Long Post of Movie Reviews
Jan. 7th, 2011 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blodeueddI spent at least half the day yesterday convinced that it was Friday, and beating myself up over the fact that I wasn't accomplishing anything. When I realised my mistake, I gave myself carte blanche to continue accomplishing nothing, which sort of worked. I did a bit of sewing, read (almost done the book the lovely ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tayles sent me), and PUT AWAY MY SUITCASE! *awaits applause* Sure, there's still lots of stuff lying around on the floor, but technically, I'm unpacked! Then, I went to Kimberly's place for supper -- I helped with the preparation of a typical Southern meal of ham, fried okra, fried potatoes and biscuits -- and she once again taught me how to crochet a granny square (she did once before, when we went to Hokkaido in 2008) and we watched a movie. I crocheted two whole squares! They're for an afghan I'm making for Anna's baby. All in all, a relaxing day, and I even got out of the house, so I probably burned off the sugar from at least fifteen of the million jelly beans I ate.
Following my resolutions, I started doing the Pilates DVD. I did the ab section yesterday, and my abs are a tiny bit sore today, which is good. When I was doing the exercises, I didn't really feel anything until the very end, which is a sure sign I wasn't doing them properly; my abs are in decent enough shape, but not so much that it should have been painless. I expect the burn to increase as I learn to do the routine better and really focus on the relevant muscles.
This morning I did the hip segment, which consisted of a lot of ballet movements (pliés, tendus, dégagés and fondus*) with some yoga (downward dog, anyone?) thrown in. My lack of flexibility was a problem, as I can't really do a proper downward dog, even when I haven't just woken up and am still stiff with sleep. Once I get more familiar with the routines I'll add some basic stretching in, my goal being about 30 minutes each morning.
I did not, however, do any studying. Bloh.
* Not fondues, which come in many different flavours and are delicious XD
As I wrote in my last post, I watched thirteen films over the course of my trip. Of those, I watched eleven of them on the plane. Here are some quick reviews! As usual, don't click if you're worried about spoilers.
From Tokyo to Toronto:
Only When I Dance
This is a documentary about two young Brazilian ballet dancers, Irlan and Isabela, trying to gain professional careers. Both of them are from poor backgrounds, so apart from focusing on the dance, there's a good deal of emphasis on just how much their families (especially Isabela's) have to sacrifice in order to pay even for the most basic necessities for a dancer, like dance shoes.
While Irlan is absolutely breathtaking (he wins a prize at the Prix de Lausanne, and afterward gets a contract with a dance company in the U.S., I think), it was obvious to me that while Isabela is good, she doesn't seem to be ballerina material, so it just seems that the director of the dance school has a blind spot, borne of affection, where her dancing is concerned. Not that she isn't talented, but it didn't come as a great surprise to me when she failed to place in the dance competition in New York. While it's true she's much curvier than the average dancer (but still by no means anything other than slim), she just didn't seem to have the extension in arabesque you'd expect, for one thing.
One point that was brought up repeatedly is that Brazil has no black ballerinas, so she'd have to find work overseas, but googling has revealed she's apparently with a contemporary dance company in Brazil, now, so I'm really happy for her.
If, like me, you are easily moved by stories of people pursuing their dreams, have a kleenex or two handy for this one. I'd say watch it just for Irlan's competition piece on Nijinsky, it's incredible. 8/10
Howl
Shot in a mix of faux documentary style (James Franco is pretty awesome as Allen Ginsberg), animation, and straight-up drama (mostly the courtroom scenes), this is a really, really interesting movie. It covers the 1957 trial of Ginsberg's poem "Howl" for obscenity, as well as exploring the life of the poet himself. The movie cuts from interviews to the courtroom to readings of the poem in a smoky bar to flashes of Ginsberg's past to wonderfully inventive animation with "Howl" as a voice-over.
"Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows" is indeed a great line.
8/10
Salt
It seems that Russian communists are back in vogue as bad guys!
Angelina Jolie being tough and kicking ass and looking hot was all I was looking for, so I didn't really care too much about the plot, what with all the brain washing and the double agents and the explosions and the spider venom and the betrayals. I'm curious about her Russian accent, though. Is it any good? I sure can't tell! I reaaaaally liked the short hair on her, and was amused by the cross-dressing disguise.
My only quibble with the film is that her suit at the beginning seems a tad provocative. Sure, the skirt is below the knee, but that slit seems awfully high for a business woman.
I'll give this one an extra point for the lead actress hotness factor, so 7/10.
Chez Schwartz
This was in the TV section, so I assumed it would be 45 minutes at most, but it was an hour and a half long, so would have taken up a two-hour timeslot when broadcast. Fair enough, since it does cover a year in the "life" at Chez Schwartz.
If you've been to Montreal, you might have heard of the city's famous smoked meat sandwiches. Now, I don't know if it's true that they're the best meal ever, but I've eaten a couple of Schwartz's sandwiches, and they're tasty and satisfying and HUGE. It's interesting to see, in the film, just how long it takes to prepare that meat: the days and days spent in the smoke room, bathing in spices... And the sheer quantity of meat that goes through the place. Not only for the dishes served on the premises, but the orders at Christmastime for turkeys, chickens, ducks, steaks, etc.
One thing that's apparent from the get-go is that Chez Schwartz is a man's world, though from its Romanian Jewish origins, it's come a long way, now employing men of every ethnicity and colour. It's lovely to hear French and English spoken with so many different accents. Some of the employees have been working there for forty years. Can you imagine slicing meat for forty years? The film not only focuses on the people inside, but also on those outside, like the homeless guys who hang around by the door, asking for change.
Overall, an interesting slice of Montreal. 7/10
Aftershock
This Chinese film spans many years, starting with the devastating Tangshan earthquake of 1976. A pair of twins, whose father died trying to save them, are trapped under a concrete slab, and their mother is forced to choose which one to save: raising one end of the slab will crush the child under the other end. Finally, she chooses to save her son. However, the daughter miraculously survives, waking up hours later among dozens of corpses pulled from the devastation. She had heard her mother's final decision, and suffering from shock and trauma as she is, she no longer speaks. She's soon adopted by a childless couple and brought to live in another city, where she grows up and eventually goes to school. Meanwhile, the son, who lost an arm in the earthquake, grows up and quits school, instead working odd jobs in order to first help his mother, then become a succesful businessman in his own right. The mother, for her part, lives in constant grief from the death of her husband and her daughter.
The story follows them until the massive 2008 earthquake, when the twins are reunited by chance. The daughter, who'd moved to Vancouver with her Canadian husband, had flown back to China to help with the relief efforts. She'd regained her memories long before, but had never dared to go look for her mother and brother.
Though there are plenty of tearjerking scenes, the one I found the most affecting was relatively early in the film, when you see all the people in the former neighbourhood burning letters to their dead. "If we move," the mother tells her son, "I'll have to keep telling your father and your sister our new address every year, so they can find their way to us."
The movie dragged a bit at times (and it's pretty long) but overall, it kept my interest. Of course, I'm slightly biased because I love listening to Mandarin. The only really bad part of the film was the guy who plays the daughter's husband. I'm assuming the casting call was "Middle-aged white guy with generic North American English accent. Acting ability not required" because oh god, his three lines are PAINFULLY bad! >____<
7.5/10
waydowntown
Having grown up in Canada, and especially in the Ottawa area, it's usually a given that stories in books or movies just don't happen in places I personally am familiar with, so I always get a kick out of passing references to places I do know. Sure, this is a Canadian film, but it takes place in Calgary, so I appreciated the mention of Carleton University (in Ottawa) even more.
This movie is pretty short, taking place over the course of about half a day. Four office workers have made a pool, each betting a month's salary to see who can go the longest without setting foot outside -- this is possibly in Calgary, if you live in the downtown core, because of the system of walkways and underground passages that connects a good number of buildings. Anyway, it's day 24 and everybody's endurance is starting to wear thin. How do they cope? Or not cope, as the case may be? Depends on the person: pot, sniffing magazine perfume samples, [attempted] sex with coworkers. There are also various subplots about a kleptomaniac boss, a suicidally depressed coworker, bathroom stall hijinks, and an insane flower shop employee. In spite of everything going on, the story zips along and never drags.
Other nice touch in the film: the use of the word "slut" only in reference to a male character who is, indeed, a great big sleazy slut.
7.5/10
In Canada, I watched these movies with A-L, because watching dance movies together is what we do:
Black Swan
Is it true that people are saying Natalie Portman deserves an Oscar for this, or is that just part of the film's promotion? Either way, I disagree. Not because she's at all bad in this, but because the film left me sort of on the fence.
On one hand, it's good as a psychological thriller and a character study of a young woman obsessed with perfection. It's done well enough that until the end, you're never totally sure what's real and what she's imagining, including the rather gross feet/fingers/feather bits, which I sometimes looked away from. I liked her chemistry with Mila Kunis (though her character was way too cliché: the wild child from California coming to class with her hair undone, a cigarette between her fingers, and her tattoos hanging out), and the relationship with her mother was appropriately cringe-inducing.
On the other hand, when I watch a movie that takes place in the dance world, I expect it to be nominally about, you know, dance. It seems that Ms. Portman trained for months in order to do the dancing herself, and I have to give her credit for that, because her dancing looked damn good -- what we could see of it, at any rate. Because the camera spends so much time up close to her face (as it does for a good deal of the film), we don't get enough full-length shots. This is standard in similar movies where the lead can't actually dance (i.e. Save the Last Dance), but then at least they resort to body doubles and long shots. Of course, the point of this movie isn't the dancing, but I was left feeling unsatisfied. In spite of all the swan imagery (and the mirrors, which seemed a bit too heavy handed), they could have set this in the world of music or theatre, for instance, with an appropriate shift in metaphor, and I don't think it would have changed the story at all. This isn't about a dancer who's crazy, it's about a crazy girl who happens to be a dancer.
For what it's worth, the much-talked-about lesbian sex scene was pretty hot (though Natalie Portman masturbating was hotter XD), but it turns out it only ever happened in her head. This falls into one of my pet peeves about portrayals of gay sex/relationships in movies/books/series: when it turns out it didn't really happen, or it didn't really count or mean anything, or it's seen as the cause of something bad happening.
Also: like hell a dancer wouldn't be made to cover up her back tattoos for a production of Swan Lake! *rolls eyes*
7/10, with some reservations
Step It Up 3
This film is bad. Like, really, really bad. So bad that even A-L, who never cares about wooden acting or predictable plots, spent a good part of the movie bitching about it. XD The good thing is, we were expecting it to be bad, and only rented it for the dancing, which is very cool. A couple of So You Think You Can Dance alums (most notably Twitch, from the 4th season) show up. I wish he'd had a bigger role, because I love his voice and he has great screen presence, way more than the guy who played what's-his-face the leader, an actor so bad he was probably worse than the Canadian husband from Aftershock. Seriously, did he direct the film and give himself a starring role? Or was he sucking off the director? His dancing wasn't so amazing that he deserved a lead role simply for that. Wooden doesn't even begin to describe his line delivery. At least most of the other actors were decent, though they really weren't given much to work with.
I won't bother explaining the plot, which was so predictable that even A-L had figured out the "twists" -- and I lose the term very loosely -- ages before they were revealed. XD (Love you, A-L! <3)
The only reason you should watch this is for the dance sequences, which are worth suffering through the rest of the film for, if you're too lazy to hit fast forward.
2/10 for the movie, 8/10 for the dancing
That's enough for now. I've spent all morning writing these, so I'll save the others for another post. Have any of you seen any of these movies? What did you think of them? Comment, I'm curious! ^_^
It's noon, and time for me to do stuff besides write. Today is my last day of true freedom, i.e. the last day I have to myself, as I have plans for the next two days, so in no particular order, I want to:
- sew;
- finish putting all my things away;
- draw up a study plan for Japanese and Mandarin;
- shower;
- go out for a sushi lunch;
- write up a quick Travelpod entry;
- put away my Christmas tree;
- crochet and knit: I'm not sure if I can do two more squares today, as I'm unused to crocheting and my hand might cramp up, but I'm halfway through a sock and can probably finish most of it this evening.
tayles sent me), and PUT AWAY MY SUITCASE! *awaits applause* Sure, there's still lots of stuff lying around on the floor, but technically, I'm unpacked! Then, I went to Kimberly's place for supper -- I helped with the preparation of a typical Southern meal of ham, fried okra, fried potatoes and biscuits -- and she once again taught me how to crochet a granny square (she did once before, when we went to Hokkaido in 2008) and we watched a movie. I crocheted two whole squares! They're for an afghan I'm making for Anna's baby. All in all, a relaxing day, and I even got out of the house, so I probably burned off the sugar from at least fifteen of the million jelly beans I ate.Following my resolutions, I started doing the Pilates DVD. I did the ab section yesterday, and my abs are a tiny bit sore today, which is good. When I was doing the exercises, I didn't really feel anything until the very end, which is a sure sign I wasn't doing them properly; my abs are in decent enough shape, but not so much that it should have been painless. I expect the burn to increase as I learn to do the routine better and really focus on the relevant muscles.
This morning I did the hip segment, which consisted of a lot of ballet movements (pliés, tendus, dégagés and fondus*) with some yoga (downward dog, anyone?) thrown in. My lack of flexibility was a problem, as I can't really do a proper downward dog, even when I haven't just woken up and am still stiff with sleep. Once I get more familiar with the routines I'll add some basic stretching in, my goal being about 30 minutes each morning.
I did not, however, do any studying. Bloh.
* Not fondues, which come in many different flavours and are delicious XD
* * *
As I wrote in my last post, I watched thirteen films over the course of my trip. Of those, I watched eleven of them on the plane. Here are some quick reviews! As usual, don't click if you're worried about spoilers.
From Tokyo to Toronto:
Only When I Dance
This is a documentary about two young Brazilian ballet dancers, Irlan and Isabela, trying to gain professional careers. Both of them are from poor backgrounds, so apart from focusing on the dance, there's a good deal of emphasis on just how much their families (especially Isabela's) have to sacrifice in order to pay even for the most basic necessities for a dancer, like dance shoes.
While Irlan is absolutely breathtaking (he wins a prize at the Prix de Lausanne, and afterward gets a contract with a dance company in the U.S., I think), it was obvious to me that while Isabela is good, she doesn't seem to be ballerina material, so it just seems that the director of the dance school has a blind spot, borne of affection, where her dancing is concerned. Not that she isn't talented, but it didn't come as a great surprise to me when she failed to place in the dance competition in New York. While it's true she's much curvier than the average dancer (but still by no means anything other than slim), she just didn't seem to have the extension in arabesque you'd expect, for one thing.
One point that was brought up repeatedly is that Brazil has no black ballerinas, so she'd have to find work overseas, but googling has revealed she's apparently with a contemporary dance company in Brazil, now, so I'm really happy for her.
If, like me, you are easily moved by stories of people pursuing their dreams, have a kleenex or two handy for this one. I'd say watch it just for Irlan's competition piece on Nijinsky, it's incredible. 8/10
Howl
Shot in a mix of faux documentary style (James Franco is pretty awesome as Allen Ginsberg), animation, and straight-up drama (mostly the courtroom scenes), this is a really, really interesting movie. It covers the 1957 trial of Ginsberg's poem "Howl" for obscenity, as well as exploring the life of the poet himself. The movie cuts from interviews to the courtroom to readings of the poem in a smoky bar to flashes of Ginsberg's past to wonderfully inventive animation with "Howl" as a voice-over.
"Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows" is indeed a great line.
8/10
Salt
It seems that Russian communists are back in vogue as bad guys!
Angelina Jolie being tough and kicking ass and looking hot was all I was looking for, so I didn't really care too much about the plot, what with all the brain washing and the double agents and the explosions and the spider venom and the betrayals. I'm curious about her Russian accent, though. Is it any good? I sure can't tell! I reaaaaally liked the short hair on her, and was amused by the cross-dressing disguise.
My only quibble with the film is that her suit at the beginning seems a tad provocative. Sure, the skirt is below the knee, but that slit seems awfully high for a business woman.
I'll give this one an extra point for the lead actress hotness factor, so 7/10.
Chez Schwartz
This was in the TV section, so I assumed it would be 45 minutes at most, but it was an hour and a half long, so would have taken up a two-hour timeslot when broadcast. Fair enough, since it does cover a year in the "life" at Chez Schwartz.
If you've been to Montreal, you might have heard of the city's famous smoked meat sandwiches. Now, I don't know if it's true that they're the best meal ever, but I've eaten a couple of Schwartz's sandwiches, and they're tasty and satisfying and HUGE. It's interesting to see, in the film, just how long it takes to prepare that meat: the days and days spent in the smoke room, bathing in spices... And the sheer quantity of meat that goes through the place. Not only for the dishes served on the premises, but the orders at Christmastime for turkeys, chickens, ducks, steaks, etc.
One thing that's apparent from the get-go is that Chez Schwartz is a man's world, though from its Romanian Jewish origins, it's come a long way, now employing men of every ethnicity and colour. It's lovely to hear French and English spoken with so many different accents. Some of the employees have been working there for forty years. Can you imagine slicing meat for forty years? The film not only focuses on the people inside, but also on those outside, like the homeless guys who hang around by the door, asking for change.
Overall, an interesting slice of Montreal. 7/10
Aftershock
This Chinese film spans many years, starting with the devastating Tangshan earthquake of 1976. A pair of twins, whose father died trying to save them, are trapped under a concrete slab, and their mother is forced to choose which one to save: raising one end of the slab will crush the child under the other end. Finally, she chooses to save her son. However, the daughter miraculously survives, waking up hours later among dozens of corpses pulled from the devastation. She had heard her mother's final decision, and suffering from shock and trauma as she is, she no longer speaks. She's soon adopted by a childless couple and brought to live in another city, where she grows up and eventually goes to school. Meanwhile, the son, who lost an arm in the earthquake, grows up and quits school, instead working odd jobs in order to first help his mother, then become a succesful businessman in his own right. The mother, for her part, lives in constant grief from the death of her husband and her daughter.
The story follows them until the massive 2008 earthquake, when the twins are reunited by chance. The daughter, who'd moved to Vancouver with her Canadian husband, had flown back to China to help with the relief efforts. She'd regained her memories long before, but had never dared to go look for her mother and brother.
Though there are plenty of tearjerking scenes, the one I found the most affecting was relatively early in the film, when you see all the people in the former neighbourhood burning letters to their dead. "If we move," the mother tells her son, "I'll have to keep telling your father and your sister our new address every year, so they can find their way to us."
The movie dragged a bit at times (and it's pretty long) but overall, it kept my interest. Of course, I'm slightly biased because I love listening to Mandarin. The only really bad part of the film was the guy who plays the daughter's husband. I'm assuming the casting call was "Middle-aged white guy with generic North American English accent. Acting ability not required" because oh god, his three lines are PAINFULLY bad! >____<
7.5/10
waydowntown
Having grown up in Canada, and especially in the Ottawa area, it's usually a given that stories in books or movies just don't happen in places I personally am familiar with, so I always get a kick out of passing references to places I do know. Sure, this is a Canadian film, but it takes place in Calgary, so I appreciated the mention of Carleton University (in Ottawa) even more.
This movie is pretty short, taking place over the course of about half a day. Four office workers have made a pool, each betting a month's salary to see who can go the longest without setting foot outside -- this is possibly in Calgary, if you live in the downtown core, because of the system of walkways and underground passages that connects a good number of buildings. Anyway, it's day 24 and everybody's endurance is starting to wear thin. How do they cope? Or not cope, as the case may be? Depends on the person: pot, sniffing magazine perfume samples, [attempted] sex with coworkers. There are also various subplots about a kleptomaniac boss, a suicidally depressed coworker, bathroom stall hijinks, and an insane flower shop employee. In spite of everything going on, the story zips along and never drags.
Other nice touch in the film: the use of the word "slut" only in reference to a male character who is, indeed, a great big sleazy slut.
7.5/10
In Canada, I watched these movies with A-L, because watching dance movies together is what we do:
Black Swan
Is it true that people are saying Natalie Portman deserves an Oscar for this, or is that just part of the film's promotion? Either way, I disagree. Not because she's at all bad in this, but because the film left me sort of on the fence.
On one hand, it's good as a psychological thriller and a character study of a young woman obsessed with perfection. It's done well enough that until the end, you're never totally sure what's real and what she's imagining, including the rather gross feet/fingers/feather bits, which I sometimes looked away from. I liked her chemistry with Mila Kunis (though her character was way too cliché: the wild child from California coming to class with her hair undone, a cigarette between her fingers, and her tattoos hanging out), and the relationship with her mother was appropriately cringe-inducing.
On the other hand, when I watch a movie that takes place in the dance world, I expect it to be nominally about, you know, dance. It seems that Ms. Portman trained for months in order to do the dancing herself, and I have to give her credit for that, because her dancing looked damn good -- what we could see of it, at any rate. Because the camera spends so much time up close to her face (as it does for a good deal of the film), we don't get enough full-length shots. This is standard in similar movies where the lead can't actually dance (i.e. Save the Last Dance), but then at least they resort to body doubles and long shots. Of course, the point of this movie isn't the dancing, but I was left feeling unsatisfied. In spite of all the swan imagery (and the mirrors, which seemed a bit too heavy handed), they could have set this in the world of music or theatre, for instance, with an appropriate shift in metaphor, and I don't think it would have changed the story at all. This isn't about a dancer who's crazy, it's about a crazy girl who happens to be a dancer.
For what it's worth, the much-talked-about lesbian sex scene was pretty hot (though Natalie Portman masturbating was hotter XD), but it turns out it only ever happened in her head. This falls into one of my pet peeves about portrayals of gay sex/relationships in movies/books/series: when it turns out it didn't really happen, or it didn't really count or mean anything, or it's seen as the cause of something bad happening.
Also: like hell a dancer wouldn't be made to cover up her back tattoos for a production of Swan Lake! *rolls eyes*
7/10, with some reservations
Step It Up 3
This film is bad. Like, really, really bad. So bad that even A-L, who never cares about wooden acting or predictable plots, spent a good part of the movie bitching about it. XD The good thing is, we were expecting it to be bad, and only rented it for the dancing, which is very cool. A couple of So You Think You Can Dance alums (most notably Twitch, from the 4th season) show up. I wish he'd had a bigger role, because I love his voice and he has great screen presence, way more than the guy who played what's-his-face the leader, an actor so bad he was probably worse than the Canadian husband from Aftershock. Seriously, did he direct the film and give himself a starring role? Or was he sucking off the director? His dancing wasn't so amazing that he deserved a lead role simply for that. Wooden doesn't even begin to describe his line delivery. At least most of the other actors were decent, though they really weren't given much to work with.
I won't bother explaining the plot, which was so predictable that even A-L had figured out the "twists" -- and I lose the term very loosely -- ages before they were revealed. XD (Love you, A-L! <3)
The only reason you should watch this is for the dance sequences, which are worth suffering through the rest of the film for, if you're too lazy to hit fast forward.
2/10 for the movie, 8/10 for the dancing
That's enough for now. I've spent all morning writing these, so I'll save the others for another post. Have any of you seen any of these movies? What did you think of them? Comment, I'm curious! ^_^
It's noon, and time for me to do stuff besides write. Today is my last day of true freedom, i.e. the last day I have to myself, as I have plans for the next two days, so in no particular order, I want to:
- sew;
- finish putting all my things away;
- draw up a study plan for Japanese and Mandarin;
- shower;
- go out for a sushi lunch;
- write up a quick Travelpod entry;
- put away my Christmas tree;
- crochet and knit: I'm not sure if I can do two more squares today, as I'm unused to crocheting and my hand might cramp up, but I'm halfway through a sock and can probably finish most of it this evening.
