Mean
Girls
More enjoyable than I expected, this collection of
second-rate teen actresses and Saturday
Night Live cast members (plus the janitor from Scrubs)
is surprisingly funny, if entirely predictable. Both
Grant and I were transfixed by Lindsay
Lohan’s massive breasts; in fact, all the high-school girls had breasts
that
were just way, way too large. It was
sort of disturbing, yet fascinating.
He
Died with a
Felafel in his Hand is an odd little Australian
movie, apparently based on a cult-hit novel.
It follows a recently divorced, drifting aspiring writer (Noah
Taylor)
as he moves through a series of group houses.
I rented it in the hopes of seeing something of Brisbane and
other areas
of Australia, but the movie shows very little outside the house. The most we got out of it, tourism-wise, is
that Australians are freaks, and under no circumstances should we share
a house
with any of them. But the movie has its pleasures, and it's
certainly not the usual corporate schlock.
Speaking of corporate schlock...
The Terminal
I'm not sure what it is about Tom Hanks babbling in a
made-up language (and then speaking English with a made-up accent) that
got my
hackles up so much, but it grated on me to the point of physical
discomfort. Hanks just isn't believable
with an accent (yes, I liked him in The
Ladykillers, but the whole point of his accent there was that
it was
completely unbelievable), and I took umbrage at the notion that they
had to
make up a country and a language (presumably for fear of offending
someone),
yet the entire movie is set against a backdrop of corporate logos, none
of
which they felt the need to change or hide. That's what really soured
me on the
movie, I think: the relentless product
placement (well, that, and the shitty writing, simplistic plot, and
manufactured cuteness).
It was shockingly crass and shameless; I'd expect that from a
lot of
directors, but not Steven Spielberg.
(And yes, it did occur to me that it was both a realistic
depiction of
an airport and possibly some sort of commentary on the way commercial
schlock
is everywhere -- but I don't think that was the point at all. Spielberg did the same thing in Minority Report, only then
I think he
explicitly said that the ubiquity of advertising was meant as a
commentary, but
he completely undercut his own argument by using real companies and
thus giving
them free advertising.) Anyway,
corporate whoring aside, The Terminal
is just a waste of everybody’s time, from Spielberg right down to you.
Sky
Captain and the
World of Tomorrow is a tedious, pointless
movie that’s absolutely thrilled with its own cleverness.
The big deal with this movie is that there
were basically no sets; all the backgrounds were filled in by computer
animation. It got heaps of praise for
this “innovation,” but I don’t see what the big deal is.
It’s meant to pay homage to those cheesy old
adventure serials, but it’s almost a carbon copy of them, and what’s
the point
of watching smugly pouting Gwyneth Paltrow when you could be watching a
real
actress instead?
Monsieur Ibrahim is
a sweet little
film about a young Jewish
boy in 1950s Paris who befriends the elderly Muslim shopkeeper in his
neighborhood. As the shopkeeper, Omar
Sharif is terrific; he doesn’t look so hot, but he’s still irresistibly
charismatic.
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