[Spain]
A passionate movie about two men whose women they love are in comas. Deals with movement, love, freedom of movement, freedom to love, and how can one know what another is thinking. Of all the Almodovar movies I've seen, this is the most comfortable to watch and seemingly natural, and therefore my favorite.
Good. Based on the true story of an ex-tobacco executive and a 60 Minutes producer. Deals with loyalty, confidentiality, the importance of truth and the difficulty in telling it, and, centrally, how business decisions interact with the public's need to know.
Stunning. Like a graphic novel brought to life. Tells three short stories all set in Sin City. Unparalleled in its visual effects and mood. Makes especially good use of color: with most of it shot in black and white, color does an exceptional job highlighting certain objects and effects.
Beautiful. A tender story of two people that meet on a train and decide to spend the night together in Vienna. Feels very real, surprising given the deep discussions the characters have about love, relationships, marriage, fulfillment, upbringing, spirituality, and more. Despite lack of a plot, maintains forward movement well.
Good, but I think I've outgrown the (fairly simplistic) story. At times it felt a little too amusement park-ish (designed for rides and games). Indeed, this hypothesis was confirmed by games appearing as special features on the DVD. (On the other hand, I enjoyed those games...) Fun songs and special effects. Willy Wonka's (played by Johnny Depp) amazingly rapid changes of mood / expression are unnerving and even horrifying at times. Good acting all around. Directed by Tim Burton (Bettle Juice, the first two Batman movies, Edward Scissorhands, ...).
Mesmerizing and sad, All About My Mother follows the tale of a single mother who loses her son on his birthday. It's about love, sickness, prostitution, and death, and about acting and appearances and the face we put forth to face the world. An uncomfortable heart-wrenching story that, while very well done, has too many men-who-look-like-women for my tastes.
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Well done movie about 1950s McCarthy-ism. Using black-and-white film, appropriate costumes, and many cigarettes, effectively capture the feel of the time. Good acting. Only flaws were that one side-story felt irrelevant and some camera movements felt too modern.
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Hugh Grant's premier movie. Decent romantic (?) comedy. To me, felt like a dark movie about the difficulty in finding true love and committing, but with a happy ending tacked on at the end.
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The story of a boy with a dying mother, an absent father, some nervous problems, and a dog that no one else seems to like. Follows the boy's coming of age, his changing relationships, and his marginalization. A good artsy film.
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Good but not exceptional pun-filled Wallace and Gromit movie. I think I'm just getting used to all the amazing things one can do with claymation.
A movie with two separate cops exploring how they deal with the ending of a relationship: one eats lots of pineapple; the other has his home invaded by a girl from the local fast food restaurant. Relatively boring, with little forward momentum or appearance of a point. Yet, I did sit through it all and it does have occasional moments.
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Pretty good movie that is unpredictable in the long-term (i.e., you don't know what will happen more than ten minutes in the future) with forward momentum (i.e., despite lack of knowledge of the larger plot, it kept moving forward). About an ad-executive, 25-year-old VPs, multinational corporate shenanigans, work-life balance, family life, and letting go.
Also, while I know it is a movie about advertising, there is just too much product placement: Domino's, Porsche, Starbucks, United, MasterCard, Target, ... I don't mind a little, but there was just too much.
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Quite good. Slick action scenes and epic (computer-generated) futuristic vistas. The scale is amazing. Also, does a nice job with interweaving parallel storylines (birth of Luke and Leah with rebirth of Vader; simultaneous battle scenes at times). That said, the dialogue is frequently flat and the acting varies dramatically (and is sometimes over the top with way-too-close close ups).
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Heart-wrenching. An excellently done movie with some twists. I can really see why it won four Academy Awards. Ponders family (or the lack of meaningful family ties?), responsibility, and the purpose of life. Good choice of actors/actresses.
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A very slick musical. While in retrospect it feels like it has a reasonable plot, the story felt very light during the movie itself. Good catchy music and appropriately over-the-top. Fun. Good choice of actors/actresses.
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A well done documentary. I knew most of the issues beforehand, but never heard them so well integrated and put together into the big picture of the corporation. Good use of music and cut scenes for transitions.
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An entertaining movie that (intentionally) makes one squirm in one's seat due to the slimy nature of the wedding crashers' plans/goals/acts. Funny. And a bit sappy. Watching it, it transitions from comedic to romantic comedic to tragic and back again. Not unaptly, someone said, "Wedding Crashers is American Pie for grownups."
Howard Hughes is an obsessive compulsive millionaire who loves planes and airlines. Neat, especially for the history I didn't know.
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[France]
True story of a man who returns from war after eight years to his village and family and has his identity questioned. Neat story, good costumes, with a touching ending about love, marriage, and family.
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Just as fun and action-filled and over-the-top as Shaolin Soccer. Great. :)
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Set in WWI. About a woman tries to find her fiance, sentenced to the front lines for self-mutilation and afterward presumed dead.
Not good. Too long. The details are hard to follow and the story, while tender, isn't that enthralling. Few people beside the female protagonist care about her fiance's fate (or believe her when she claims he's still alive), so I as a viewer am not convinced I should. Nevertheless, with the confusing storyline, does a good job of demonstrating the chaos of war.
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Excellently done biography/profile of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Elegant narrative with quality acting weaves together the future and the past into one persuasive portrait of Kinsey's growth and life profile.
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Weird philosophical movie focusing on the opposite ideas of everything-is-connected and nothing-is-connected, as demonstrated by how characters grow and interact throughout the film. Tries to be more philosophically clever than that simple opposite, but fails to be clear about the questions, let alone about the answers.
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Based on a true story, the tale of a convicted murderer who learns to love birds and becomes world-renowned for diagnosing and treating bird diseases. Fairly good.
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Amazingly comprehensive review of the harms of corporations, including limited liability, extensive property rights, privatization, externalities (esp. on the environment), greed, exploitation of labor, poverty, advertising, mind control, patent law (esp. on biological entities), whistle-blowers, war profiteering, and the power of corporations (esp. multinationals) on governments. The DVD includes intimidatingly large quantities of commentaries, additional interviews, and other special features.
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Wonderfully (consciously) over the top. Kung-Fu applied to soccer, playing against a Team Evil. Some film allusions.
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Touching movie about cultural/class differences, and the relationship between love and marriage.
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Cute, though a bit over the top (especially at the beginning until you get used to it). Nice message about emotions and expressivity.
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Thoughtful movie covering two men's trip wine tasting. Deals with friendship, love, lust, marriage, and depression. Unpredictable yet natural: one cannot predict where it is going but it seems obvious when it arrives.
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Interesting but not as deep as I had hoped it would be. Nonetheless, it did have some insights, as seen in its investigation of loaded questions and of preferential news reporting.
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Decent, thoughtful movie about suffering, God, and taking control of one's life. Story follows God, who wants a vacation, as he comes to earth looking for a saint to replace him for a little while. (The movie's not thoughtful in a particularly sophisticated way, but is relatively cute with its brief spurts of commentary.)
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A good Hitchcock film with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly about a retired jewelry thief ("the cat") and what happens when someone starts stealing jewels in the same style. Full of sexual innuendo. A good classic.
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Semi-disturbing movie about genocide in Rwanda, though not as disturbing as I expected. It felt real: it felt as if the main character (and indeed other characters as well) weren't acting. Somehow, the film managed to pull off positive yet non-hollywood ending appropriately tempered by the reality of what occurred. Based on a true story. Worth watching.
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Jamie Foxx plays Ray Charles (blind singer and pianist extraordinaire) in this movie about the early part of his life. Excellent. You forget Jamie isn't Ray Charles. And the supporting characters, especially the female ones, are also excellent actresses. Music from countless songs is well integrated into the film.
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Somewhat neat documentary involving a camera in Clinton's war room during the 1992 presidential elections. I was disappointed: it didn't seem delve very deep, or cover many issues or strategies at anything more than a superficial level.
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Pretty good. Very evocative of a black barber shop. Reveals atypical opinions and discussions relating to African-American issues. Story doesn't go the necessarily cheesy way one would expect when halfway through watching it.
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[Taiwan]
Taiwanese movie about a retired chef and his three daughters looking for men. Quite good. Really shows the personal development of all the characters. I was a bit disappointed that the food wasn't more focal.
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Humphrey Bogart plays an incompetent ship's captain in WWII. Pretty decent. The acting and suspense are good, even if the story is thin.
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Hilarious through surprisingly depressing documentary on curmudgeon-ness and the people who exhibit it. Basically, a movie exploring people who are bitter at the world and/or very expressive about their opinions on everything. Felt longer than it actually was (1.5 hours), perhaps because it caused introspection and thought.
Neat movie elaborating on some of the posts made on one particular random day. Very reflective of the diversity of community.
Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx are, respectively, a hired killer and taxi-cab driver in this film set in Los Angeles. Decent suspense/action flick with good storytelling and excellent evocation of the setting (night-time LA).
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Cute post-college angst movie about the dangers of medication and the risks of not being yourself.
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Another fairly good epic action movie set in the nineteenth century (like Master and Commander). Tom Cruise does an okay acting job, but he's too inexpressive and I really don't feel the growth of his relationship with the Japanese woman. The level of detail and accuracy in Japanese architecture, weapons, clothing, etc. of the time is amazing. You can feel the big-budget-ness of this film throughout.
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Disturbing. Mesmerizing. The story starts with being about a teenage son's relationship with a soon-to-be-divorced woman (with two children). It then twists in unexpected ways from there. Despite the movie's length, there are no extraneous scenes in it--I couldn't tear my eyes away. Makes one ponder death, murder, and the death penalty.
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Story of religious school sexual abuse and how it changes the lives of two homosexuals as they grow. Does a very good storytelling job with parallel stories / timelines. Mesmerizing, perhaps because of the feeling of being disturbed and disquieted. All the same, made me too uncomfortable to truly enjoy.
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Set near Tibet, the story of a man who is trying to get to America. The movie focuses on interpersonal relationships, both between the man and the people he meets on the way, and, via a parallel storyline told as a story throughout the film, between two brothers who want to switch places. There's a love triangle that results from an older couple and one brother. Interesting. The film's all about what people want and what they are satisfied with.
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A short, entertaining animated film about rock creatures and their long-lived, slow-moving lives. Also about the rise and fall of mankind, and the transience of life.
The movie's home page. It's available for purchase at Amazon.
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Seafaring war story. Very evocative of the eighteenth century and ship life in general. Drama and action. Good, but nothing special.
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