Tag Archives: movies

Reviews

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)

Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End (2007)Saw Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End last night with Ligia. Superb follow-up to Dead Man’s Chest (2006). I loved the plot twists in this one, and thought the script was handled wonderfully to offer closure to the story points from the first and second movies in the series. It seemed to me there was a ton more action packed into this one than the first and even the second. And it was certainly not as dark as the second, which left me frustrated and with a headache. As expected, things definitely had the Jerry Bruckheimer signature: big music, big fights, and furious, charging action.

I loved all of the legends and tales that were weaved so nicely into this movie’s plot (Calypso, the maelstrom, the literal end of the world, Davy Jones’ locker). (For more information about the places discussed in the movie series, see the Geography of the Pirates of the Caribbean, but know that it contains spoilers.)

Now about the acting: superb, as we’ve come to expect from the previous two movies. Honestly, praises are to lavished all around. Everyone’s performances felt authentic. I was in awe of Geoffrey Rush’s portrayal of Barbossa this time around. That man is a born character actor! Orlando Bloom really grew into the role of Will Turner this time. It felt to me as if he finally inhabited the character. Kevin McNally’s performance as Mr. Gibbs also stood out as more forceful than in the other two movies.

There’s a surprise appearance by someone in this movie. I’ll give you a hint: he appears at Shipwreck Cove as a pirate, and he was supposedly an inspiration for Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Jack Sparrow… This may be a spoiler, but I have to point it out, or you may miss it: it looks like Jack Sparrow is the son of this pirate king. Watch closely for the dialogue between them!

The set designers and the editors are to be praised as well. Like in the first movie of the series, they did a wonderful job in making the sets inhabitable. When I watched it, things were so real I could imagine walking around the streets and places that were filmed. Beyond that, the entire movie came alive — it was believable and authentic. It met my litmus test: I didn’t notice the sets, and focused on the movie.

There was one thing I didn’t like: the makeup on the actors’ faces was very visible in some scenes, and it was a deep sort of yellow. It looked as if they had jaundice. I understand it’s really hard to deal with makeup in humid and wet environments, especially when people are sweating and action sequences are being shot, but still, it was disconcerting to look at their faces and see them yellow in one cut and normal in the next. This happened especially during scenes filmed on the ships.

The way is left open for another movie at the end. Don’t worry, this movie does NOT end in a cliffhanger, like the second one. I thought that was a particularly cruel move, and I’m glad to see it didn’t happen here. Everything that needs closure gets closure, while the gate is still left ajar. Beautiful ending, if you ask me. And that reminds me: do NOT leave the movie theater until ALL of the credits roll by. There is a surprise scene at the end (and I mean the END) of the movie. Don’t want to spoil it for you, but do NOT leave the theater, wait for it. It’s worth it!

One of the last scenes takes place between Will and Elizabeth. I’ll spoil it if I go into the details, but it’s very endearing, and involves a play on words — a wonderful metaphor about sincere love, and the act of giving someone your heart with the hope that they will guard it well.

More information:

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A Guide To A Good Life, Reviews

Random Harvest (1942)

Just saw Random Harvest (1942), and had to blog about it. What a wonderful movie! I had no idea it even existed until tonight. Ligia spotted it on TMC a week or two ago, and we moved it toward the top of the queue of our Netflix account. I’m so glad we did!

The story is fantastically beautiful. A woman (Greer Garson), meets and falls in love with an amnesia patient (Ronald Colman), a convalescing officer from WWI. His life, until then a dreary, monotonous stay in an asylum, begins with their chance meeting.

They move to the country, and he begins to write. He’s quite good at it, and emboldened by his success and the prospect of making a living from writing, he proposes to her. She accepts, of course, and they settle down to a beautiful married life.

They have a boy, and one day he gets a job offer in nearby Liverpool. They’re both very happy about it, and he sets off for the city right away. On his way to the job interview, he has an accident, and a concussion brings back all memory of his previous life, erasing his current one.

Naturally, he goes back to his family home (he happens to be an aristocrat) and picks up his life, troubled as he may be by the lapse of three years from his life. His now ex-wife, desperate, searches everywhere, falls ill and the baby dies. When she sees his photo in a newspaper some time later, she applies to be his secretary, and gets the job, but does not tell him about her identity, hoping that he’ll recognize her. He does not, and things go on like that for years: he, tormented by unrecognizable wisps of memory from the past, and she, so close and yet so far from his heart.

I won’t tell you more, because I don’t want to spoil the movie for you if you haven’t seen it. Suffice it to say that it’s absolutely excellent. It’s a perfect screenplay, and Ms. Garson and Mr. Colman are absolutely marvelous in their parts, and they’ve now made my list of favorite actors and actresses. I was left speechless at the beautiful ending, and could only think “Bis, bis, bis!” I’m truly shocked that I did not hear of this movie until now, and want to find more like it. Record it, rent it or buy it, but see it. You must. You won’t regret it.

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Thoughts

How is your private data getting used?

I read the Red Tape Chronicles over at MSNBC on a regular basis, and one of their latest posts really struck a chord with me. We really have become a nation where everything gets tracked, whether we like it or not. To some extent, I don’t really care. If the government wants to tap into my phone calls, fine. Been there, done that. I grew up in communist Romania, and our phone was tapped. There’s nothing of real interest to strangers in my phone calls anyway. And besides, you’d have to be a sort of a peeping tom to want to listen in on strangers’ conversations, anyway. Not my type of job.

What really irks me is that every little footstep off the beaten path gets documented somewhere. Not that it’s happened to me, but say I get in a brawl and get locked up overnight, then sort things out in the morning. That little brush with the law may affect me for years to come, even though that’s not the type of person I am. I may regret it, I may not usually do those things, it may be that it just sort of happened, but it’s going to stay on my record. And the payback’s brutal. I may not get new jobs, and if I want to attend classes at some school, I may not be able to get in. It may even affect my credit history. It’s all because of a stupid system that tracks one’s every legal move with no discernment.

This whole mess wouldn’t be a bad thing if there were only one system, and updates to that system were handled properly. But no, there are hundreds and thousands of various government databases, and data from those databases flows into private background check databases and clearinghouses, until there are copies of that single incident all over the place. I may be able to get the government to edit out that little troublesome incident, but there’s no way to track down all of the other digital copies of that record and make sure they get changed. That’s VERY disturbing.

Just do a search on Google for background checks. There are a ton of websites where you can check details about anyone. It used to be that only law enforcement officials were able to conduct such searches, but now any Joe Blow with a credit card can find out information about anyone. That really gets my goose! What right does some freak somewhere have to know stuff about me? Exactly how have our public officials let this happen? You can find out anything: properties, debts, criminal record, demographic information and possibly income, address, phone number, marriage and birth information, anything. I find this VERY DISTURBING.

What’s worse, who knows where these businesses get their data from, and how often they update their information? Looks to me like most are fly-by-nite operations that only care about having a record about someone, not the record. If they list bad information about me, how do I go about changing it? I can’t possibly contact every single one of these shady operations. Yeah, I call them shady, because I think they have absolutely no right to my private information. Only licensed law enforcement officials (read certified and cleared government employees) ought to have the right to view my aggregated private information. Yet these people profit from MY private information by selling it to whoever wants to get it. This disgusts and angers me.

Anyway, what got me started down this warpath? Those of you who know me know that I like old movies. Remember scenes from those movies where people would get into brawls, or there’d be some misunderstanding, and they’d get booked? They’d spend the night in jail, get out in the morning, and be done with it. Everyone would laugh about it. That’s how it should be for the occasional offense. It should NOT affect one’s career, education and finances. Everyone messes up here and there. These mistakes should not be recorded for posterity, or if they are, they should not be made available to every idiot that wants to look at them. It just isn’t right. And no, I’m not talking about serious or repeat offences.

We may have modernized our data storage and retrieval, but we’ve lost our good, old common sense about how to use it.

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Reviews

Music and Lyrics (2007)

Music and Lyrics (2007)Ligia and I went to see Music and Lyrics (2007) tonight, and we loved it. It’s a love story told in a funny, endearing, modern way. The characters are believable, the movie enjoyable, and the message uplifting.

In a nutshell, 80s has-been pop star Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant) is offered the chance to write a hit song for Cora Corman, a rising modern pop star. The problem is he’s got to do it in 36 hours. Desperate, he looks around for help and finds Sophie, his plant-watering girl (Drew Barrymore), has an unexpected talent with words and rhymes. After much coaxing, he convinces her to help him write the song, and they find out they get along great. As a matter of fact, they fall in love. But when Cora wants to change the song to suit her pathetic tastes, Alex (Hugh) and Sophie (Drew) clash and separate. They’re brought back together in a most wonderful way in the end. I don’t want to spoil it for you, so I won’t tell you how.

We found ourselves laughing out loud throughout the movie. We loved the 80s jokes. I in particular got a kick out of the name of Alex’s band, “Pop!” — that’s because my last name is Pop. I can’t really help it — every time pop music is mentioned somewhere, a subtle smirk finds its way to my face. As long as I’m talking about the music, the songs in the movie were great! Those tunes are now stuck in my head and Ligia and I determined the only way to get them out is to buy the album.

We also enjoyed the not so subtle skewering of brainless celebs and new age fads. I want to congratulate the writers and the director of this movie for their witty take on this plague. Generally speaking, instead of a meaningless parade of “religious” superficiality, I’d like to see more sincerity and less show when it comes to religion of any kind in show business. Whatever the various religions of these actors and singers are, I’d like to see changes in their lives, not outward masks and clueless mimicry. I’d like to see them stop forcing their religion on the people they work with, and instead focus on fixing themselves.

On the whole, this is a great movie, and I highly recommend seeing it. It’s enjoyable, funny, worthwhile and uplifting.

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Reviews

Mighty Joe Young (1998)

Mighty Joe Young (1998)Ligia and I bought Mighty Joe Young (1998) on DVD a while back, and it sat in our library, waiting to be viewed, for a few months. We finally got the chance to see it tonight. We didn’t know quite what to expect, but we were rather pleasantly surprised. It’s what I would call a good movie. The plot, although a bit thin in some spots, was tied together well. The characters were believable where it mattered. It was easy to root for Joe, Gregg O’Hara (Bill Paxton) and Jill Young (Charlize Theron). We have a simple litmus test: if we can sit down to enjoy the movie without being bothered by the way it was made, then we like it. This movie passed the test just fine.

The best part of the movie was Joe Young himself – a huge, artificial gorilla that its creator, Rick Baker, somehow managed to make very believable. The movement (gestures, facial grimaces, walk and stride) seemed very natural. It was very easy to forget Joe was not real and actually see him as Joe, a gigantic gorilla very out of his element in Los Angeles. As a matter of fact, this movie was nominated for an Oscar because of its great special effects.

This 1998 version is a remake of an original 1949 movie, made after a screenplay by Ruth Rose. The original story was written by Merian C. Cooper, who also developed and produced the original King Kong (1933). Somehow I think the gorilla in this movie looked and behaved much better than the original stop-motion figurine in the 1949 version — although there’s a certain element of nostalgia that’s associated with those special effects.

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