Bilmflog review: P.S. I love you

P.S. I love you (usa 2007)

Director:Richard LaGravenese Writers: Richard LaGravenese and Steven Rogers

My friend and co-bilmflogblogger Zeb warned me when I told him I was going to see this movie that it was going to be a corny tearjerker. I didn’t mind, because I was with my wife and the last movie we saw together was written about in this blogs first post. Go figure. I take her to Hugh Grant movies and in exchange I’m allowed to enjoy Die Hard or Wayne’s World.

Here’s the story: Hillary Swank and Gerard Butler are a young couple living in New York. (He showed his sixpack of a lot, so I kept hoping for some Persians coming though the door 'THIS... IS... SPARTA!')
Alas Butler gets a braintumor and dies, leaving letters for Swank helping her get on with her life. I’m the first to admit its sounds corny. Almost Kevin Costners Message in a bottle corny.
But here’s the good news: they don’t tell the story like that at all, but with humour and great dialogue instead of self-pity or endless crying. For instance; they could have shown Butler dying slowly and mumbling ‘I –cough- love you’ with his dying breath. Instead we fall in on his wake were music from The Pogues is played and when the bartender hears how Butler dies he replays “Nice!”

The Bartender is played by Harry Connick jr. I really enjoyed his role and my guess is you will to. He’s rude with a lot of dark humour. I didn’t think he’d be funny cause his acting on Will& Grace sure as hell isn’t.* I have to mention Kathy Bates too, she’s one great actress. (and Gina Gershon, you’ll always have a special place in my heart – in a Showgirls kind of way). The acting and the dialogue is really very lifelike, and the film has a few surprising turns.
Fellas, go see it with your special lady friend. If you’re lucky, she’ll respond to the scene where Swank sheds a few tears in bed like mine did: “oh… I love those drapes.” (She’s cute that way.)

ONE thing bothered me. Why cant there be Irish characters in a movie without including all Irish clichés? Butler as ‘Gerry Kennedy’ wears a lot of jewellery, and porkpie hats, drinks only Guinness, and listens to Irish bands only. They even pulled that guy who played an Irish psycho on OZ out of obscurity. My advice: next time you go overboard, for feck’s sake bring in Ardal O’Hanlon or Graham Norton from Graham Linehans Father Ted.


* He’s gay, she’s Jewish. That joke isn’t funny enough to last eight seasons.

bilmflog review: My blueberry nights

My blueberry nights

Director: Kar Wai WongWriters: Kar Wai Wong & Lawrence Block

Norah jones doesn’t make my sort of music. I like jazz, and all the Blue Note greats. Personally I feel jazz music should be wild and a little dangerous. Jones isn’t. Her music is not to interruptive, all sounds the same and gets a little boring. (Bytheway, people who call music “Jazzy” should be shot.)
So I wasn’t to wild about MBN being marketed all about norahjones debuting as an actor. And in the first ten minutes I was right, but it got better. In the start of the film Jones starts off whining to the coffeeshop-owner-aspiring-philosopher Jude Law–who-gets-about-a-hundred-customers-a-day-but-we-hardly-see-any about lost keys. After that she decides to roam the earth (within the American borders) in search of ‘her true self’.
No offence, but to me it all sounded like it was written with a solely female audience in mind. Why? 1) Jude Law 2) surrounded by cake 3) remains single and dreamy for about a year for 4) Norah Jones 5) a girl he met only a couple of times. 6) did I mention cake?
Anyways, Norahjones wanders off to the South and to Vegas working as a waitress. These parts of the movie were a lot better, a bit like short stories in it self, with reliable actors like David Strathairn. Natalie Portman as a gambler overacts a bit but its allright. Norahjones acts a bit low-key with appears quite natural. I still wont play Norahjones’s music, but wouldn’t mind seeing her act again.
Overall this movie could have had a little less needles slow-motion bits or close-ups on food (witch in this CSI day and age is just gross, until you realise its just food) and a lot more dialogue such as “lets get you out of these wet clothes”.

A few jokes could have really helped this film. The only thing in this movie that made me lauch were the names on the end credits such as Jacky Pang Yee Wah, Telly Wong and Suk Pin. (I’m sure they’re all beautiful individuals with great personalities, but they sound funny.)

dvd-review The Last King of Scotland

The Last King of Scotland dvd-review (usa, 2006)

Director: Kevin Macdonald
Writers: Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock (screenplay)

Since this is my third dvd-review for this blog, let me start by saying piracy isn’t a crime. Overpricing movies and boring me with stupid anti-piracy ads is or should be.

That being said, The Last King of Scotland didn’t do much for me. I never was very interested in Uganda or its history. I only heard about Ida Amin because Tom Waits sang about him on a Chuck E. Weiss album. This movie could have gotten me interested in Amin because he was an interesting character, but it didn’t.
I did like the way of filming, witch looks like movies from the 70’s, but neither Forest Whitaker as Ida Amin or James McAvoy as his doctor convinced me to care about their characters, or what happened to them. McAvoy as Amins doctor is not a bad man, but naive and opportunistic. Whitaker can be charming, threatening and paranoid, but not really convincing. Maybe they lost me in the first minute of the story: it starts with a Scottish family drinking alcohol and eating stew. (the only thing missing is Stuart Mackenzie and his Scottish wall of fame). Later on Amin wears a kilt without explanation. Its al just a wee bit to much.

We are supposted to believe in the love affair between the doctor and one of Amin’s wives, after we seen him having sex with somebody he met at random on a bus and his flirting with another doctor’s wife. Not bloody likely I say. (Talking about bloody, there is one torture scene you might want to fast forward. It could really ruin a romantic evening.) I think Whitaker should do some indiefilms or choose more carefully. He did some great flicks, like Smoke or Ghost Dog, but those movies about scientology with Travolta were total crap.

dvd review: Million Dollar Baby

Million Dollar Baby. Dvd review

I didn’t know what to aspect from MDB. Let’s just say I tend not to follow hypes, and I thought maybe it would be a slobber movie. I was wrong, and should have known better. Eastwood seldom disappoints. (Yes, I said seldom. Let’s face it- Blood works sucked).

Every man likes Clint Eastwood. (And every man should worship Lee Marvin as a tiki-god, but I’ll explain why in a later post) 'Cause Clint played cowboys (cool), soldiers (also good), dj’s (all right), trigger happy cops (yup), sheriffs (ok) an aging astronaut (uh-huh) and a sensitive photographer who hangs around Meryl Streep a lot. (wtf).

In MDB he plays a guy who runs a boxing gym. (That’s more like it baby) His character reminds me the most of an older version of sgt. Gunnery from Heart Break Ridge. If you haven’t seen it, make it next on your list. It’s ‘CC’ -classic clint. It looks like Morgan Freeman is back into acting too. Good for him! Anyway, Eastwood is a boxing trainer. One day Hilary Swank. walks in and convinces him to train her. Eventually he does, and she turns out to be a great boxer. Don’t think you know what’s coming next, because the story doesn’t went at all as (I at least) expected. Swank surprised me as well with a great job, so I don’t understand why the girl on the cover doesn’t look like her at all.

The biggest surprise however was Eastwood's beautiful job of directing. You’d almost believe top lights and boxing rings were invented just for him so he could take the lighting to a new level.
Clint’s the man!

dvd-review: the Good Shepherd

the Good Shepherd, espionage, 2007. Director: Robert de Niro Runtime: 167 minutes dvd review.

Basically, the Good Shepherd is a little more than a espionage-film. It also tries to give an insight in the secret society called "Cross and Bones" where many CIA-agents were recruited from (like George Bush senior). Sounds like a great idea. Yeah.

I’m going to get straight to the bad news; I had a really hard time believing Matt Damon in the role of a spy during war time (I’m not talking Bourne here). Damon plays a bureaucratic pussy who gets sucked in the CIA without putting up a fight or even a word. He’s really a poet, who falls in love with a deaf girl (Pussy). Then he is forced to marry Angelina Jolie and fight the Russians. That sounds exiting, but it really isn’t. Instead of shagging the hell out of Jolie and kicking Russian ass, we see him reading files and making a lot of phone calls. Not exiting enough for you? He also can’t show love to his son who turns out to be a bit of a sissy. Surprising turns of events you say? Indeed.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Matt Damon -I personally don’t think that when you win a Oscar with your first script you take this as a reason never to put pen to paper again except sign million-dollar-contracts. But hey- He’s miscast. He just doesn’t have the right face (yet) to play a husband, a father and a senior spy. It takes a more experienced actor to make us believe in a really shallow character.

Maybe next time De Niro can leave the daddy-issues to Wes Anderson. I think Michael Caine said it best as Nigel Powers: “If you’ve got a daddy-issue, here’s a daddy-tissue.”
And next time he brings Joe Pesci out of eight(!) years of retirement, I don’t want him disappearing after two minutes. I want him stabbing people in the frigging neck with a f*cking pen.

Dvd-extra’s: behind the scenes, interviews, photos and to documentaries. Combined they add up to a total waste of time.

The Flock

Thriller, 2007, Directors: Wai-keung Lau, Niels Mueller, Writers: Hans Bauer, Craig Mitchell, Runtime: 105 min

Richard Gere plays Erroll Babbage, an employee of the department of public safety who monitors registered sex offenders. He became obsessed with his job after a girl went missing on his watch. He swore it would never happen again and waddayouknow, just before he is about to quit it happens again…

Because of the fact that he became so obsessed with his work and started to freak out his collagues, Erroll is fired. In his last day’s he has to train Allison Laurie (Claire Danes) to be his follow-up. Together they try to track down the missing girl, in the murky world of sex offenders. This all boils down to a pretty basic thriller, with solid performances by Gere and Danes. Nothing new here, but still a very decent film. Except maybe for the editing which is done in that flashing-about-like-on-crack C.S.I. kind off way. But it does add to the already creepy setting. Wait till this one is out on dvd.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Horror, 2007, Director: Russell Mulcahy, Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson, Runtime: 95



This is the third installment in the Resident Evil series and arguably the best. Let me rephrase that: it sucks less then it's predessesors. This isn’t that difficult, since the last one sucked so hard, it's now used as software to program vacume cleaners. The first Resident Evil was fairly watchable, but this one wins by upping the action and gore, which makes it a fairly decent zombie-movie. But then again - the standards in that genre aren't that high.

The story doesn't matter unless you care and if you do I ask you: why? What's nice, is that the whole thing takes place during the day. You don't see that too often in a zombieflick. Let's leave it with that.

30 Days Of Night

Horror, 2007, Director: David Slade, Writers: Steve Niles, Stuart Beattie, Brian Nelson, Runtime: 113

Strange shit starts happening when a small town in Alaska is getting ready for 30 days of night. Sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) investigates and finds out all means of communication and transportation out of town are cut off. It appears a bunch of vampires chose the town as their 30 days of all-you-can-eat-buffet. Pretty soon the majority of the town gets murderd/eaten (as shown in a nice top-down point of view). A small group of people under command of sheriff Oleson, seeks shelter.

From there on out it's your average survival horror stuff. People get emotional, do dumb shit and end up as vampire breakfast (or dinner. It's hard to tell, since it's night all day). Which doesn’t mean this is an average movie. The pace is just high enough, the violence brutal and best of all: they made vampires scary again. These are predators who feed on human flesh, instead of dandy’s who like the occasional glass of blood. Unlike American Gangster, 30 days does go out with a bang, even if the ending doesn’t make any sense.

Anche Libero Va Bene

Drama, 2006, Director: Kim Rossi Stuart, Writers: Linda Ferri, Francesco Giammusso, Kim Rossi Stuart, Federico Starnone, Runtime: 108

I’ve seen so many American movies the past years, that I almost forgot there are other ways of storytelling on screen as well. Anche Libero Va Bene is a Italian movie without comic relief from a sidekick. Without a bankable star to keep the accountants happy. Without the latest popstar attempting to act in order to attract young people to the theatres. No redundant scenes to explain the characters because otherwise studio-executives think audiences won’t believe them. No obligatory happy end.

What you do get are actors who tell a moving story about a family of a single father and two children. The mother has abandoned them wich left an big impact on everyone. It takes effort from the father as well as the children to keep the family together through the good times and the bad. It’s as simple as that.

American Gangster

Crime, 2007, Director: Ridley Scott, Writer: Steven Zaillian, Runtime: 157 min

A story about the Good (Rus-sell Crowe) the Bad (Den-zel Washington) and the Mumbling (Armand Assante). Cinematical this is a beatiful picture about Manhattan in the seventies. Scott based the sets on William Kleins photographs and did a terrific job. Downsides: The film doesnt get exiting at any point. It's clear that the 'blue magic' dealing Frank Lucas is going to rise to the top, only to be brought down by Richie 'serpico' Roberts. When that happens, he's cooperating in a matter of minutes. After more than two hours of caracter development, the movie goes out without a bang. Washington says 'my man' a lot, just like in Training Day (for wich he won an Oscar) but at least that movie ended with a shoot-out.

High Points: Josh Brolin as a extra-corrupt cop "Have a great fucking trip back to Jersey" and plenty naked ladies cutting up dope.

Things We Lost In The Fire

Drama, 2007, Director: Susanne Bier, Writer: Allen Loeb, Runtime: 119 min

Benicio Del Toro plays a heroin addict, who tries to get clean when his best friend is murdered. He moves in with his friends widow Audrey, played by Halle Berry. Although Del Toro from time to time seems to keep himself restrained and Berry had some weak moments, this is a strong film with good players. It focuses on details in sound as well as visually. These deepen the story. I especially enjoyed two actors in supporting roles – the widow’s brother and next door neighbour.
Trivia: Del Toro’s t-shirt, the one with ‘same same’ on it was his own idea. It was based on a graffiti he saw once and was a way for him to get in character.