Reviews

Of course nothing of a masterpiece is to be expected from a movie whose premise is a neighborhood war between a married couple with a newly born and a bunch of guys from a frat house hellbent on partying. Still, if you're able to pass the first truly atrocious minutes (what can I say, I'm too old) set in the frat house you're in for a funny (if at times truly gross) comedy. I think all the hate the movie is getting on IMDb is the same reason I kind of appreciate it (again, I'm old): it looks like a frat comedy for a young audience, but the humor (although often crass) is more for a middle-aged audience. Recommended on a night when you don't have anything to do and are looking for a couple of carefree hours. The scene where Rogen and Byrne talk Barinholtz into one of their plans is truly hilarious.

I watched this movie in a theater while I was on vacation in Spain when it came out. I only paid 2 euros (more or less 3 dollars at the time), but I still felt I was ripped off.

Given the upcoming "reboot", and as I memory is getting worse and worse with time, I gave it another try on TV last night. It was worse than I remembered.

Here's a short list of the most severe shortcomings of this work. 1) A severe lack of action sequences. The director (Bryan Singer) was so focused on the "human" side and family issues of the protagonist that he forgot that a Superman movie is a superhero movie, that is, a movie full of action sequences. There is only one fast-paced scene. Definitely not enough. 2) A severely mistaken casting. Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane must be one of the least likable character ever seen. Her wooden performance and ever perfect hair and make-up provide no opportunity to relate to her story of a (supposedly) torn mother and wife. Let's not speak about her son. If talented kids in Hollywood have a hard time growing up (see Daniel Radcliffe, Drew Barrymore etc.) this boy is more than safe. 3) A severely wrong script. This may be related to shortcoming #1, but I cannot repeat it often enough. This is a superhero movie. Nobody called for an overlong and uninteresting family story that would be considered rather scant even for an afternoon on the Lifetime channel, let alone in what is meant to be an action packed blockbuster.

Action hero movie fans, please steer away from this like it's kryptonite. If I think that Bryan Singer got out of the X-Men 3 project (eventually disfigured by the inept hands of Brett Ratner)...everybody lost a good chance to do good.

Better best avoided.

Although it is from 5 years ago, the movie can sport truly marvelous graphics when it comes to landscapes (Antarctica, ocean, and space). It can compete with Wall-E without hesitation. The plot features a very nice and original idea, too. Too bad, really, too bad that such wonderful eye-candies and the surprisingly good storyline are ruined by an overlong and useless series of embarrassing singing sessions that, without adding anything to the development of the movie, transform it from a potential Pixar-like masterpiece into a cheap, awkward, tooth-cringing musical. If you can survive the singing parts, you will be rewarded with breathtaking and adventurous scenes. Whether the endurance was worth it or not, remains to be established.

Let's be honest, here. Nobody expects any real movie quality from a dance movie, except for beautiful and entertaining dance moves and a director who's skilled enough to shoot them adequately. Anybody complaining about the cheesiness of dialog or the non-existent plot is missing the point. Dance movies are cheesy by definition ("Dirty Dancing", anyone?), so the viewers must adopt a kind of "suspension of belief" and embrace what is being offered. Does anybody enjoy ballet or operas for their plot? Compared to an opera libretto, an episode of "Gossip Girl" is "Citizen Kane". "Streetdance" has the merit of presenting nice choreographies (especially the very interesting finale) accompanied by an enjoyable soundtrack, with also a bit of professional acting courtesy of Charlotte Rampling. The 3D effects offer a pleasant support to the dancers' efforts. It's an honest movie. It doesn't promise anything more than what it is.

I watched Cloverfield with a big, big delay with respect to its premiere. I was sort of turned off by all the very geeky hype surrounding this movie: nerds commenting on the trailer frame by frame, wasting their time on the Internet browsing through "secret" websites with mysterious numbers and code-names... moreover, "Lost" getting boring as hell shed a dim light on the whole J.J.Abrams world: did he lose his magic touch?, what if this is another invisible nonsense monster terrifying people on an island (in this case: Manhattan)? All these doubts prevented me from going to a theater, and so I only rented "Cloverfield" on a particularly dull evening. The movie? Not dull at all! The steady-cam technique gives a sense of reality and not, like in previous attempts, nausea. Never over the top, very effective special effects ensure more than a chill. Finally the nice unexpected gem: the acting. The young and not very famous cast delivered a very solid performance: we never had the hysterically screaming crowd on screen (and with a monster movie this is a strong temptation), but instead constantly tense and utterly believable drama. Bravo! The ultimate test for an excellent monster movie? When your friends who hate sci-fi tell you that the movie wasn't bad at all. Definitely a go on your home theater.

The Sixth Sense was really really good (and scary); Unbreakable was kind of boring (and definitely not scary); Signs was quite good (and really scary at some moments); The Village wasn't good nor scary. So, trying to extrapolate from the available data, I was expecting Lady In The Water to be both good and scary. Well... it is not at all bad, and it scares you from time to time, but the scare in this movie is based on really cheap tricks and the goodness of the movie surprisingly comes from something that, in my humble opinion, has never been a primary factor in M Night's movies: the acting. I won't be discussing the relations between directors and actors, nor whether it is the director's task to take the best out of the cast... I'm not an actor, nor a director, just a movie-goer. But let me just say that even though M Night has always being casting great actors and actresses, they have never shone in his movies (the biggest exception being Haley Joel Osment, of course). Lady In The Water is then really different, and so no good extrapolation can come out of comparing it to the other M Night movies. The plot is based on a bedtime story, so you can imagine you won't be getting a lot of thrill out of it. Besides, the trademark plot twists are not effective at all in this movie, in that they hardly make any difference from the viewer's point of view. Kind of: "Oh, so _________ is the __________ and __________ is the ___________" big deal...let's move on! So, back to the acting. A nice surprise came from Bryce Dallas Howard, who has improved her acting skills a lot since The Village, even though I suspect her performance in this movie has been enhanced by her magnetic eyes and a very skillful make up that makes her look even eerier than usual. Paul Giamatti has once again proved to be a very, very, very talented actor. Even though the story behind his character is another non-effective trick in the plot, during the movie he gives an extremely intense (sort of) monologue that is without any doubt the highest peak of the entire work. Bravo! All in all, Lady In The Water is an enjoyable fantasy movie, with good direction, very good acting, a so-and-so plot, but hey...if you keep in mind that it is a fantasy movie (hence, you lower your expectations a little bit), you're up for a very nice couple of hours.

I was ready to enjoy a quiet evening, taking a friend to the movies, to see what I basically considered as a refined version of a "chick-flick" about romance in a beautiful small town in the Amalfi Riviera. Even though I had never heard of the director, I was sure this couldn't be a bad movie, as it featured Scarlett Johansson and Helen Hunt (oh well, the latter starred in What women want, so maybe I was just deluding myself). Watching the opening credits I discovered that the script was based on some work by Oscar Wilde, so my expectations rose and...I wasn't disappointed. Indeed, all the audience (er...10 people) was delighted. Witty dialogs, enchanting sceneries, also a significant amount of plot twists that you wouldn't expect in a movie set in the 1930s. Good cast, especially the supporting actors and actresses: they're so much fun (well, in a witty way, so if you enjoyed Wedding crashers, please ignore all of this). Definitely for a more mature audience, but I'm sure that also the younger ones will get out of the theater with a smile on their faces. Absolutely recommended if you're kind of jaded by love.

There are very few occasions for us viewers to compare different movie directors' talents. X men: The last stand is one of those. Benchmarking is a slightly geeky practice that consists of running the same program on different computers to evaluate and compare their performance. In this case, the program deals with X men fighting ordinary human beings that are trying to exploit a new kind of substance taken out of a particular X man. (In the previous installment the drug allowed for total control over an X man who received it, this time the drug apparently eliminates X powers). The computers we're comparing are Bryan Singer and Brett Ratner. This new movie reflects Brett Ratner's basically larger-than-life, hyper-muscled, thick-minded way to direct movies. You get a gazillion different characters (each of them expressing themselves for er...5 milliseconds) doing a gazillion very scenic but ultimately meaningless things (I'm especially referring to the way Magneto gets to the Alcatraz research center). What made the X men movies a bit different from the other superhero movies was the everlasting mind games about being different from the rest (which director Singer was really good at showing in a very discreet but effective way). Now it's all a super power show-off. This is not a bad movie. But! It could have been so much better.

Michel Gondry is best known (at least to me) for his music videos for on-the-edge artists like Bjork (Army of me, Hyperballad), Daft Punk (Around the world), the White Stripes (The hardest button to button), and the Chemical Brothers (the weirdest and most beautiful video of all time: Let forever be). He is said to be a very weird but incredibly creative person in real life, and his works reflect that. Together with the extraordinary performance by the leading actors (Winslet and Carrey), his visual genius is the highlight of this movie. (By the way, in my humble opinion the co-stars weren't as good, especially Wood, whose expressiveness ranges from starry eyed to eyes wide open). Gondry's visuals give this movie a very particular touch, but they constitute a limitation, too, in that one would like to see Gondry's directing talent emerge in a very ordinary setting, without the frills that characterize his videos. Will he be able to stand the normality of an everyday life drama/comedy? He has to prove that video directors can be great movie directors without making a 2-hour version of the videos they're used to directing. Anyway, Gondry has succeeded where other high-profile video directors have failed (see Joseph Kahn's "Torque", which is as badly edited and confused as his U2 "Elevation" or Britney "Toxic" videos, or Mark Romanek's "One hour photo", which is so clean and neat it's almost boring like Lenny Kravitz "if you can't say no" or Jay-Z "99 problems").

I've always been suspicious about buying the pass to all movies from the Venice Festival, as among a huge bunch of films you can get roses and orchids, but also a cactus like this one.

By far the most boring movie I have ever seen, and probably the most dreadfully boring movie ever made.

Please don't think that I'm a SFX freak that goes "Wow!" in front of The Chronicles of Riddick or a blood lover that worships Tarantino as a god. I like every genre of films, and I am also used to French movies, which, as we all know, tend to be a little bit quieter and longer than needed, sometimes. Often with good results, though. (I'm thinking of L'histoire de Marie et Julien, this year's Emmanuelle Beart's er...blockbuster).

But this one...my goodness. Imagine a young female photographer who takes pictures of rural landscapes, hardly talking to anyone (she says "excusez moi" and runs away in a very embarrassed way every time another human being talks to her for more than 30 seconds). Oh OK, she has some interaction with a guy who is staying in the same hotel...but, again, in a very quiet way. You think there might be some mystery behind the job she's doing (she's substituting an English photographer who apparently disappeared), but none of that is sought after in any way. So, imagine a young photographer taking pictures of landscapes. For one hour and a half.

You get so bored you'd rather die.

Gerard Depardieu is a great actor. It seems like his offspring can only be involved in total disasters. (We have Julie D. here, and her brother in disgrace Guillaume in another horrible movie entitled Peau d'Ange -2002-)

To avoid at all costs. All.

Let's face it: this movie is not for everyone, because it may challenge the patience of those viewers that are addicted to uncountable plot twists or to jaw-dropping exploding action scenes.

Nothing like that can come from this movie, settled in the surroundings of a Buddhist temple in the very middle of a lake in a Korean valley.

I didn't count them, but there are probably less than 200 lines in the dialogues. But this is what it's all about. Not (spoken) words, but the tough though serene Buddhist way of life.

The existence of three men, two monks (one old, one young) and an apprentice, is narrated by focusing on the most important events in their lives, which happen in different seasons, as you may have guessed by the title.

Even if it is rather rarefied, don't think that this movie is not intense. Some moments get the audience very, very emotional.

Oh, by the way...if I think of it, there are actually some plot twists, blood, and gunshots. But this is not the point. The point is the mystery of life. Nobody can tell you about it, you only can try to grab it by yourself. This movie is a beautiful enchanting chance.

After seeing "The Chamber of Secrets" I promised myself not to see another HP movie in my life again.

I'm not among those great fans that get angry at the huge but inevitable cuts that transform the very long HP books into an affordable screenplay. That's absolutely fine with me.

But I have to say I'm among those people that do not like Chris Columbus's (er) talent as a director.

This new HP by Cuaron is rather different, in that you get a lot of beautiful images, as Hogwarts is presented in a darker, yet more elegant way.

The special effects look better, maybe because there is no 'final monster' to spend gazillions of money for, and so they could concentrate on those effects that are throughout the movie.

The new characters add a new interesting twist, especially Prof. Lupin, whose final lines seem to allude at things that are definitely not meant for kids.

Let's give it 7 out of 10.

Shame on the producers that have given the fourth installment to Newell. We'll see if he can do better.

I have often discussed with movie-goers whether it is possible to slice a single movie into parts to make statements like: "the director is very good, but the cast...oh my god", or "that screenplay rocked, but the editor was definitely having problems".

Well, this is it. "In the cut" I found the answer: yes. Some aspects of this movie are good, some other are not, as follows.

Thumbs up items from "In the cut":

1) The gorgeous titles, Jane Campion has always been extremely good at it. (See "Portrait of a Lady")

2) The visuals in general. Every scene is a treat for the eye, both in beautiful (e.g.: Jennifer Jason Leigh at the beginning) and in awful (e.g.: Meg Ryan in the end) circumstances. Again, Campion is a master.

3) The psychology of female characters. I think the movie provides a great insight of how a woman's mind can work (Let us all forget "What women want"). At least this is the impression that I get as a man. The most effective examples are the two sisters' dialogs and the love scenes. Well, Campion is a lady, after all!

Shortcomings "in the cut":

4) The psychology of male characters. Yes, Campion is all woman. Probably this movie provides another proof of the fact that Venus and Mars are very distant planets: there are four men playing some significant role, and none of them has more psychological depth than an ash tray. They are like dumb puppets filling the gaps between female characters' lines.

5) The "thriller" plot. After all, this movie is supposed to be a thriller. Well, from that point of view it simply fails. The final "oh my" revelation is simply silly. It makes sense "per se", but it doesn't match the high quality of the rest of the movie (I am always taking the assumption of slice-ableness of movies).

So, this movie is a so-and-so thriller, but it has many other qualities that make it worth a try.

I will start from the conclusion of it all: this movie is bad. Very, very bad. For a number of reasons, as follows.

1) It is bad for people who haven't seen The Matrix (very good indeed) nor The Matrix: Reloaded (quite bad, better best avoided). To not-enough-Matrix-educated people, this movie is completely meaningless.

2) It is bad for people who don't care about the pseudo-philosophic-religious-apocalyptic-hallucinating plot, but who are a lot into good special effects. None of the visuals that made the first Matrix a milestone in the history of SF movies is featured in the third instalment. You get a glimpse in the first ten minutes, but that's it. The rest is ugly Robocop-like machine-guns shooting and the usual metal squids. Oh, right...also an embarrassing face-to-face with a head-of-machines that reminded me of Tron (it was many many years ago...no Keanu Reeves there, but Jeff Bridges).

3) Last but definitely not least, this movie is Bad (capital B) for those who cared even a little bit for the plot. Excuse me? Did I miss anything? Wasn't the One supposed to get rid of the evil machines and destroy the matrix? The "Gran Finale" of the Matrix Revolutions simply shuns everything that was left pending at the end of the first movie of the franchise.

Shame on W. Bros. (Warner, Wachowski, please pick one): you lied to us.

But there is a bright side. Please spend five minutes of your time to browse the Web looking for comments on this movie and the entire trilogy. Great laughs are ahead, they will make the endurance test in theaters worth it.

A product of the French New Wave, this movie is more than 40 years old, but it still has the powers to make you leave your mouth open, either to laugh or just to be in awe. Extremely different from anything you can find on the screens today, "Zazie" is able to entertain you even without a coherent plot or a bunch of lines that make sense. A dark-short-haired witty little girl goes around an extremely colorful Paris meeting unusual and funny people. Does this remind you of anything? Actually "Zazie" had already gone beyond the borders of the land that would be explored by "Amelie" 40 years later. Maybe this means that the future is behind our backs? It is time to turn around.

It is probably the Coen brothers' fault if a viewer comes out of the theatre quite amused but also a bit disappointed after having seen this movie - they have been spoiling their public, providing very intriguing and extremely alternative (e.g.: very far from mainstream) films. If you wanted something different, the Coen brothers were the answer. But, alas, not at all in this case! The topic is a dusty classic - wealth-centric marriages and divorces. The plot is too predictable (but I'm not going to reveal it, don't worry). The characters are very simple and mono-faceted. (Some of them are funny only because of weird breathing noises). The acting is fair - maybe Zeta-Jones is extremely beautiful but not fit for a comedy, while Clooney should definitely become a comedy actor (especially now that people like Steve Martin or Billy Crystal have started showing the signs of artistic age).

So, if you want to have a few good laughs, go and see it, but please, do not expect anything more. Oh, imagining that the movie's director is Chris Columbus could help. Maybe.

I am glad to be offered the chance to speak my voice about this movie, so that I can warn all IMDB users.

A bunch of mediocre actors working very poorly (alas, the worst one is Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, from my country Italy, I have to admit), and a screenplay that probably tries to imitate the story of Pollyanna make this movie a very good candidate for your next "all-trash-night" (when you and your friends eat mash-mellows and ice-cream, watching Glitter and Swept Away...and of course this very movie). The top (= bottom) is with no doubt the dialogues. Lines like "I feel like I have a stone on my heart", or "If God exists, I wonder why He lets children die" should be heard only if you are watching Dawson's Creek on TV (and you would deserve them), not a movie in a theatre. An advice for Vincent Perez: I think it's better being a so-and-so actor, rather than a disastrous director. Agree? Hope so.

Beyond any limit of human tolerance. To avoid at all costs.

If you are looking for a tricky plot that makes you think about it over and over again all night long, please rent a David Lynch movie and forget about Moulin Rouge. But if you are willing to give your eyes and your ears a brand new experience that will make everything else look and sound a bit dusty, this is the right movie. The simple plot which we can find in every classical opera involving an impossible love and some kind of nasty disease, has been enhanced up to the limit with incredibly luxurious settings, gorgeous costumes, a powerful soundtrack and an eye-striking editing. Moulin Rouge actually does not have any original content to offer - as said, the plot is so classical that it gets dangerously close to being naive, and in the soundtrack you will find only one original song, the others being elaborated covers to hits from the 70s, the 80s and the 90s - but this "nothing original" is presented to the audience in such a beautiful, witty, colorful, even redundant way that you cannot do anything but watch and be pulled into this fantastic world where nothing is important but Freedom, Beauty, Truth and Love. The Bohemian Revolution is here, and nothing will be the same again.

Well, what can I say? I know I'm going to be quite unpopular, but let's face it: this movie is not thrilling, or at least it's not as thrilling as people are used to saying...They say "vox populi vox dei", that is what most people say is undoubtedly true, but if there's any chance of disagreeing, I'll take it on this very occasion. I have to admit I had no clue about the final throughout the film, but when I saw it I didn't go "Whoa!", but just "Hmmm, ok...so?". Maybe I'm just too dumb to appreciate it, or, more simply, this movie is boring. Yes, boring.