans and later make money as seamstresses during the day and singing at a bar by night. When her sister leaves her to get married to a baron, Coco decides to leave, too. She stays with a friend/lover where she meats the man that helps her change her life.

As I said, Coco before Chanel is a stunningly beautiful film. The costumes are obviously a huge part of the films look but I also loved the hairstyles. Cocos whole style is just gorgeous. I am so glad that it was filmed in French, which gives it a sort of authenticity that an English version would have lacked. Audrey Tautou is great, as always. She has such a strong presence on screen and  is just so beautiful to watch.

Watching Gabrielle grow into Coco is very inspiring. It really shows that you have to stay true to yourself and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something or shouldn’t wear something. The story itself is very interesting but it is told in a very slow way that made me constantly grab my ipad to play Farm Story. That is never a good sign.

Wow, so Lost is really over. How long until they are going to make a movie?

It does feel a bit like the end of an era. I started following Lost pretty much when it first came out and got hooked on it quickly. I lost interest after about two seasons and then recently re-watched and then watched all of the episodes.

The ending was quite disappointing though. It seemed like the easy way out. I’m not gonna stay up to watch the alternative endings (mainly cause the online stream stopped right after the episode finished) but I’m sure they are gonna be available on youtube in the next few days. I thought the writers would come up with some amazing ending that would totally blow all of us away but I guess they couldn’t think of anything.

What did you think of the final episode?

I put this movie on my Netflix list a few months ago after watching Scarlett Johansson in one of her newer films. I don’t think I’ve seen The Horse Whisperer since it came out. I must have been more or less the same age that Scarlett was back then. Watching it now, the movie took me straight back to feeling thirteen years old. I’m not saying that I was a miserable teenager (well, pretty much all teenagers are miserable so I guess that’s not entirely true) but back then and still now I can relate to this young girl, Grace, who has suffered a trauma and is now trying to make sense of herself and her life.

Objectively seen The Horse Whisperer is not a great film. It is overly cheesy and it’s too long but for me the film works on several levels. I don’t like the love story between Grace’s mother, Annie (Kristin Scott Thomas), and the “horse whisperer” Tom Booker (Robert Redford) but I completely get the struggle Annie is going through: city vs country life. I’ve pretty much always lived in cities and would consider myself a city girl but whenever I go to the country (which is not very often) I think I could easily stay there and live a quiet life. Annie’s New York City life where she has a great career and goes to the theater and the museums all the time is so exciting and at the beginning of the film she couldn’t imagine her life without all that but the more time she spends out in the country with the horses and with the Booker family who have lived on that farm for so long, the more she sees how happy she could be out there. I’m not even sure whether she falls in love with the man Tom Booker or with the idea of this life. If she had met him in the city, she would’ve never even noticed him.

As I said, I can very much relate to Grace’s story. Partly because Scarlett Johansson did a good job playing the girl. Her looks haven’t changed much although her acting has gotten a bit more sophisticated since then. She is so wonderfully young and bitchy, or wounding towards her mother, the perfect teenager.

The countryside is filmed absolutely beautifully but what is going on with the lighting on Robert Redford? He is always lit to make his hair glow as if he has a halo. Overall I think it would be a much better film if it was less “tacky” or “kitschy”. The countryside is beautiful but why do they always have to show sunset or sunrise? And it could use some cutting. But I did really enjoy watching The Horse Whisperer again after so many years.

Last night I watched a German/Austrian/Italian made for TV movie about the Austrian Empress (Kaiserin) Elizabeth. It is a remake of one of my favorite films Sissi (1955). I never understand why they have to remake already perfectly made movies. But alright, I was curious, so I watched it.

The entire time I was thinking that there was something off about the acting. The actors weren’t really connecting well which I put down as pure bad acting and made me wonder why they didn’t hire better actors. But I found out afterwards that the main actress (Cristiana Capotondi) is Italian and more or less everyone else, including the main actor (David Rott), is German. The German actors don’t speak Italian and the Italian actors don’t speak any German. So what they did was to have the Italian actors speak Italian and the German actors German. Even if they had a scene together. They would memorize the last word of the other persons dialogue as their queue. Apparently this is called babylonian film making (at least it is in German).

Which brings me to my question: WHY???? Why would you do that? I’m sure there are plenty of German speaking actresses that could have played the Empress. So why go through the hassle of all that confusion on set? Well, in this case the producers were mainly Italian and insisted on using an Italian actress (or so it sounded in the interviews on their website). But why couldn’t they find an Italian actress that speaks German? I just don’t get it. I don’t see any advantages of doing it this way.

And it shows, it really does. The actors are more or less reciting lines that they memorized but they are not playing off each other. Most of you know that I am at acting school at the moment and the main thing they teach us is to really listen to each other and let the other person have an effect on ourselves. But you can’t do that if you don’t understand the other person and are just waiting for one word in a foreign language that tells you that it’s your time to speak now. It is also strange to watch since one person is obviously dubbed but the others aren’t.

I wonder if this is a European thing or whether its going to come over to America as well. I surely hope not. I’m completely up for international collaborations and using actors that come from all sorts of different countries but then film it all in English (or whatever common language they all speak). This is completely nuts! Sorry, but I couldn’t sleep well cause it was bugging me so much last night.

Here is our very romantic choice for Valentine’s Evening entertainment that we had along with a heart shaped pizza from Papa John’s. My dream date There is one of these new Blockbuster boxes in our local Duane Reade. Unfortunately it has a very limited number of films available to rent.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

I had seen the trailer to this movie which left me cold. When I heard that it received a Golden Globe I was a little more intrigued but little did I know how much I would enjoy watching Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It is utterly hilarious!

Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) wanted to become an inventor since childhood but his inventions never really worked and he wasn’t well respected, not even by his own dad. But things are changing for him when his newest invention, a machine that turns water into food, takes off. Literally: it accidentally flies into the sky where it turns the clouds humidity into food which then rains onto the earth. Pretty neat! What’s even better is that Flint can type in any food that he would like the machine to produce. Right around that time Sam Sparks (Anna Faris), a young weather broadcast intern, steps into Flint’s life and bewitches him with her nerdy charms. Naturally, disaster is waiting right around the corner. The food machine gets out of control and starts to produce giant food that it now a danger to Flint’s town. He has to stop it!

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs has so many quirky little ideas that make it a lot of fun to watch. I haven’t laughed this much in a long time.

Watchmen

Superhero movies are somewhat blending together in my mind. A lot of them are so much alike. Whatchmen is clearly not one of the better comic book adaptations that I have seen though.

Yes, she is wearing latex suspenders...

I won’t write a synopsis of this movie, mainly because I didn’t really get the story. It felt more like an introduction of the comic book characters then a story-line. And I didn’t care about the characters at all. None of the character managed to touch me in any way, not even really engage my interest. Malin Akerman (Laurie Jupiter) gave a such a terrible performance that I had to think of my teacher, George Loros, who always says that it’s a pity that we can’t sue actors for bad acting (he is hilarious, I wish I could tape him!). I usually really like Matthew Goode, Billy Crudup and Patrick Wilson but this movie brought out the worst in them.

The special effects, fight scenes and all that were fine but overall I don’t think you are going to miss out on anything if you never see Watchmen.

Alright everyone, what’s the deal with this movie? So many people said that it is really great. I thought it was kinda entertaining but seriously nothing special.

The premise of the story is easy: Four guys are celebrating a bachelor party in Las Vegas, they wake up the next morning and don’t remember anything about the night before. Their hotel room is destroyed, they are mysteriously rooming with a tiger and a chicken and one of the guys (the one who is supposed to get married) is missing. The three guys that are still there go on a quest to find their missing friend and to find out what happened the night before.

(Spoilers!) Apart from the tiger who turns out to belong to Mike Tyson nothing truly original happened though. One guy got married to an escort girl (Heather Graham), they accidentally stole casino chips from a Chinese mobster and had a party with a lot of stripper like looking girls. These seem like the obvious Vegas choices to me. Some scenes are moderately funny but I never actually laughed out loud.

I’m not sure I want to get into the acting because there basically was none. Obviously I don’t know the actors personally but it seemed like pure typecasting to me. The “stupid” guy was a bit funnier then the others but he over-acted the role for my taste. I can see how the movie could possibly be amusing when you are with a group of friends having a few drinks. But I am so glad that I didn’t watch it at the cinema!

And why on earth did it get a Golden Globe? For what? How did they justify this decision? I mean, it ran against (500) Days of Summer, Julie & Julia, It’s Complicated and Nine. That’s tough competition. What were the guys on when they voted for The Hangover? I am using “guys” on purpose because it is definitely more aimed at male viewers.

Could someone please explain to me what is so special about this film that it deserves so much attention and a Golden Globe?

(If The Hangover had not gotten a Golden Globe, I might have given it 2.5 MovieStars but out of protest, I’ll only give it 2)