Change Your Image
jasongbeale
Reviews
Les amants réguliers (2005)
Great start then downhill
The first 60 minutes of 'Regular Lovers' is highly recommended. The first long sequence depicts the street riots in Paris of 1968, and are extremely convincing in the combination of random images and sounds.
After such a promising start, it's downhill... For another 2 hours the 'story' dwells on a tedious and passionless relationship between two young artists. Unnecessarily extended shots with no action or dialogue are little more than insipid imitations of Godard's style, without his wit or intelligence. They add nothing to this particular film I'm afraid.
I love the nouvelle vague, don't get me wrong, but this film mimics 'avant-garde' techniques to end up with the equivalent of an endless Calvin Klein advertisement - bored and handsome youths lolling about, being decadent and looking so photogenic. It needs much more dynamism and emotion, either in the acting or in the editing. It might have made a tolerable 2 hour film, and perhaps more involving for this audience member.
Humpday (2009)
A good naturalistic comedy, that needs more drama
I love naturalistic films that combine human drama with comedy and pathos (think of Mike Leigh), and this film definitely starts off in that direction. I also enjoyed the basic premise and the way it unfolded. However, the dramatic potential of the story was not explored enough for my liking, especially in the wife's character half-heartedly played by Alycia Delmore.
In addition, the ending of the film is satisfactory, but didn't really deliver on the build-up. There was a dropping off in emotional and narrative tension, which made me feel they hadn't gone all the way with the idea. Perhaps that's the underlying message - that these characters are out of touch with their fundamental feelings and living on the surface.
Overall it's a highly entertaining comedy that explores male friendship in a very surprising way.
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
This is NOT Alice in Wonderland
This is NOT Alice in Wonderland. It is a completely different story piggybacking on a timeless classic that should be left alone!! It is a Disney-Hollywood bowdlerization, which is a cross between Lord of the Rings and Shrek. If I had children I would give them the book and forbid them from seeing this garbage.
This is NOT Alice in Wonderland. It's 'what if Alice was grown up and returned to Wonderland and saved it from a fictional dragon'. In other words it has a predictable moronic plot, in which the subtle mystery of Alice in Wonderland is reduced to a sword and sorcery B-grade epic.
By the way 'I loved the special effects' (so what) 'Oooh it's in 3D too' (so what). Let's be serious. Lewis Carroll would sue Tim Burton to Timbuktoo if he was still alive.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)
Wonderfully moving
I loved this film - it was so simple, yet so real. It shows childhood so truthfully. Friendship, betrayal, guilt, redemption, sacrifice... children experience all these things. This film shows this against the situation of a concentration camp, which just highlights the essence of these universal human emotions. The young boy denies his friend and so experiences his first sense of responsibility. Instead of playing games of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, he enters a world where true friendship means solidarity with another. This story transcends the setting. It is not focused on the cruelty of man to man, the mindless destruction of the holocaust, but is focused on the more meaningful relationships that bound people. That the young boy is the commandant's son is a profound irony that affirms the common humanity of us all, before society has brainwashed us to hate.
Bobby (2006)
Waiting for Bobby
A ponderous, disappointing movie. Actually, apart from some marginal stock footage, Bobby Kennedy isn't a character in the story at all. It should be called "Waiting for Bobby", since that's what you'll be doing. The different characters and situations have no space or time to be developed very much, and it must be said, they fail to grab the imagination or emotions.
Overall the various narrative strands are presented with hardly any real tension, suspense, or excitement (despite the overdone soundtrack that drowns out half the dialogue). In fact, the whole movie has no narrative or thematic drive, and limps along like a sick dog - it drags and drags and drags and drags and then he's shot and thank god it's over!