After. Life

After. Life (2009)


Writer: Agnieszka Wojtowitcz-Vosloo, Paul Vosloo, Jakub Korolczuk
Director: Agnieszka Wojtowitcz-Vosloo
Starring: Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson, and Justin Long

Synopsis
a schoolteacher in a relationship on the rocks gets into a car accident and ends up at a funeral home. is she actually dead?

The Woman
this reminded me of "poison ivy". the plot and writing like a lifetime movie but it's just a little too racy to be on tv. 13-16 year old girls who love v.c. andrews would like this movie. there was a lot of christina ricci boobies and if you look just a little harder in a scene or two some fly-away peek-a-boo bush. the "mystery part about her actually being dead or not was fairly evident, and the ending was totally dumb. just look at the title. there you go. if you like that kind of stupid...well.....yeah. truly eh. so eh i have nothing left to say about it.

It's Complicated

It's Complicated (2009)


Writer: Nancy Meyers
Director: Nancy Meyers
Starring: Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin

Synopsis
divorced empty nester finds herself having an affair with her ex-husband and having fun doing it.

The Woman
this was alright. it was better than i thought it would be anyway. i fear empty nest syndrome and my kid is only two. i like to think that it is actually like a rebirth when you're only responsible for yourself again. what a strange transition it must be. it probably helps enormously that this writer/ director that focuses on the love lives of women in their 50's/60's always makes her characters loaded and successful. this movie was good at pointing out the complication of relationships of the entire family dynamic when divorce is the way life has been. what things were missed. i.e. the glory of family dinner. i also found it weird that this woman would revel in having the love drama of a highschooler. who wants to deal with that crap at that age? the empty nest thing apparently went into her head and suddenly there was a mid-life crisis thing going on at the same time. i don't know. it's complicated . not really, but it's funnier if i leave it at that. a solid 2.6666666666666 stars

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)


Writer: Eric Roth (screenplay), F. Scott Fitzgerald (short story)
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchette

Synopsis
Screwy-looking baby is born, baby-sized but with geezer symptoms.  He grows and loses symptoms and gains erections and does some things.  One of the things he does is a Fanning-cum-Blanchette.  He's a selfish jackass.  She's a selfish bitch. The end.



The Woman
it actually makes me laugh that this was a SHORT story. 2 hours and 48 minute movie, but short story. they must have taken it page for page, word for word, except the present in this piece of garbage was 2005 during katrina, for which, i'm pretty certain, f. scott fitzgerald was not around to see or write a short story about. this was the curious case of why the hell is this movie so long and why won't it end? i was actually giddy when it ended and rejoiced in the fact that it was finally over and i will never have to subject myself to it ever again. i laughed with moster about an hour in that we should take the advice and moral of the story and not waste our lives away by finishing this movie. seriously, this was about as predictable as an episode of "airwolf" or wait! no, better. it was as predictable as an episode of "full house"! yes! that is it! why didn't full house get any recognition by the academy? i see these two things as interchangeable.

it took ten minutes of voice over bullcrap for brad pitt to tell the audience that cate blanchette was hit by a taxi, when from 3 minutes before the scene you could tell that was exactly what was going to happen. i was yelling at the screen "get on with it!" we get it already! i couldn't wait for one of them to die. i was kind of hoping it would be waaaaay messier than it actually was. they both deserved to suffer. i suppose cate blanchette was wasting away from cancer, but still. more pain please. i want something comparable to my ass pain from sitting on the couch. perhaps a pleasant trip to vietnam in the late sixties? a napalm accident. horribly maimed by a land mine. fingers and most of the legs turned to meat chunks falling from the sky. back to cate blanchette's cancer. was it entirely necessary to keep going back to her whining incoherently from a hospital bed? cut most of that out and it could have been an 80 minute movie. eeeehhhh. i'm going on too long about this myself. if you haven't seen this don't bother. she's a bitch and he's an ass and they don't live happily ever after.

needless to say we both got up frequently an left the room and didn't even care to pause it.

MOster
The makeup in this production was above average.

Taken

Taken (2008)


Written by Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen
Directed by Pierre Morel
Starring Rob Roy, Jean Grey, Shannon (God's friggin' blight on Humanity)

Synopsis
ex cia(?) guy's 17 year old daughter goes to paris and gets abducted by human traffickers. he goes out to find her. he kills a lot of people. car chase. fight scenes.

MOster

This is a standard super-solo-retired-cop-gets-revenge movie.  On the one hand, direction brings atypical clarity to frenetic action sequences; on the other hand it's a little too much in the much department.  Including the music in the prologue, exposition is clunky and overwrought.

There's something to be said about walking along a forest path somewhere like New England or the northwest, where even within the individual days of a season the goings on vary widely. The trip to the end of this movie took us along a ruler-straight desert road where the only things that change are the detritus left by passing motorists or the occasional abandoned vehicle. 

The Woman
this was ok. i was kind of expecting better. it was pretty typical action flick. liam neeson's part could have been played by arnold schwarzenegger, or bruce wilis, or any one of those mid-nineties action guys. this reminded me of "commando" a lot. it was that kind of movie. replace shannon from "lost" with alyssa milano. it's kind of disappointing as a besson movie. the bar is set a little higher for him and he failed to reach it by a mile or two with this one. very shme. forgettable.

Fame

Fame (2009)

Writer: Allison Burnett (screenplay) Christopher Gore (original fame guy)
Director: Kevin Tancharoen
Starring: a whole bunch of kids you'll probably never see again except in guest spots on "law & order" and "CSI" and that chick that was on "so you think you can dance" that one season a couple of years ago... twitch's partner i think

Synopsis
this beautiful piece of cinema follows the students of new york's performing arts highschool from their audition day through all four years of their matriculation. beautiful.

The Woman
this was like watching over four years of a soap opera edited down to and hour and a half. you barely know who the characters are, you don't give a crap about any of them, and you only have a vague picture of the stories of each character. the original "fame" was so much better in portraying character development. even though the same things happened in this one it was piss poor. i didn't even pay attention to the big show scenes. you know why. i didn't give a poop. i used to love watching terrible movies like this a.k.a center stage, the prince and me, crap like that. stuff obviously made for teenage girls, and i had that same sick glee about watching this, but it wasn't even cheesy enough for me to laugh at. it was just bad. and they dropped the whole part about the ghetto kid knocking up the rich bitch ballerina. that was the best part of the original. am i right?

it also took me half of the movie to figure out when they would say "P.A" they weren't talking about pennsylvania.

i shall continue thinking of b.d. wong's part in "the karate kid part 2" when i think of fame. yes indeed that puts a smile on my face. "kamiko-chan come to the dance tonightah. aaah, bling youl fliendah" yes indeed.

Valhalla Rising

Valhalla Rising (2009)

Director:Nicolas Winding Refn
Writer: Nicolas Winding Refn, Roy Jacobsen
Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Maartin Stevenson, Gordon Brown

Synopsis
a super tough mute viking slave guy escapes his massuhs and winds up with a group of christian dudes who all collectively somehow end up in the new world. oh and he also has a little kid following him.

The Woman
boooooooooooring. it was like "aguirre, wrath of god" except it was no herzog film, it made much less sense and with about 90% less dialog. the lack of dialog spotlights the horrendous, bore a hole through your skull, feedback soundtrack which does not warm my heart to this movie. one- eye, the viking slave guy, is no doubt, bad ass, and i see the point the movie makers were trying to get across, but jeebus moose-teebus it was boring. i enjoyed the moments of extremely graphic violence and gore. a.k.a disembowelments, but these moments were incredibly few and far between. it was mostly just silence, and feedback. i didn't see the point of giving the historical text in the beginning about christianity taking over and all that. that was the only part of this movie that was obvious. in fact, the only reason i know the guys were vikings at all is the name of the movie, and the summary from netflix. boo hiss.

I Hate Valentine's Day

I Hate Valentine's Day (2009)

Director: Nia Vardalos
Writer: Nia Vardalos
Starring: Nia Vardalos, John Corbett

Synopsis
a flower shop owner who loves romance, has a set of rules about dating. to keep the romance alive she only dates people for five dates and then stops seeing them. enter john corbett.

The Woman
this was actually ok for a romantic comedy. it was predictable, but fun. maybe i was just in the right mood to see it, i don't know. i like john corbett. i think he's a cool cat. i also have an extremely soft spot for "connie and carla" also predictable, but somehow i can ignore that part. so. yeah. if you like any of the above keywords, you may like this movie. you just, like "connie and carla", have to ignore the last quarter of the movie.