Reviews

Spoilers here, but this movie is so badly written that it's no great surprise.

Seldom have I felt so much hate towards one movie, but hey, I do with Sweet Home Alabama. Oh, look, it's Reese Witherspoon and she's successful and she's going to get married, only she has to go to Alabama to get a divorce from the husband she deserted 7 years ago, only oh wait, she's falling in love with him again.

Wow, that would be original. If we hadn't seen it in EVERY ROMANTIC COMEDY A STUDIO HAS CHURNED OUT SINCE 1960.

This movie is utter crap. May as well be called 'Reese Witherspoon Is Cute, So Here's A 109 Minute Cliche'. When Reese reunites with her old flame, they hate each other. So they fight a lot. The first 20 or so minutes after they meet is pretty much them squabbling. Oh yes, but then she's also walking around town seeing all these people she knew in high school. Oh, and guess what, every person she sees talks to her about how she was such a troublemaker in school. So then Reese and her husband start loving each other again, but no, her fiancee and his control freak mother get in the way. She starts loving the fiancee again (for a whole 8 or so minutes of screen time) and the parents of the two goes horribly, as you know it will if you've ever seen a bad romantic comedy before. So then she starts loving the husband again, but the husband now doesn't like her. So lookie here, she leaves her fiancee at the altar and goes to the husband where they kiss in the rain, like when they were kids at the start of the film.

But you've seen this before in a million other movies. So have I. So has that guy over there. Quite frankly, if you were to show this movie to a little boy named Pedro who lives in Guatemala and has never seen a movie before, he'd have seen it before. This poorly strung together pile of cliches is so worn it's better suited to Mystery Science Theater 3000 than to the theaters.

Do me a favor and don't watch this, watch Citizen Kane, or Bridge on the River Kwai, or Fargo, or Chinatown, watch ANYTHING that isn't a pile of cliched jokes and kisses like this. Keep your dollars from going to studios so they can make more of these awful, awful movies.

Spoilers here, yo!

Having hated Reloaded and knowing that Revolutions will be just as bad, I sat down yesterday and rewatched The Matrix. The original movie. The GOOD movie.

This time I noticed a lot of the smaller things that make it so beautiful, so amazing, so DIFFERENT from other movies. The plot was simple and complex, it was stylishly shot, and one can never say that they don't enjoy watching SWAT teams get blown away by badasses in trenchcoats.

The Oracle, for example. When Neo goes to the oracle, the entire audience knew for a fact that she'd say 'wayhey, you're the one!'. Only she didn't. Suddenly, the audience is caught off guard. They don't know what to think, and they don't know what in HELL will happen next. Neo's situation when Cypher betrays them and the police and agents ambush the building is very unique - Morpheus sacrifices himself because he thinks Neo is the one, but Neo knows he isn't, but he can't save him because the rest of the crew will endanger themselves trying to save him if he tries to go after Morpheus. Convoluted as hell! And a great situation! And then saving Morpheus, God (I maintain that the sequence from when Neo and Trinity walk into the lobby to the helicopter crash is the finest action sequence in the history of filmmaking, and that from Neo and Trinity walking into the lobby to the end of the movie is overall brilliantly done). Truly inspired, all around.

Also take Agent Smith. Agent Smith is the coolest movie villain ever, damn it. From the first time we see him we KNOW there's something sinister about him and the other two agents with him. He has such a methodical and well groomed look to him, the glasses, the suit, the huge freaking gun, and don't get me started on his voice. And then we see that he's slowly becoming unglued. An amazing character, through and through, not to mention that the whole 'suit with sunglasses and ear communicator' look is dead cool. In the later versions they've got him as some kind of rogue program or whatever, but I really don't think that works, mainly because I think he works so well as a product of the system, not something that ran away from it.

The Matrix isn't my FAVORITE movie (on a recent top 30 movies list I made, The Matrix was at #20) but it is, as the Teen Girl Squad would put it, 'hella tight'. The storyline is smooth and streamlined, and while it is easy enough to understand, it also has loads of levels (mainly just from what the Oracle told Neo and how that shaped how he saved Morpheus). You can watch the Matrix on all kinds of levels - the 'kickin' rad action' level, the 'kickin' rad story' level, the 'kickin' rad philosophy' level... The list goes on. So once the critics are done panning Revolutions, remember that the movies didn't always suck - they were started out with one of the finest most beautifully done accomplishments of all time.

Spoilers be here.

I first saw Fargo around 7 months ago, from that day forward it has been my absolute favorite movie. Fargo is accessible, because it's the story of an everyday guy (Jerry) who needs money, so he hires a couple other everyday guys to kidnap his everyday wife, who end up shooting an everyday state trooper, and so on and so forth.

I choose not to view Fargo as a comedy, even though it has quite a few funny moments. I see Fargo as a story of real life. When you think about it, Fargo is one of the most realistic movies out there. It's the Hamburger Hill of thrillers. Like I said, Fargo is about people who aren't really smart (well, except for Marge I guess) doing things that aren't very well thought out. And there isn't a whole lot of drama to the things they do that make them more exciting and less realistic. For example, Marge doesn't fight off 20 ninja assassins in the field where she finds the dead bodies. Jerry doesn't pull out Uzis and have a 10 day standoff with police in the hotel at the end of the movie. Marge's husband (even though I love Fargo I can't remember his name) doesn't win the stamp competition. No, Fargo shows what life really is like, without a whole lot of needless drama. And yet, somehow, there IS drama, in the imagery. Like when Jerry is walking to his iced over car in the building parking lot. The scene is shot from above, and for a few seconds it looks like it's a picture because of the stillness until Jerry walks into frame. Or when Steve Buscemi drives into the airport parking lot to steal new plates for his car. Or when Marge shoots at the fleeing Peter Stormare as he runs across the frozen lake. Fargo's drama comes from compelling imagery, and not suspension of disbelief.

Yeah, that didn't make sense, but you can pretend it did.