Movie Diary
1. 27 Dresses
When I was on the long, long international flights to and from my honeymoon, the airline I was on had free movies/headsets and a pretty good selection of relatively recent releases, but since it was a long, long flight, I ended up watching a few movies I probably wouldn't have otherwise put on the Netflix queue. Not a bad romcom, although if not for box office concerns they probably would've been better off swapping Katherine Heigl and Judy Greer's roles as the lovelorn protagonist and party girl best friend, respectively.
2. Charlie Wilson's War
Maybe I just wasn't paying attention enough or got turned off by the cast, but I think the ad campaign and generally buzz about this movie was way off, because I thought it was gonna be some stuffy prestige picture, and never even realized until recently that Aaron Sorkin wrote it. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was, more or less, just a really bawdy, foul-mouthed version of The West Wing that it took itself much less seriously. As a biography of Gap Band frontman Charlie Wilson, however, it's simply terrible, full of errors and revisionist history.
3. No Country For Old Men
I don't know what to say about this, really. I love the Coens, and this might've been a really well done adaptation (I wouldn't know, but I was reading The Road at the same time I saw this, and I don't think I'm much of a Cormac McCarthy fan but it seems like they captured his voice well enough). But after a really involving first half, I don't feel like this really lived up to its potential, and I'm not just saying that because the ending was ambiguous and lacked a violent climax -- I don't feel like the ending was earned, or that we spent enough time with the character the movie ended on for it to be as meaningful as it was supposed to be. It was ballsy, sure, but I don't think it paid off.
4. The Mist
Another Stephen King adaptation starring Thomas Jane had me primed for something as batshit crazy and entertaining as The Dreamcatcher, but no such luck. This kinda sucked, I gotta say -- Andre Braugher left way too early, the ending was like a really dumb "gotcha" Twilight Zone episode, and the whole angle of it being about how people behave in a crisis, rather than the crazy sci-fi nature of the crisis, was just telegraphed too broadly. It felt like the screenwriter took all of King's exposition and description of the characters' thoughts, and put it right in their mouths in the most inarticulate way possible (again, didn't read the book, but that's what it felt like). And the onslaught of beasties was just unforgiving and noisy and unpleasant, while never as impressive or intriguing as the somewhat similiar Cloverfield monster.
5. Cassandra's Dream
Another one I wouldn't have watched if I wasn't stranded on a long flight, as I was no fan of Match Point or Woody Allen's current run of humorless European-set morality plays. The dialogue is so appallingly bland and devoid of nuance or subtlety that the guy really just seems naked without his jokes. Another movie where the casting probably would've benefitted from swapping the roles of the 2 leads.
6. Dan In Real Life
Like The Family Stone, a big New England family get-together goes off the rails because of a love triangle involving siblings, but a little more sentimental and only slightly less slapsticky. Watching Steve Carrell and Dane Cook compete for the heart of a woman is like some kind of weird metaphor for the choices faced by the contemporary comedy filmgoer.
When I was on the long, long international flights to and from my honeymoon, the airline I was on had free movies/headsets and a pretty good selection of relatively recent releases, but since it was a long, long flight, I ended up watching a few movies I probably wouldn't have otherwise put on the Netflix queue. Not a bad romcom, although if not for box office concerns they probably would've been better off swapping Katherine Heigl and Judy Greer's roles as the lovelorn protagonist and party girl best friend, respectively.
2. Charlie Wilson's War
Maybe I just wasn't paying attention enough or got turned off by the cast, but I think the ad campaign and generally buzz about this movie was way off, because I thought it was gonna be some stuffy prestige picture, and never even realized until recently that Aaron Sorkin wrote it. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was, more or less, just a really bawdy, foul-mouthed version of The West Wing that it took itself much less seriously. As a biography of Gap Band frontman Charlie Wilson, however, it's simply terrible, full of errors and revisionist history.
3. No Country For Old Men
I don't know what to say about this, really. I love the Coens, and this might've been a really well done adaptation (I wouldn't know, but I was reading The Road at the same time I saw this, and I don't think I'm much of a Cormac McCarthy fan but it seems like they captured his voice well enough). But after a really involving first half, I don't feel like this really lived up to its potential, and I'm not just saying that because the ending was ambiguous and lacked a violent climax -- I don't feel like the ending was earned, or that we spent enough time with the character the movie ended on for it to be as meaningful as it was supposed to be. It was ballsy, sure, but I don't think it paid off.
4. The Mist
Another Stephen King adaptation starring Thomas Jane had me primed for something as batshit crazy and entertaining as The Dreamcatcher, but no such luck. This kinda sucked, I gotta say -- Andre Braugher left way too early, the ending was like a really dumb "gotcha" Twilight Zone episode, and the whole angle of it being about how people behave in a crisis, rather than the crazy sci-fi nature of the crisis, was just telegraphed too broadly. It felt like the screenwriter took all of King's exposition and description of the characters' thoughts, and put it right in their mouths in the most inarticulate way possible (again, didn't read the book, but that's what it felt like). And the onslaught of beasties was just unforgiving and noisy and unpleasant, while never as impressive or intriguing as the somewhat similiar Cloverfield monster.
5. Cassandra's Dream
Another one I wouldn't have watched if I wasn't stranded on a long flight, as I was no fan of Match Point or Woody Allen's current run of humorless European-set morality plays. The dialogue is so appallingly bland and devoid of nuance or subtlety that the guy really just seems naked without his jokes. Another movie where the casting probably would've benefitted from swapping the roles of the 2 leads.
6. Dan In Real Life
Like The Family Stone, a big New England family get-together goes off the rails because of a love triangle involving siblings, but a little more sentimental and only slightly less slapsticky. Watching Steve Carrell and Dane Cook compete for the heart of a woman is like some kind of weird metaphor for the choices faced by the contemporary comedy filmgoer.
This entry was posted
on Friday, June 20, 2008 at 9:27 AM.
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2) "As a biography of Gap Band frontman Charlie Wilson, however, it's simply terrible, full of errors and revisionist history."
Haha. I know right? Someone eventually will come along and set the story right about the true origins of the Gap Band.
3) Woody Allen movies now are just plain sad.