Some Movie Reviews

Mary and I, tired of watching the same game show reruns while we fed and napped with Micah, decided to sign up for Blockbuster's online program, and we've enjoyed it so far. The movies get here on time (in general), and we've caught up on some titles we were meaning to see (at some point) but never got to. So here's my uneducated take on a few that we've seen since joining:

• Finding Neverland. Not a bad film--I particularly liked the (relatively) understated blurring between the author's imagination and reality as everyone else sees it. Even better were the blurrings that happened while he was playing with chlidren. The end was pretty standard tear-jerking fare, but the visual and plotline statements about imagination and adulthood make this one worth seeing.
• The Manchurian Candidate. When I see an action movie, I don't want to feel this violated. Instead of the clean-cut international intrigue story I'd hoped for, this movie spent most of its time plumbing the depths of war's scarring of the human mind, the machinations of biotech, and a mother's drive to see her son rule the world that shades (for a scene or two) into the incestuous. Yechh. On the plus side, Denzel just can't seem to do a role halfway, so his portrayal of a psychologically-scarred career soldier is wonderful even as it disturbs.
• Friday Night Lights. Don't try to remake Hoosiers. Coach Carter did somewhat, but the strong pro-education, pro-black overtones made it a movie worth watching beyond the feel-good sports appeal. This one didn't have any such focus. The games that received significant screen time in the first half of the movie were so devastatingly one-sided against Team Mojo (the protagonists of the film) that their meteoric rise to the state championship game (which lasts all of four minutes for five rounds) and subsequent nail-biter championship game with the invincible Dallas high school team (the game's ups and downs seem nothing short of deus ex machina) lack any plausibility. On the other hand, I have to hand it to any script writer who puts this couplet into a movie script: "You want to win? Put Boobie in!"
• I Heart Huckabees. I don't know what I want to think of this one yet. On the one hand, it's a feature-length joke at the expense of philosophy majors. On another, it's a lovely look at intersecting thought-worlds and their inability to reconcile unless the people who think hard also learn to love one another. If you live in any two of the worlds staged in this film (environmentalists, nihilists, idealists, evangelicals, capitalists, and many others) and wonder what would happen if too many of those worlds collided in one room, this is one that will at least give you one possibility of what it might look like.
• The Notebook. Never being one to begrudge my wife a good chick flick, this gem led off our Blockbuster trial period. It was too chick-flicky even for her.
• Garden State This one was genuinely good. J.D. from Scrubs (can't think of the actor's name) tells his story with fairly convincing (though obscenity-laced) dialogue, cinematography that reflects the scene-POV's mental state, an archetypal journey into the underworld set in suburban New Jersey, and a sound track that I've been told is quite hip (I'm a poor judge of that). The ending scene was a hair over-the-top (reminded me of the Friends finale), but that doesn't diminish a really good movie.

My in-laws also purchased Rudy on DVD for me for my birthday--not bad stuff. I can see why Sean Astin got cast as another emotional favorite in the LOTR trilogy.

So there's the movies I've seen since Micah was born. I think Mary and I are going to watch Ray here in the next couple nights--I'm looking forward to seeing Jamie Foxx's continuing emergence as a serious actor. I was impressed enough by Collateral that I go into Ray expecting great things, not waiting for Foxx to redeem himself for Booty Call.