The Avengers (2012)

Tags

Chris Evans, Drama, Fantasy, Joss Whedon, Mark Ruffalo, Movies, Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Science Fiction, The Avengers

puny review…

It’s good.  Real good.  Way to go Joss Whedon.

I haven’t even seen Incredible Hulk, Captain America, or Thor, and I didn’t feel like I was too far behind.

My only complaint would be that Loki wasn’t the most exciting villain.  Or maybe it was the performance by Tom Hiddleston that I wasn’t impressed with.  It’s hard to say.  It wasn’t terrible, but I think a more menacing villain usually works better.  He struck me as more bratty than menacing.

Most surprising element = how much I enjoyed Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow.  Whedon knows how to write interesting female characters that can also kick some tail, and Scarlett did a good job with all of it.

I probably don’t need to really sell anybody on this particular movie, but it’s definitely entertaining and worth a watch on the big screen.  Even the crying baby and talking kids in the theater didn’t ruin it!

Loki and a few hazy plot developments drop it to saaaayyy… 8.4/10

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Personal Favorite: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Tags

Drama, Elijah Wood, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Movie, Romance, Science Fiction, Tom Wilkinson

you were right, this is much more comfortable with clothes on...

R

Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson

Joel: Random thoughts for Valentines Day 2004:  Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.

When Joel (Carrey) finds out that Clementine (Winslet) has had the memory of their entire relationship erased, he undergoes the same procedure.  As he starts to encounter memories that he doesn’t want to lose, Joel tries to figure out a way to wake up from the procedure, or at least a way to hide the memories of Clementine somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind.

Well, it was Valentines Day and I was looking for something relevant to watch.  So, why not just go ahead and watch my favorite movie?

Where should I start with my praise?  How about Carrey and Winslet.  After seeing a bit of the soul-torture that is Ace Ventura, I basically despised Mr. Carrey.  But, he gradually started to win me over with roles in other movies, like Dumb and Dumber and The Truman Show.  Then came this movie, and the winning-me-over process was complete.  As for Winslet, well, she’s basically created one of my favorite characters of all time.  It’s amazing what she can do with subtle mannerisms and a simple look.  Plus, I think the accent she achieves is impressive.  She’s not just faking an American accent, but an American accent with a slight New York accent on top of it that only emerges here and there, which seems more realistic to me.  The greatness of the Clementine character can also be partly credited to the costume designers/wardrobe people.  Gotta love that orange sweatshirt (and matching hair).

Okay, on to the story now.  If you could erase someone from your memory…someone who you miss greatly or who hurt you terribly…would you?  Is it worth losing the good memories to get rid of the bad memories?  Or do we need all that pain in order to grow as people?  As Westley said in The Princess Bride, “life IS pain…anyone who says differently is selling something.”  You take away the pain, you take away life.

The movie begins with a meeting between the odd but charming Clementine and the quiet but “really nice” Joel.  They gravitate toward each other and immediately fall into conversation as though they’d known each other for a long time.  How could these two ever have problems?  Well, as the memory erase is started on Joel and we begin backtracking through their relationship, we get to see how they gradually grew apart.  Joel doesn’t communicate well, which then annoys Clementine, who then gets bored and angry all the time.  No wonder they both want each other gone.

But then come the good memories.  The moments Joel wants to hold on to.  So, at memory-Clementine’s suggestion, Joel tries to take her to the secret, hidden, embarrassing places in his mind.  Places he would never allow her when they were together.  I think this is brilliant writing by Charlie Kaufman.  I imagine he’s had this kind of problem in a relationship before and knows now that you need to be an “open book”, as Clementine tells Joel.  Showing that through this elaborate memory exploration is genius.

Michel Gondry’s inventive directing style is exactly what was needed to bring the story to life.  Apparently there were very few digital, post production tricks used, which is hard to believe at times.  Either way, it’s beautiful when it needs to be and nightmarishly dreamy when that’s called for.

I haven’t even touched on the story of the memory wipers.  Stan (Ruffalo) and Mary (Dunst) smoke weed, dance, and engage in other activities around Joel as his internal battle rages on.  Meanwhile, poor loser Patrick (Wood) is off trying to seduce the real life Clementine using all of the stuff he got from her and Joel’s files.  These stories seem a little extraneous at first, but once again Kaufman manages to weave them all back together perfectly.

This is getting a bit long, and I could probably go on longer about the music, the little details of the sets, and the performances of the supporting cast, but what’s the point?  You’ll probably just forget it all anyways…

I’ll close by saying, it’s probably not a perfect movie (but what is?), and I can actually understand why some wouldn’t like it nearly as much as I do, but…well, that’s the thing about favorite movies, they usually touch people in a very specific way.  For me, I can see myself in Joel a bit.  Not just because I’m nice, but because I’m sure I’ve uttered his phrase “my life just isn’t that interesting” many times.  Though, I’ve yet to have a Clementine come fluttering into my life unfortunately…

SOMEBODY out there has got the job of making up names for hair dye colors…

10 – .4 for a couple of parts that are a little slow or bothersome = 9.6

The Brothers Bloom (2009)

Tags

Adrien Brody, Comedy, Drama, Mark Ruffalo, Movie, Rachel Weisz, Romance, The Brothers Bloom

you fought a mummy, eh? well, I fought King Kong, so...yeah...

PG-13

Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz

Bloom: You don’t understand what my brother does.  He writes his cons the way dead Russians write novels…with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and s***.  And he wrote me as the vulnerable anti-hero…and that’s why you think you wanna kiss me.  It’s a con…

Stephen (Ruffalo) and Bloom (Brody) started out as con men early in life.  Stephen is the brains behind most of the schemes, and Bloom is tired of playing the characters that Stephen thinks up for him.  Bloom wants something real.  Stephen convinces him to do one last con with him, and Penelope (Weisz) is the mark.  It’s a complicated con, and Penelope ends up being a much more interesting and unusual mark than they expected.

I really really liked this movie.  It’s energetic (for most of its running time), funny, interesting, romantic, and even touching now and then.  Everybody seems to be having a blast making it, especially Rachel Weisz.  She’s as charming as I’ve ever seen her as the somewhat loopy Penelope.  She’s a lonely woman, rich via inheritance, living in a huge castle of a house.  As she tells bloom, she “collects hobbies”, meaning she sees something interesting, then learns how to do it.  This leads to a highly amusing montage of her talents, including juggling chainsaws while balancing on a very tall unicycle.

Brody is sympathetic as Bloom, the more passive of the two brothers.  He’s played so many roles in cons that he doesn’t even know the difference between real and fake emotions any more.  Is he falling in love with Penelope, or is it just acting?  I guess you’re a pretty good con man if even you can’t tell the difference.

At first, Ruffalo seemed like an odd choice to me as the more aggressive, genius brother who’s not afraid to get a little violent now and then, but he won me over pretty quickly.  He and Brody have a good chemistry that was really needed if this movie was going to work.

The setting all feels like it should be in the 1930s maybe, but then there’s cell phones and Lamborghinis, which place it clearly in a more modern era.  I guess the con men theme lends itself more to an older era, so the costumes and locations reflect that.  It’s strange, but it adds to the quirky, offbeat tone of the movie.

There’s solid acting, a good script, great visuals (and visual humor), good music, and likable characters.  It all adds up to a movie I definitely plan to see again.  Admittedly, in the end, the movie does start to get a little too convoluted and loses steam just a bit, but it’s still a satisfying conclusion to a great story.

You can make a pinhole camera out of a watermelon.

10 – 1.1 because it does get convoluted and overlong near the end = 8.9

Blindness (2008)

Tags

Blindness, Drama, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Movie

how's my hair? ha! just kidding...you're blind...

R

Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo

Doctor: (who is blind, addressing a room full of blind people)  Ok, I think he’s right.  If anyone’s willing to go, I think you should raise your hands.
Other person: …what?
Doctor: That’s about the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever suggested…

A strange “white blindness” starts to spread across the country, and the government, thinking a disease is responsible, begins packing the crippled people into containment facilities, leaving them to survive mostly on their own.  Julianne Moore plays a doctor’s wife who pretends she’s blind in order to accompany her husband to the facility he’s taken to.  Once inside, the question becomes will these people come together to help each other, or will it become every man and woman for themselves?

This comes close to being a fairly good movie, but it manages to fall a bit short.  It has an interesting, dream-like look to it throughout, which works pretty well to help us identify with the situation the characters are in.  It also does a good job of creating a miserable world inside the containment facility that all these people have to survive in, unsupervised by any sighted people to help them.  The stuff that doesn’t work is the heavy-handed message that if we’re all blind to appearances, things would be better in the world.  Seems like a noble message, but the movie seems to contradict its own premise as we see the different wards in the facility basically go to war with each other.

After several rapes and murders have occured, Danny Glover’s speech near the end about how he wishes things could stay this way, with everyone blind, seems foolish.  I suppose he’s just referring to the small group that has emerged from the facility alive, as friends, but we can’t forget the events that preceded their bonding moments.

There are good performances and some decent writing, though I thought Julianne Moore let things go too far with the other ward, to an unrealistic extent.  As the only person with sight there, she could have easily brought an end to the terrorizing that some of the characters were unleashing on the rest of the occupants.  Especially when the threat of mass rape entered into play.

In the end, I wanted to like the movie more than it seemed to let me like it.  The horribleness of the situation works well, but the message it seems to want to say doesn’t.  Also, if you noticed that I haven’t used any character names, that’s because nobody’s name is said in the movie.  That’s more of the effort to put everybody on equal ground.

10 – 2 for the message of the movie not really working well – 1.5 for unbelievable character motivations/actions – .5 for never really supplying any explanation, or even real theories or hints as to what is happening and why + .3 for a good sense of realism = 6.3