DVD Voice

One of the movies up for the Best Picture oscar is Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. It was released today, and well, wanting to be up on the Academy Award nominees, and see one of the winners (Mo’Nique wins Best Supporting Actress for this role). Can’t really say that I knew what to expect from this one.

In short, it’s an Oprah Winfrey presented story about an overweight inner city teenager who is pregnant with her second child. It shares with you her struggles to obtain a life and her strength to better herself and pull herself out of the unfortunate circumstances which are not her fault.

It’s a tough one to watch. It’s hard to see how cruelly people can treat each other – but on the flip side it is amazing how far a little kindness goes. I don’t know that I can really empathize well with the characters here, because honestly I can’t imagine myself in that kind of situation – but I know it has to be really hard. If you take the time to watch this and honestly feel what’s going on, you can’t help but feel grateful for your life, no matter how hard you think you have it. I know I don’t have it very good, but in comparison my gratitude meter has gone up.

P.S. It is also amazing to see how the character changes over time as the education she is getting (and honestly it isn’t a whole lot) sinks in and makes her more refined and “with it” if that makes sense.

Rated R. 109 minutes (1 hour 49 minutes). Profanity out the wazoo!

I didn’t get any time over the weekend to watch anything. And I didn’t get to see the Oscars presentation last night even. This is probably the first year ever that I’ve seen more than 1 or 2 of the contenders. Oh well, next year!

Tonight I watched Audition, Takashi Miike’s horror film from Japan. It’s about a man in Japan who has his wife die of an illness about 7 years earlier. He is prompted by his son that he should marry again, so he decides he will. Not knowing how to meet women, he takes the advice of a friend or co-worker (I could never really tell which) and holds a fake “audition” and views the women. He’s enamored with one and calls her later a few times, they go to dinner, etc.

He comes in to talk to his son one day who suspects right away his father might have a girlfriend. His father confirms it and that they are going off on a trip for the weekend and he’ll ask her to marry him. He also mentions he’ll introduce her to his son sometime soon! (weird!) Anyway, that’s when the horror element starts up. And I thought it was rather creepy, but nothing that would keep me up at night.

After watching it I looked at a few extras and found that this movie ranks #11 of the 100 scariest. Eli Roth and Rob Zombie both declare how creepy it is. That’s when I see a few scenes and realize that the glitches I thought might be effects were the video skipping. So, I missed a hunk of the gory stuff on this DVD. NetFlix sent one that didn’t play right. So, I’m off to their page to report a defective disk. When you report one as unplayable or defective you have the option to have them send a replacement the next business day. I got the gist of this one, so I think I’ll just have them send the next title!

If you like horror and a little gore and want something that is more creepy that your ordinary horror, you’ll like this one. Be prepared to read the Japanese sub-titles as I couldn’t get the English audio track to play – but I’m thinking now maybe it didn’t have that track even though it was listed in the cycle of audio tracks from my remote. Anyway, enough of my problems!

Rated UR (Unrated). 115 minutes (1 hour 55 minutes). Almost zero profanity – at least the parts I actually did see. I saw one scene where an auditioning girl stripped down to her panties and you got a glimpse of her nice boobs. Gore and violence - torture and dismemberment, if that’s your thing.

This is the big movie version of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. Everyone on the planet has probably read this book — except me. I didn’t really know what to expect it to be about besides it was a little boy’s imagination. I just finished watching it and maybe it’s one of those kind of movies where you need to let it sink in for a while before you really know what you think. I don’t know what I think of it.

As I got into it I thought it would be an imaginative child’s world – and it is – but I didn’t really expect at the heart of it to be about relationships. Honestly. Relationships and how we do little things or say things or don’t say things that someone else doesn’t quite understand what we really feel and so they get upset and want to leave. It was through Max’s eyes and you can see how as child he doesn’t entirely understand what is going on either, but as King he’s supposed to make it better. And I felt for the guy .. honestly, because here I am, pretty old (too old actually) and I don’t understand relationships either! How do you genuinely let someone know you really care and yet not come off as wimpy, or needy/clingy, or any of the other negatively implied attitudes? And then I saw the one character who was smart, Goat, but who no one listened to what he said or wanted to include him – they just treated him like he would always be there because he wanted to be around them. I feel like that, a lot … how should he remedy that? And then there are lots of times that the characters make you feel alone with them. And that gnawing loneliness that saps the joy out of living. I know its important to be ok with being alone, but as social creatures we aren’t supposed to perpetually be alone. So this opens a whole bucketload of questions, and they just remain unanswered. (Yes, you aren’t supposed to let movies answer life’s questions for you, I know). But the whole movie really left me feeling sad. I understand where Max was coming from, I had in some ways a similar childhood experience, I just didn’t run as wild as he did. Which, I guess means I was more easily overlooked.

James Gandolfini, Max Records, Cahterine Keener, and Catherine O’Hara all do a very good job with the voices. The suits that the big giant monster puppets wear are very well done – they look like monsters! The movie is visually stunning and fun to watch. Worth repeated viewings. After I got done I so wished I’d picked up the bluray from Blockbuster instead.

What do you think? If you read the book does it follow it well? Do you get any meanings or messages from this film?

Rated PG. 101 minutes (1 hour 41 minutes). Violence of a kind.

Tonight I needed a break, and Ponyo fit the bill very well! This is a Japanese cartoon, it is distributed here in the US by Walt Disney, but it is a animation by Hayao Miyazaki (of Kiki’s Delivery Service, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, etc). The drawings were top-notch. Very beautiful to see and the story was simple and pleasing.

Great for kids – and since I’m not really much of a grown-up (I’m a waste of age) I enjoyed it! The voice cast for the English dubbed version was very good, easy to listen to. Tina Fey played one of the main characters and her husband was voiced by Matt Damon – even though he wasn’t in much of the movie.

The movie is about the underwater keeper of the seas. His daughter escapes and sees a little boy and she decides that she wants to be human. Because she uses a little bit of magic to turn herself human and escape the ocean, it messes up the balance and the world is on the verge of being destroyed. Unless they can pass the test.

If you are a kid, or just a kid at heart, this is an enjoyable evening. Just throw out any ideas before you watch, and don’t make yourself think you have to only watch grown-up movies. Get some popcorn and live a little!

Rated G. 101 minutes (1 hour 41 minutes).

Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler (300’s King Leonidis) are in tonight’s Law Abiding Citizen. Clyde Shelton (Butler) has his wife and daughter killed during a home invasion by two men. They are caught and are in the justice system when Nick Rice (Foxx) cuts them a deal. One of the two guys agrees to cooperate and testify against the other one in exchange for just a prison sentence. The guy who cooperates was actually the one doing the killing. (But, because of the felony murder rule, the other guy was just as guilty as if he had killed them). Shelton is upset that they were not prosecuted and that DNA was tossed on technicalities, etc. So, he quietly waits his time and begins setting up his plan for revenge. He finds and catches the guy who did the actual murder in a very slick way – and proceeds to do a real number on him – they tell you what, but you don’t see much of it, if any. Soon, he’s arrested for the murder and while in prison more people associated with his wife’s death are killed. Who’s doing it? Why? Will Clyde Shelton be found guilty?

This movie asks a lot of interesting questions of you. About justice and whether our justice system is not functioning well. It makes you think about vigilantism, and what really is right. Is it just what meets the letter of the law, is it what lets you sleep at night. It does expose a lot of what is wrong with the justice system and legal field, but how is it that we are to change it to make it better?

This movie was rather good. It kept my interest the entire time very well. And up until nearly the end did it become apparent what was going on. I can’t say that it was entirely satisfying as a film, but good and entertaining. Worth the evening. If you like drama/thrillers, you should enjoy this.

Rated R. 108 minutes (1 hour 48 minutes). Language and violence.

Last night was fun. Cabin Fever … campers, in the woods, horror, etc. Tonight. Ummm … not so much! Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, is a follow-up to 2002’s Cabin Fever by Eli Roth. This movie is directed by T.I. West – and apparently even he tried to disown it. It has the same contaminated water from Cabin Fever, the same goofy deputy, and the water carries a virus. The similarities stop there. This one was not clever, wasn’t enjoyable and not worth your time to watch it.

It’s a high school, they are having a prom. The school gets a shipment of Down Home Water, the water company who pumps water from Cabin Fever 1’s lake. The kids get to the prom and someone makes punch using the bottled water. Everyone at the prom is carrying a small cup of punch and sipping it. Some people who have had the bottled water earlier in the day are ok all the way until the prom. Others who drink the punch and contaminated water shows symptoms almost immediately. It causes you to forcibly vomit blood and then die. Or lie around painfully watching all your skin swell up and ooze. Then the Feds show up and think it would be a great idea to just lock the school and go inside and shoot everyone. Even after they have chained the front doors, 15 minutes later some kids finally decide to go out the back door which isn’t locked or being watched yet. Ugh.

Like I said – pathetic.

Rated R. 87 minutes (1 hour 27 minutes). Profanity. Lots, because you know its high school kids. Some nudity, for instance topless strippers who are diseased, a couple of butts, and one guy in particular shows everything down below and – well, come to think of it, that is the horror of the movie – makes you want to wash your eyes out with clorox or something. Mostly gorey stuff blood oozing, blood flying, etc. Mercifully the entire movie is short, but not quite short enough.

With the recent release of Cabin Fever 2, I thought it might be a good one to watch, but first I’d like to see the first one of them, so I had NetFlix send out Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever. I believe this was Eli’s first film as a director. I quite enjoyed this – it made for a good Saturday evening entertainment and has me a little stoked that maybe Cabin Fever 2 might be at least partly as good.

Don’t get me wrong, this move isn’t great. It could have been better than it was, but it isn’t bad. It isn’t a typical horror movie, and you figure out what is really going on pretty early. But it does do thing you don’t expect and is entertaining the whole way through. I honestly expected a different kind of cabin fever going in to this – I didn’t read to much about it before hand.

One neat feature is the “Chick Vision” that lets you watch the movie and gray hands will block parts of the movie as you watch it through your fingers. This is for the scarier parts. I would have imagined though that chicks watching this wouldn’t hold their hands up until the scarier parts have already started, but in this feature they start up a little bit early … not totally a bad thing.

Just keep in mind that these guys are camping way out in the middle of nowhere in a rented cabin. The cell phones don’t work and there are all those “eerie” nature noises the city kids encounter. Add on top of this that Eli throws things at you, such as the deer and the dog scenes, will more than likely catch you off guard. Enjoy!

Rated R. 92 minutes (1 hour 32 minutes). Profanity – your typical wild weekend away college kids. You see topless females, but a movie like this kind of felt like it needed a few more – but still, no complaints. Lots of blood and goriness.

Tonight’s movie went into corporate crime, with The Informant! starring Matt Damon in Steven Soderbergh’s film. I must say that I enjoyed it.

Basically it’s a story about America’s top executive to turn whistleblower. He beings working with the FBI about the price fixing going on at ADM. He works with them for over 2 1/2 years getting video and recordings of meetings, but in the end it begins to also appear that he’s embezzling and he gets prosecuted as well.

What’s not to enjoy about this film — the happy-go-lucky bouncy music set against a backdrop of big corporate deals, white collar crimes, FBI agents, and possible jail time, and the while Mark Whitacre goes merrily along seemingly uncaring about the lies he’s telling or when or if they’ll catch up with him. It’s neat to see him just invent (I think) something new when he realizes he’s being discovered and how most of it then checks out, at least for a while. I say “I think” here because he’s so full of stories that you have a hard time really realizing which one of them, if any, are factual. He suffers from bipolar disorder, even as the forged letter from his would-be psychologist states in very specific terms. He must be a brilliant guy to keep all this straight for as long as he did, and that 2 million, no 5 million, or is it 7.5 million? I think it was 9 million, that he embezzled. Maybe it was 11…

Entertaining film! You don’t really learn anything and the drama isn’t really there, its just downright entertaining. So, have an enjoyable evening.

For me, the most sobering thing (aside from the white collar crime, don’t do that) is that in 1992 people with desk jobs were making $100K. When do I get a raise? I’m way underpaid!

Also interesting is ADM’s statement about the movie you can see by clicking here.

Rated R. 108 minutes (1 hour 48 minutes). Why it’s rated R, I don’t know! There is some profanity. No blood, no nudity, no violence aside from the alleged hit in the head by a briefcase.

This weeks sees the release of Cold Souls, a film by Sophie Barthes starring and about Paul Giamatti. It seems that it is possible to extract your soul and store it. So a burdened Paul Giamaitti, who is playing himself in the film, is told about a service that does just that. And to help him do a stage play easier he decides to have his removed and stored. Only thing is that he discovers being soulless is not such a good idea. The service tries to convince him the soul removal has done what was promised he agrees to renting a Russian poet’s soul to help him play the part in a Chekov. It works, but he decides he wants his own soul back — after repeated comments from his wife that his skin felt “scaly” (when he had no soul) to that he smelled different and seemed different after he got the poet’s soul.

Going back to the clinic he finds that his soul is missing … perhaps they shipped it to the warehouse in New Jersey by mistake. Rather than spoil any more, I’ll let you watch it if you desire. I give it a good rating. Once it started I imagined how good I expected it to be, and it didn’t meet my expectations. It was enjoyable and opens more questions if you’ll let yourself think about them.

There is an article on VenusZine about the movie and the director and her ideas behind it.

Questions like: What is our soul? What does it look like? Do we need it? What happens if you “lose” your soul. Is the soul basically good or evil? Can a soul be dried up? Is it really possible to lose your soul? Do emotions or lack of them make up who you are as a person or is it something else? Would you swap souls with someone else to get away from the pain, emptiness, or worries that you think your soul has?

I think it does slightly reinforce the meaning that you should be happy with yourself. That looking back on your life there are lots of good things and good memories and you should relish those and the people who you share your life with.

The quote by David Strathairn who played Dr. Flintstein in the movie is a great one. “Now, have you ever visited the circus and seen one of these creatures standing quietly while tied to a small wooden stick? You see, when the elephant is young and relatively weak, it is tied to an immovable stick. So later, no matter how large and strong he becomes, he continues to believe that he cannot free himself. Many intelligent people are like circus animals. They never question their self-imposed limitations. And the soul can become just such a stick. They need to break the chains.” It is important to break free of those self-imposed limits, you just don’t do it by removing, disregarding, or destroying your soul.

Rated PG-13. 101 minutes (1 hour 41 minutes). Some profanity. Some total female nudity, you just see butt and boobs on a live model at an art studio.

Tonight I took on Amelia, Mira Nair’s biographically based account of some of Amelia Earhart’s adventures. This film stars Hillary Swank as Amelia, Richard Gere, and Ewan McGregor.

I must say, this is a beautiful movie. It’s not 100% true to real life, as few movies — which are entertainment ever are — but as far as what it does do for you it does well. I’m sure we are all familiar with Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, the first one to fly it solo, and who disappears attempting to circumnavigate the globe.

What this movie does show is a woman who knew something she wanted in life, that is to fly. And how the people around her try to ride along on her coattails or use her to get ahead themselves. It’s about how she empowers herself and inspires other women as well as men and children, to dream big and to reach for those dreams. It’s about how her husband discovered that sometimes you can best love someone by letting them be who they are and as he discovered letting someone go to pursue their dreams doesn’t mean you lose them, love is a powerful thing and can bring people back.

And possibly best said by Amelia in this movie, when you have a dream and something you want to do “Don’t let anyone turn you around.”

In short, a beautiful film showing the wonder and spectacle of flight and a entertaining way to spend an evening.

Rated PG. 120 minutes (2 hours).