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Midnight in Paris (2011)
Cute and quite enjoyable, but not much more
I'm not a big fan of Woody Allen's work, but this movie wasn't bad. However, I feel it was certainly not great, and felt rather flat in retrospection despite enjoying the majority of it.
The movie begins with about four minutes of footage showing Paris in the rain, which in my opinion was a bit of a wasted time. It didn't further anything and didn't evoke any emotions toward the city. Later, we are introduced to our main character and his fiancé. They spend their time in a vacation in Paris, and we immediately understand how much our protagonist is in love with the city.
Sadly, all the characters felt very shallow for me. There is the neurotic protagonist who doesn't really do anything and things just happen to him; we don't know a thing about the fiancé besides the fact she doesn't want to live in Paris and is in love with another sophisticated man; and all the other side characters show only one main quality rather than being three dimensional characters.
The film doesn't try to present any logical themes about the time traveling stuff, but rather takes the time travels easily, which isn't a bad thing. The story doesn't make much sense and there are many plot holes which are not addressed, but it didn't bother me too much overall.
The parts which I liked the most are the ones in Paris in the 1920's, and the various well known figures we meet there. It was pretty fun, and the characters were colorful enough to enjoy them. However, at some point towards the end of the movie, I realized there isn't a real emotional hook to keep me interested in the characters and what happens to them. I was left a little underwhelmed, and the moral of the story was shoved in the audience's throats. In the end, it was pretty enjoyable, but not much more than that.
Lost in Translation (2003)
Wonderful absorbing experience
This is a film best viewed alone. It depicts two lonely characters in an alienating environment, who find comfort in each other's quietness. For me, the viewing experience was similar, slow-paced but very absorbing. Bill Murray has an amazing performance, having much subtlety in it. Scarlett Johansson is lovely too.
Some may say the film doesn't have much plot, but I don't think this is the point of the film. It shows a rather bizarre experience of two troubled characters. There is no need for logic here, just raw emotions. After I finished watching the movie and thought about it for a while, I simply couldn't find any drawbacks or significant flaws here. Everything is meticulously crafted, subtle but effective, resulting in a small but captivating film.
Fearless (1993)
Good film, but has its flaws
What happens after one dies?
"Fearless" tries to answer that question through its raw emotions, showing a survivor of a terrible plane crash who becomes truly and utterly fearless. Max, the survivor, reaches some type of spiritual nirvana when facing death directly, and is reborn in a way. However, he feels as if he's already dead, and he sees the rest of the survivors in the same way. This makes for an interesting character study, exploring what happens when one embraces fully both fear and death. Jeff Bridges has by far the best performance in the film, and showed much of the needed emotion to keep the movie afloat. The rest of the cast did a decent job (though I didn't like the child actors), and Tom Hulce was great in his little part as a greedy lawyer.
However, I felt the movie lacked some focus at some parts. The beginning was great, and so was the end. In the middle, I felt some ups and downs, and some scenes fell flat in contrast to some of the better scenes in the film. After the beginning, the film constantly flashed religious themes without much subtlety, but those stopped after the middle of the movie. The relationship between Max and Carla, another survivor, was interesting enough - but I didn't feel the actress playing Carla did the best job she could. The psychiatrist was rather superfluous to the story, and Max's wife was rather ignored in the first half of the film and didn't get enough depth afterwards in my opinion. The directing was interesting at times and unnoticeable in others, but it was overall solid. I think the script has the biggest issues of the movie - some of the lines were hideous in my opinion, and the plot itself felt a tad not fully organized.
To sum up, even though I found the film good, there were too many flaws in it which kept taking me out of the movie. The ongoing themes of Christianity felt rather annoying and preachy, some characters didn't contribute much to the emotional depth of the film, and some of the dialogues felt extremely fake to me. An interesting viewing, but I felt some aspects could have been handled better.