In no specific order...
1. Love Actually (2003): Although set during Christmas fever, this film provides a handful of love snapshots that pack an emotional punch heavy enough to have you nuzzling closer to your significant other, mustering up the courage to spill your heart out in front of your crush, or both!
2. Lars and the Real Girl (2007): A good V-Day movie with Ryan Gosling that isn't The Notebook? Yes. This film is touching and genuine, and will make you jealous of a mannequin.
Some movies need but an open mind and open arms to achieve something memorable. While The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a flighty and, at times, lost example of one, it is indeed one of those films.
Crafted by co-writer/director Terry Gilliam, whose noticeably French-influenced style of filmmaking makes him particularly interesting to keep track of, Parnassus will keep you as confused and insecure as its subject matter: a traveling sideshow headed by the immortal Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer).
The only thing consistent about the film is its inconsistency, caused perhaps by the death of its lead (Heath Ledger, as the sideshow's newcomer, Tony) mid-shoot, which resulted in a complete retooling and the casting of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell as Tony's other selves; but to shrug off what becomes the film's critical feature—an askew universe that ties both the characters and viewers into knots—as a mere happenstance would be a nearsighted and lacking departure.
Recipe for When in Rome: Take 1 bland, expressionless leading lady, 1 male counterpart so average it hurts, a handful of trite, obnoxious supporting characters, mix them all together in a bowl of exploitative, sexist, depressing, repressing and suppressing ideology, and send it to hell to bake for 91 minutes. Congratulations director Mark Steven Johnson, it came out perfectly!
More disgusting and disturbing a film than any torture-porn out there, When in Rome is a vile retreat into gender stereotypes and male worship, a film that stitches together every one-dimensional character, every flat, overplayed joke, and every pig-headed idea of love that the movies have ever provided us into something truly terrible.
Beth (Kristen Bell) is a working girl who just can't seem to get love right. In Rome for her sister's wedding, Beth steals a variety of coins from a magical fountain in spite of romance and happy-endings, unknowingly cursing those whose coins were picked to fall in love with her.
Film is a reliable place to look when seeking out our own weaknesses. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, not 2008) assures us it’s our own trigger-happy nature that will do us in. WALL-E has the human race complacent and consuming, our globe rendered one giant dust bowl. Al Gore is practically banking on the ice caps melting.
Humankind loves to predict our own end. And, whether it's by nuclear annihilation, global climate change or good old-fashioned sinning, we love it the most when it's our own fault.
The Lovely Bones is not a movie; at least not in the sense you and I think of one. It has no coherence, no idea of what it's doing, what its purpose is. It barely has a plot. I'm still not sure if it has any scenes, whatsoever.
What The Lovely Bones does offer, however, is a tangled marsh of unfocused emotion, unclear characters and uninspired dreamscapes, all of which sum up to make a moving picture, yes, but a movie? No.
NOTE: Like most things I write, I'm not very happy with this; but, the ideas I'm presenting, I believe, have some substance to them. I'd love to go off specifically about each one, but, alas, there are not enough hours in the day. And, although I am basically reviewing the film, this piece is more of a string of thoughts about the film in which I'm not necessarily judging it per se. with that in mind, read on.
Watching James Cameron's Avatar, one starts to understand how its main character, Jake Sully, must feel when splitting himself in two. Just as Mr. Cameron has his protagonist jacking into a new world, a place he could never experience to the fullest without this link, he has audiences plugging into their own separate reality: a new type of cinematic experience.
A film made strictly as a catalyst for the 3D movement, Avatar was destined to be either the messiah of a new wave or the biggest Nelson-style “haha” to the technophiles of the film industry of all time. Now nearly a month after its release, Cameron's Avatar has grossed more than $1.3 billlion worldwide, making it the second highest grossing film of all time. Sorry Nelson.
