I seem to have gone on a serious bender when it comes to my recent Netflix viewings. All of them are pretty much dramas, yet there's only one film here that really stands out.
Okay, I guess Jennifer's Body is not a drama. Nor a comedy. Nor a film that anyone with even half a mind should remotely consider seeing. It proved once and for all that Megan Fox can't open a film on her own, reducing her to arm candy status for the rest of her career, until she plays some outrageous hag on a made for HBO movie and people sit up and take notice. JB is essentially a horror movie, about a teenage succubus who preys on the boys around her. It doesn't hurt that she looks like Megan Fox, either, but even that charm wilts about halfway through the flick. Amanda Seyfried plays the "good" girl/BFF who has to stop her. Diablo Cody (Juno) wrote the script, but eventually she's going to have to graduate from high school and write something for people over the age of 20.
A Serious Man is the latest from the Coen Brothers (I just watched their best, Fargo, a couple of days ago on cable) and its a great film, but nothing that I would want to watch again. In usual Coen fashion it has an ending that leaves you baffled and WTF-ing, but getting there is all the fun. The "serious man" of the title is Larry Gopnick (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) who is going through a tough spell in his mid-60s life. His kids don't respect him, his wife is fooling around with another guy, and his career as a professor at a local college is falling apart. It's not a pleasant film to watch, but it's fascinating and compelling and definitely dark.
The Hurt Locker won both the Best Picture Oscar and the Best Director Oscar for its director, Kathryn Bigelow. To me it was a film that was just a collection of scenes strung together, not telling any real complete story; in fact, you could divide this film up into its individual scenes and put them back in an entirely different order and it wouldn't make much of a difference. I was literally sitting here waiting for one of the leads to die. It's wonderfully shot and it certainly captures the tension and atmosphere of wartime Iraq, but ultimately I had to ask why did it win Best Picture?
Amelia is the story of aviatrix Amelia Earhart who went missing over the Pacific in the late 1930s, never to be found. Oscar bait Hilary Swank was definitely diving for another gold boy on this one, but she comes up way short. Aided and abetted by Richard Gere as her publisher/husband, Earhart is revealed to be a forward-looking woman of her time, not just in the air, but on the ground and in the bedroom, too. Swank looks incredibly handsome (that's the only word for it) as the golden girl, but the film suffers from the same fate as the real-life Amelia: She just kind of gets lost and disappears.
The Men Who Stare at Goats is neither drama or comedy. It can best be described as "when bad movies happen to good people." You would think with George Clooney, Ewan MacGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey involved there would have to be something here to attract them, but this back and forth tale of the Army's quest to start a paranormal department--bouncing from the 1970s to early 2000s Iraq--is so uneven and boring, you might be able to stare into the future and figure out when exactly you're going to reach for the remote. The titular goats show up about one hour in and offer a few--well, two--laughs, because let's face it, goats are funny, but that's about it.
Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is one of the most moving books I've read in years, and it ranks up there with other "told by children" novels such as To Kill A Mockingbird and Dandelion Wine on my list of favorites. Except for the fact that the young girl telling the tale is dead, the victim of a child molester in the mid-1970s. Peter Jackson chose this to be his follow-up to King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a quieter, smaller film. Everyone on screen is great, from Saoirse Ronan as the dead girl, Susie Salmon, to Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg as her parents, and Stanley Tucci as the creepy neighbor who does the deed. But Jackson and company can never decide what they want this film to be: tragic family story, trippy look at what Heaven is really like, or murder mystery. It tries to be all three and fails across the board. It's still a fascinating visualization of a tough-to-film novel and worth your time, if only to see Ronan's star-making performance.
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