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chronicenigma
Reviews
Lovely by Surprise (2007)
Stranger Than Fiction's poor cousin
Saw this at the Seattle Film Festival last night.
This film had all the appearance of something I would like, and it seemed like the director/producers had made a great effort to get me to like it (with some pretty blatant references to Charlie Kaufman, Wes Anderson etc.). But, unfortunately, it just fell flat. There was never any actual product placement in the film, it still felt somehow hollow and soulless; the result of an advertising campaign and not a genuine creative endeavor. It was a very calculated sorted of indie-ness, quirky for the sake of being quirky.
Though I didn't happen to see the original webisodes this is based on I did watch Meet The Lucky Ones which I liked a lot more. I think that may have been a much better format for this material. There just wasn't enough here for a whole film, and at feature length the theatricality of the thing - the stilted dialog, broad acting - just became grating. I felt very removed from it all and never connected with any of the characters.
The story has some strong similarities to Stranger Than Fiction, and I had expected to enjoy this "indie" take on the same premise a lot more, but found it far inferior.
At least the soundtrack by Stephin Merrit/The Magnetic Fields was excellent.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)
cotton candy
It is amazing the sheer amount of words some people have wasted analyzing this film (granted IMDb's 10 line minimum is perhaps partially to blame).
All that anyone actually needs to know is that it's a flick starring two of the most beautiful people on earth, doing... stuff. Also they occasionally do stuff while clad only in their underwear.
The plot, characters... blah, blah, blah, all pretty much irrelevant (and forgotten about as soon as you exit the multiplex). Basically either such a premise appeals to you, or you're enough of a hardened cynic/film snob/puritan/etc. that it doesn't.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
the last Square film, unfortunately, not the last generic sci-fi film
After watching the movie I was baffled. I don't mean baffled by the film's shallow excuse for a plot or its CG but rather what its makers were thinking when they made it in the first place. By calling it `Final Fantasy' it seemed as if they were targeting it at the mostly teenage-male fans of the game series. However, fans of the series are a relatively small percentage of the movie-going audience so perhaps realizing this the producers aimed for a more conventional film that would supposedly be more appealing to a main-stream audience. In the end they failed to please either. As a fan of the games I was immensely disappointed that The Spirits Within had absolutely nothing to do with the Final Fantasy series. Everything that made me love the games was absent here, the classic music of Nobuo Uematsu was replaced by some instantly forgettable drivel, the whimsy, beauty and ingenuity of Yoshitaka Amano's art was gone as well, a boring, pointless story was substituted for the humor, drama, plot twists and character development that made Final Fantasy a hit. Most dismayingly, instead of maintaining the delicate balance between fantasy and technology featured in the games they makers' of this film chose to go with a fully sci-fi setting, ugh! A more suitable title would have been `Generic Sci-fi Flick,' and perhaps, with that title I would have seen it for what it was, like the rest of the audience - a mildly diverting, but ultimately, forgettable computer graphics extravaganza. Speaking of the graphics, while they were pretty impressive, I didn't see much sense in rendering a clone of Ben Affeleck and then dubbing him with Alec Bladwin's voice, he wasn't as good as either of them so actors aren't in any danger of being replaced by computers in the foreseeable future. The way computers were used in Lord of the Rings was to me much more impressive. With their budget and technology Square should have been more faithful to the games which would have gotten a better critical response, better viewer response and created a more memorable picture. So in the end, if you want to see an entertaining CG movie watch Shrek, if you want good sci-fi watch Blade Runner, if you want good anime watch Princess Mononoke but if you want to be bored and waste your time and money watch Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within.