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| billyweeds |
 Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 2:03 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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carrobin wrote: What? Baldwin's character had dumped his aging wife for a sexy younger woman. Although Meryl's character clearly still had affection for him, I was glad she didn't yield to his overwhelming ego. (My mother, who divorced my father after enduring his affairs with a string of "other women," felt the same.) Steve Martin offered a new and more appealing way to go, and I liked the ending.
Sorry. Steve Martin's character was bland, personality-free, and sexless. He was, I will admit, an unthreatening alternative to Alec Baldwin, but unthreatening is blah in my book. |
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| Marj |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 2:07 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 10497
Location: Manhattan
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Spoilers please!
Admittedly this is going to be a lot to ask since I've been waiting over a month for Inglorious Bastards. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 2:16 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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ehle64 wrote: I liked Brothers a LOT. However, it is a very difficult film. Massive kudos to Natalie and Jake.
Not Tobey? |
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| inlareviewer |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 3:20 pm |
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Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 1949
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Brother Tobey is not getting the kindest of reax from most of my colleagues.
The mater giddily, heartily approved of the ending of It's Complicated. She clapped and everything.
It made me want chocolate croissants. (stomach rumble).
What is it with Mrs. Gummer and delicious-looking food-prep this cycle? If she does two future releases in which she's a vintner, it's all over (hic).
The Messenger screener arrived. More anon. |
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"And take extra care with strangers/Even flowers have their dangers/And though scary is exciting/Nice is different than good." --Stephen Sondheim |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 4:08 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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Befade wrote: Quote: It was the only hysterically funny scene in the movie.
Billy.........Putting it that way......Yes, I'll agree with you. The main thing about the movie that bothered me was SPOILERS that Meryl rejected Baldwin's character. So much of the movie was about the 2 of them and their kids that it seemed the natural direction to go in. I know there was the view that he was using her to get out of an unhappy marriage but I thought his feelings toward her were genuine.
Did anyone else notice that Meryl not only ran her own bakery but she had a major vegetable garden so tidily kept at home. (The boundless Martha Stewart energy of some people..........)
She hadn't had sex for quite a while, so she needed a hobby. |
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| carrobin |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 5:08 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 7795
Location: NYC
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I loved Steve Martin in "It's Complicated." True, he didn't have a chance to do his best physical comedy, but he presented a charming and intelligent character who had a natural chemistry with Streep.
And Marj--there's nothing all that new or surprising in the movie, if you've even looked at a poster, so all these aren't really serious spoilers. See it for the fun of it. (It'll be good on DVD too.) |
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| inlareviewer |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 5:11 pm |
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Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 1949
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Given the conventional contours of It's Complicated, I thought Steve Martin was fine, though wish there had been a bit more narrative use of him (same goes for the galpals and certainly Mr. Krasinski). Found him an effective low-key correlary to his liquid leading lady and ribald romantic rival. To me, the point, if there was one, of Jane Adler's mega-garden and meta-bakery (and, for that matter, the 10-years-in-coming home renovation), besides the upper-class careerism/House Beautiful fantasies that typify Meyers Formula, was to depict what she'd done post-divorce to get past the divorce (though obviously she hadn't, quite) -- or, as Rita Wilson's character said, to Feng Shui her entire life. It also was sort of a riff on the high-income self-delineated quality of Santa Barbara existence (though there weren't any ant onslaughts, a perennial problem, per friends who reside there).
Am brought up short by the idea of Mrs. Gummer playing Martha Stewart. Don't know whether to be intrigued, skeered or both.
On second thought, not. She's done enough food-filming for a spell, and my cholesterol levels can only take so much.
Paging Glenn Close.... |
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"And take extra care with strangers/Even flowers have their dangers/And though scary is exciting/Nice is different than good." --Stephen Sondheim |
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| inlareviewer |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 5:48 pm |
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Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 1949
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Red Carpet patterns further solidify with the DGA noms: Bigelow, Cameron, Daniels, Reitman, Tarentino.
L.A. Times: The Envelope: Five directors vie for DGA Award |
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"And take extra care with strangers/Even flowers have their dangers/And though scary is exciting/Nice is different than good." --Stephen Sondheim |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 6:59 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
Posts: 8424
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| I'm tellin' ya, I think it was mistake rushing The Hurt Locker to dvd. It still had some theatrical life left in it considering all the awards and nominations it's getting. |
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| Marj |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 7:42 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 10497
Location: Manhattan
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| Well, Marc, she said selfishly, I can get to see it. |
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| Marj |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 7:46 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 10497
Location: Manhattan
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carrobin wrote:
And Marj--there's nothing all that new or surprising in the movie, if you've even looked at a poster, so all these aren't really serious spoilers. See it for the fun of it. (It'll be good on DVD too.)
Thanks Carol. And I do agree that it's one of the few films I feel comfortable seeing on DVD. But even so, I hate learning anything before see a movie. I'm just silly that way. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 8:30 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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marantzo wrote: They come from Iraq and then end up in your class? Talk about going from the frying pan into the fire. 
Well, we don't want to release them into peacetime too jarringly.  |
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| Ghulam |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 9:44 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4742
Location: Upstate NY
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| Up in the Air is a well directed movie based on unconvincing characters. Spoilers: Juno is back, older and with sex change. These are caricatures, "what if" characters, not real people. Comedies about unconcerned pregnant teenagers and men lost in callous work are not very amusing. The movie must however be seen to see what an accomplished actor George Clooney is. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 10:29 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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| You're fired. But think of it as an opportunity to change the world. |
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| inlareviewer |
| Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 11:29 pm |
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Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 1949
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Up in the Air, thought the actors gave their archetypes notable veracity, sustaining my interest, though hardly as much as the real-life downsizees managed in a fraction of the running time (really wanted more of them). Especially liked both the wommyn, and admired Clooney, The Chanel of Heartthrobs, while simultaneously noting his equivalent work elsewhere (George's #1 Fan, alias madre di inla, was palpably disappointed in the film, its own commentary). It's certainly accomplished, and well worth seeing. Am just not certain that it's as indelible or timeless as it's being marketed -- can remember plot points easily enough, less so key moments, barring Li'l Kendrick's comic dissolve into waterworks, the look on La Farmiga's face at the climactic Chicago scene, and Clooney with the blow dryer and the cut-out. A good film, just don't know that it's a great or particularly original one, though it unquestionably strikes an exposed topical nerve in present-day America.
Which would be an understatement re: The Messenger, which quietly gripped me from the first close-up shot of Ben Foster's drop-receiving eye, and scarcely let go thereafter. Whereas The Hurt Locker (with which it shares a spiritual kinship) rent me by its tautly strung trajectory, apolitical verisimilitude and determined demonstration of why war is both Hell and (per the opening title card) a drug, this one pole-axed me by honing in on the sustained after-damage of same on the home front, with unyielding, unflashily engineered punch. The script had its occasional snippets of over-poetic metaphor in dialogue, one calculated reversal, a couple of dramatic-convenience-over-realistic-outcome bits, and a scene of intimate conversation flirted with over-langueurs amid the emotional carnage (though the film never bored me). That said, it's a considerable, procedurally insightful, character-focused screenplay, never merely issue-driven, with some wicked mordant humor and much social/behavioral detail that recalled exactly how my Korean War vet dad, WWII vet uncles, their spouses/children, and any number of Vietnam-through-the-current-conflicts-surviving returnees in my orbit behaved/behave. There were passages of unvarnished acute human response that only the Bigelow masterwork and Precious have thus far delivered for me in 2009 English-language films (Antichrist exists in its own distant galaxy), notably Steve Buscemi and, briefly, Peter Friedman, among the brilliantly cast next of kin whom Mr. Foster and superior officer Woody Harrelson must notify. Credit not only first-time director Oren Moverman, who co-wrote the script with Alessandro Camon, and the subject's inherent cultural impact, but absolutely the acting, deeply disciplined and felt across the board. Mr. Foster's protagonist is mesmerizingly committed, a portrayal of martial ambiguity to set beside Jeremy Renner's justifiably celebrated Locker turn, his heart-stopping climactic admission throwing my pre-Blanche lead-actor mix into complete disarray. Perhaps Mr. Foster's (and the film's) most impressive aspect is how almost imperceptibly he evolves, in not only his layered back-story but his centrifugal relationship with Mr. Harrelson, who, channeling Duvall in Santini mode by way of a cornpone buzz-bomb, wholly merits the nomination he's sure to receive from that other, um, film society. Jena Malone as the hero's girlfriend made, as usual for her, very much of an underwritten part, and Samantha Morton, lighthouse-eyed as ever, brought enormous immediacy and affecting conflict to her pivotal widow -- she must play Maria Falconetti while she's still the right age. The final dedication at the end credits, while Willie Nelson crooned my birth-state song, had me clutching my throat. I rather hesitate to call it an Important Film -- except it kinda sorta is, and instantly stands among last's year's strongest offerings, intense, restrained, trenchant and involving.
Yeah, I edited it. Repeatedly. It's a drug. |
Last edited by inlareviewer on Fri Jan 08, 2010 2:22 pm; edited 10 times in total
_________________
"And take extra care with strangers/Even flowers have their dangers/And though scary is exciting/Nice is different than good." --Stephen Sondheim |
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