Film Review: The Time Traveler’s Wife

I read this book so long ago that I don’t remember a lot, but even so, I noticed how much content was left out of the movie, but that’s always the case anyway.

I really liked the cast, especially Rachel McAdams to play Claire, and although I imagined Adam Levine the whole time I was reading, Eric Bana’s close enough. Oh, actually, the only character who I thought was inappropriately cast was Dr Kendrick, who is played by Stephen Tobolowsky, aka Sandy from Glee. If you don’t watch Glee don’t worry. But if you do, you’d be laughing through all of his scenes too. I bet the casting directors are regretting it.

For such a long plot, I suppose the movie did the best it could to squeeze most of it into 2 hours or however long it was. The reason I found The Time Traveler’s Wife so touching was because you’re exposed to the characters so much that you emphasise with them like you’re them. Only the book can pull off that kind of attachment. Despite that we ended up crying very shamelessly.

It’s a very lovey movie. 100% not B’s type. If you don’t believe in/care about/megaloathe love it’ll be too eye-rolling inducing. If you have love troubles it’ll be too sad. If you have a significant other who time travels it’ll be too perfect for words! 7.5/10

 

Time Traveler’s Wife

I was watching the trailer again yesterday. You know, Bana has really prominent ears.

C finishes exams on Thursday so we’re watching it then. That’s all :)

Film Review: UP

In very stark contrast to Funny People this was an awesome movie.

We watched UP in 3D and I’m not sure whether it was more gratifying than 2D because after awhile I didn’t really notice the 3D-ness anymore.

Anyway, there’s not a lot to it. It’s a simple story which worked out fabulous. And it wasn’t too long. I remember Wall-E had just as much hype but it dragged on enough to get me bored. UP is good the whole way through, and it was at least six times funnier than the supposed-to-be-hilarious Funny People.

The story. Carl meets Ellie when they’re little kids. Ellie shows Carl her adventure book in which she draws a picture of a house on Paradise Falls in South Africa. Carl and Ellie get married and when they find out that Ellie can’t have children Carl decides to save up and make her dream of living on top of Paradise Falls come true. However Ellie passes away before they could make it happen and Carl decides he’s going to do it himself in memory of her. He sets off on his house lifted by probably thousands of balloons and finds that the boy scout who looks like a giant egg has inadvertently followed him. They end up in South Africa and have some sort of adventure, at the end of which the evil explorer guy (who is supposed to be significantly older than Carl but for unexplained reasons wasn’t) free-falls to his splattery death and Carl and scout-boy Russell return home happy.

SQUIRREL! 9/10

Film Review: Funny People

Movies that should NEVER exceed 90 minutes:

• Animated films
• Romantic comedies
• Films based on TV shows
• Anything with Adam Sandler in it

This might be just my opinion (and A’s too), but Sandler is just not funny anymore. We found Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore and Big Daddy hilarious but we were like ten years old back then and while his form of humour has pretty much stayed the same throughout the intervening years we’d like to think ourselves a little less low-brow now that we’re graduating from uni and all.

The movie opens with home videos of Sandler’s character, George Simmons, prank-calling restaurants pretending to have been sick from their food and being generally dumb. Then you find out that George is a comedian, and then a Swedish doctor with a scary accent tells him he has acute myeloid leukaemia and is going to die. So George plans for his imminent demise and hires Seth Rogan’s character Ira Wright as an assistant and then a short while later finds out he’s not going to die after all. He calls his ex-girlfriend and love-of-his-life Laura who is married to Eric Bana (whose character name I cbf to look up) and those two pretty much fall in love all over again, have oral sex but not SEX sex for some reason and then break up because Laura eventually ends up staying with Eric Bana.

The story is like a giant convoluted knot. And worse, it drags on like that for 2.5 hours. There are too many tasteless sex jokes for my mind to process and the very few funny lines were way insufficient to make up for the rest of this batshit movie. The cinema was also cold because whoever decided that the air-conditioning should be set to 16 degrees on an unseasonably cold night obviously came to work without their cerebrum.

My very lenient rating: 2/10

Film Review: Inglourious Basterds

Compared to Public Enemies which left me kind of wanting my $14 back Inglourious Basterds was a whole lot more comprehensible, most probably because general knowledge already covers a large portion of WWII hence there is less need to hang on to everybody’s every word.

I liked how the plot develops smoothly without a lot of complications and distractions which is where my simpleton brain usually fries out. I also liked that the characters were clearly distinguishable from each other. I know this sounds rather dumb but after Public Enemies and The Good Shepherd and movies where you need to have spent several years of your life in whatever era the story was set in to be able to understand more than 30% of dialogue, I don’t ask for much.

Most of the dialogue was in French or German and I had a lot of fun listening to the latter and discovering that I could still faintly understand it. Oh and if you used to watch Inspector Rex and fell in love with Alex Brandtner (i.e. Gedeon Burkhard) like 99% of the female population you’ll be happy to know that he is in fact, a basterd.

I squirm easily at gore. I wouldn’t call IB gory but you know how Lt. Aldo Raine wanted 100 Nazi scalps from every basterd? Well they didn’t hold back on the scalping. Or people getting shot in the face. There was one scene I couldn’t make myself watch continuously so I kind of waved my hands in front of my eyes every two seconds to break it up, but now I don’t remember which scene it was.

My favourite character is Shoshanna. Favourite scene is where Raine says “Arrivederci”. You know what I’m talking about :D

Because I’d totally watch it again, I give IB 9/10.

Film Review: Brüno

I was just thinking of movies I’ve seen recently and Brüno came to mind and I just HAD to say something about it even though I really should do my PBL and internship applications. Will be brief.

I really don’t think there should have been a plot. It was painfully contrived and the movie would have been much better less worse if it was shorter and composed of skits. I also think there was WAY TOO MUCH sexual connotations, even for SBC’s standards. By WAY TOO MUCH I don’t mean it becomes offensive. I mean it’s just always there and we become desensitised to all the penises and rectally administered champagne and it just ends up being boring.

I thought Brüno was funny for about 15 minutes and then during the rest of the movie I was checking the time every five minutes and apologising fervently to W for suggesting we watch this atrocity. W literally covered his eyes at some point, which I found kind of strange because even I could sit there and hack it but I guess for a true heterosexual male it just might be too much.

When Brüno was cage-fighting Lutz and they end up getting their sex on I rolled my eyes so hard they hurt. The only redeeming feature was the charity song “Dove of Peace” at the end which momentarily held my interest as it was performed by a number of celebrities including Chris Martin and Snoop and Bono. Then again I was probably just glad it was over.

This time I want back my $14 AND 80 minutes of my life, 1/10.

Film Review: Public Enemies

Just a couple of things:

1. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale were the only two characters who I could identify. Everyone else looked the same. Maybe they shouldn’t have been dressed in identical outfits and have identical hair and be around the same age. Maybe each character could have worn a unique identifying colour. Maybe they could have also worn name badges with a one-liner explaining who they were. Maybe I was just too tired
2. The last 10% of the film was confusing. What I said above, combined with fast movement and characters not really facing the camera, I had no idea who was shooting and who was getting shot and who was doing anything
3. I could have really used subtitles
4. Marion Cotillard looks like a mix of Katy Perry and Zooey Deschanel
5. I didn’t know it was based on a true story until the credits started rolling

I’d probably have to watch it again to understand it, but at least it didn’t leave me feeling as dumb as The Good Shepherd did. 6/10.