Tag: movies

What’s so special about a dog? Marley & Me has the answer. Of course, all dogs in movies are special, and your dog is also special. Dogs in general are special except Cujo and that mutt of yours that shat and pissed everywhere in your house while tearing things up. Of course, that can also describe the adorable Marley.

It’s a movie of how a dog touched the lives of its owners as they grew from a couple to a family. You know how that works: meet cute, go over the good times, show the trouble with the dog, go over the bad times, the kids show up and overtake the dog, they grow up, they grow older, the dog grows older, the dog will die. Then the lights come up and the little girls behind you are sobbing their eyes out.

Dogs are special. This movie isn’t.

3 of 5 stars.

There’s a lot of fancy CG effects in The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons. There’s the site of a Brad Pitt growing younger as he ages. There’s a riveting attack on a German U-boat. There’s a wonderful, old-timey gag on lightning strikes. And there is Cate Blanchett — young and old.

There was the CG effects, and it dominated every scene of the movie to a point that I had to think about what wasn’t real and was. Then I thought about how they pulled that off. Did they put Brad Pitt’s head on a kid? A midget? Or was he completely built up as a CG model like Neo in the later Matrix films. The most intriguing CG was the your Cate Blanchett. How did they graft her face on that body so seamlessly? Or did they digitally stretch and shape her to look young and svelte?

The effects really got in the way of the story. It was a short story from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but was mainly written and adapted by the guy who did Forest Gump. It shows. Benjamin Button seemed to go from one thing to the next just as Forest did. So the story was rather meager. It was filled with love, but was so boring.

And it was long. The problem was that Brad Pitt is in his 40s and when he reached the look of his natural age, the movie was already two hours old. We followed that dude to the grave and it felt like it.

It also had an unfortunate framing device of the old Cate in the hospital dying and her daughter (Julia Ormand!!!!) reading Benjamin’s diary in New Orleans as hurricane Katrina bears down on them. You get too worried about the present to enjoy the past. I’m hoping Julia Ormand made it out of New Orleans to safety.

Just not that good and intriguing. A disappointment from Fincher (!) whose last film was very, very good.

2 of 5 stars.

I am a Slumdog Millionaire only because I know the answers to the questions you ask. I don’t know everything. I know enough from my experiences, and not enough from my lack of experience. I am street smart if not book smart. I am lucky that things that happened to me are things that are easily to remember: the worst outhouse in Mumbai, the religious riots, Fagin, the three mouseketeers, etc., etc. I use this too my advantage. If there was a wall with pictures on it, I would’ve used that too. I am smart that way. I am a slumdog millionaire, and I know that my answers are correct because I am loved.

So it was written.

4 of 5 stars.

Australia is as big as the continent and takes as long to get to the end
as it does to get from Darwin to Sydney. Now I don't really know if
that's true, but it sounds like something you would say to make your
opening statement sound masterful. I don't know about the geographical
relationship between the two cities, and I don't know if it would take
just three hours to travel between them. Go google-map it and find out.
I just needed a hooky opening line for this review.Australia's hook is that Nicole Kidman, a bonafide aussie, plays an
English lady who arrives Down Under to pursue her dead husbands dream of
being a cattle baron. Just like other Westerns of the American Old
West. I can think that Kidman tries to tame the wild Outback, but it is
the Outback that she breaks her and she embraces it as she embraces the
young heart of the aborigine kid. Kidman starts as the classic duck out
of water. I think she would eventually become like Barbara Stanwyck in
Forty Guns, "a high riding woman with a whip," but only in my dreams.Then there is the sexiest man alive for 200x, Hugh Jackman. Water
caressing is sun baked body. Whew. Who wouldn't fall for that? He
should've been dumping the bucket of water on himself for the entire
movie. The girls would've loved that.The movie is long, but moves. The cattle drive does wonders to make it
work. Yet, the commercials and the trailer led me to believe that this
was Pearl Harbor all over again. The attack on Darwin were pretty much
over in minutes and appeared in the finale. I expected more.Overall, it is a much better movie than I anticipated it to be. I don't
think it would go on to be an Oscar contender, because it felt too much
like a Lonesome Dove or other CBS sweeps week western. 3 of 5 stars.