Change Your Image
giligara30492
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Airplane! (1980)
The most Pythonesque American comedy film... and that's truly saying something.
"Airplane!" is a unique American comedy film where the satire and the silliness flow naturally, where the comedy stems from a plot deliberately not taking itself or its characters at all seriously, and where the witty retorts and the Pythonesque surrealism abound and coalesce brilliantly into a hilarious work of genius.
I adored all the puns, the wordplay, the exaggeration...
This is one of my favorite comedy films now.
It's what would happen if American comedy allowed itself to be a little more British.
Annie Hall (1977)
Amazing film, worth at least 3 or 4 views.
Believe it or not, I had never watched a Woody Allen film before this. I'm not much of a film buff, as you can imagine. Now, I'll definitely find more of his work.
That major caveat aside, I absolutely loved this movie.
PLOT AND CHARACTERS
The characters were very, very nicely fleshed out- we explore their lives in the present, as well as their childhoods and families, and their motivations and thoughts are nicely exposed to us keeping in line with the psychoanalysis theme (one of the major themes of the movie). What that ends up meaning is that we see their relationship evolving naturally every step of the way. It never feels odd or out of place. We actually buy that these two end up together and, at the end, it makes total sense for them to separate.
Alvy is a neurotic, quick-witted, funny, obsessive-compulsive, incredibly pessimistic Jewish man approaching his 40s who dreams of becoming a famous comedian and writer/playwright, and Annie is a free-spirited, open-minded, more optimistic, small-town girl in New York City who has hopes of becoming a singer. The beautiful thing, is they're both complete oddballs. They don't fit in anywhere. And that's why we buy their relationship. When she makes a royal screw-up of herself at their very first meeting ("do you need a lift?"), for instance, we are forced to contrast her with Alvy's ex-wife, who hung out with the most pompous of intellectuals only and made HIM feel like the screw-up. Annie, we understand, is the opposite of that. She chooses, at every turn to experience life, to wear the ties and huff the blow. He also encourages this, just as much as she encourages him. She laughs at all his jokes and he finds her initial fumbling genuinely charming.
We also understand on both parts, why it doesn't work out. The dark cloud of pessimism that we practically see hang over him, his obsession with timeliness and detecting antisemitism, his paranoia about her teachers, the fact that he makes her feel unintelligent... All of these sour him for her. As for him, her need for socializing ends up being too much, as do her habit of smoking marijuana before sex, her emotional detachment and later liberation, and her openness to new experiences like rock concerts and right-wing magazines.
It seemed to me a sad ending, but one that makes sense. He tries to get back with her, and we know that he doesn't fit with anyone else he dates, but he's spent the whole movie sabotaging himself (believing it would never work out with someone who would want to date him in the first place), so his pessimism ends up being the downfall of the relationship in the end. Even if he fantasizes about it working out. The reason he keeps trying, though, even after it's over, is that of every person who keeps trying at their relationships: he needs the eggs.
GENERAL REVIEW
Both Woody Allen and Diane Keaton turn in wonderful performances here. Woody's comic timing and delivery is impeccable. He's so good at portraying the neurotic, obsessive facet of Alvy, I swear I had an ulcer by the time Alvy and Annie break up for good. Diane is his perfect match, of course. Amazing how she plays almost the complete opposite - relaxed, free-spirited, open to the big wide world - and yet has perfect chemistry with him. I like the way the film played with time and how there were abrupt cuts from scene to scene sometimes and lots of breaking of the fourth wall. It's a non-linear love story, and playing with time like this is crucial to the film, I think, because that's not only why we get to know the characters so well (we get to see their past and in-between romances, their childhoods and families), but why we understand that 1) they don't fit with anyone else and 2) they fit so well with each other. As a final note, I found the script to be fantastic. Full of great banter, humor, wit, and ideas (all well-delivered, of course). I adored that it doesn't stay away from, say, drugs and sex, but I also liked that the script doesn't try to exaggerate or find any shock humour with them. All the jokes are mostly understated even when they're raunchy (like the cunnilingus joke), and I like that. Sex and drugs to me are not taboo or shock subjects, and in this movie they genuinely don't feel like they are. Just a normal part of human life.
CONCLUSION
This film offers a good-humored, fairly pessimistic view on relationships. It's a funny, well-acted, witty view into romance that is utterly unique and I recommend it to everyone and everyone.
Blackpool (2004)
Great Story, Great Characters
As a huge fan of David Tennant, I had watched clips of "Blackpool" before. Mostly the musical bits. I had just never gotten around to watching the whole thing before. And here's my verdict. I absolutely loved it. The story itself was very well written. Half-way through, though, you realise that it's more about the growth of the characters and about the changes in their relationships, than about the unsolved murder or Ripley's money troubles.
I loved that the three main characters were nicely complex: they are broken in some ways but very good people in others. That is, Ripley isn't just a gambling bastard out to make a profit, Peter isn't just an officer intent on nailing him and his son because he falls in love with Natalie, and Natalie isn't JUST a bored, unhappy woman. Part of it, of course, is the writing. We see Ripley's adoration of his children, and even his tense relationship with his wife shows that he really loves her. He is also fiercely independent, and seems to care about the economic future of his town. As for Peter, we see how gone he is for Natalie almost at once, but we also see that his moral compromise and his obsessive investigation is something he is pulled towards slowly, not something inherent in him. There is a lot more to him: determination, and copious amounts of charm, cleverness and sarcasm. As for Natalie, she is, besides a wife and mother unhappy in her marriage, an altruistic woman who, despite having fallen in love with Peter, has the strength of character to break it off and decide she won't leave Ripley until Ripley gives her his blessing. The two children were also nuanced. Danny isn't just a troubled teenager who deals drugs and has trouble with the police. He is also very depressed and starving for affection from his father. He's also possibly the bravest of the bunch. And Shyanne isn't a brat marrying an older man to spite her father. She genuinely loves Steve AND adores her father.
The acting was phenomenal. No matter how much I try, I cannot seem to find a bad thing to say about David Tennant's acting. He is wonderfully nimble, enormously charming, endlessly magnetic, and the way he conveys the emotions of his character is beautifully clear. He is quite simply a dream. David Morrissey shined through and through. He was perfect for the part, especially in portraying the contrast in the different sides to Ripley. It wasn't hard to buy what a good father he can be and what a bastard he can be as well. Very well done on his part. Sarah Parish was measured and explosive when she needed to be. She played the moral dilemmas very, very well, but also clearly let us see how her marriage has affected Natalie before she met Peter. Great acting over all from all of the cast.
The music choices were a few times in complete disharmony with the story, but most of the time this served to get further inside the characters' minds. Loved how surreal the sequences were sometimes. My favourites were "Should I Stay or Should I Go," "Cupid," "The Boy with the Thorn In His Side," and "Viva Las Vegas."
I recommend this mini-series to everyone. It is a great story that is a lot of fun to watch, and a refreshing departure from the usual TV crime-fiction.
Love in the Time of Cholera (2007)
Faithful Adaptation, Sorely Lacking in Characters
Let me start by saying that "Love In The Time of Cholera" is one of the finest pieces of literature I've ever had the honour of reading. The complexity of the characters in the context of the epic love story, and, of course, García Márquez' uniquely masterful, creative, nuanced, and haunting storytelling are as astoundingly difficult to get out of your head as they are to even begin thinking about portraying on film. So, when I set out to watch this, I expected the details and the rich colour of the book to be present only to a certain extent, but I didn't expect this. The characters were gone, too.
Florentino, the boy who is all but destroyed by an acutely-debilitating, chronically-present, obsessive, dangerous, manic and unconditional love for Fermina, was very, very different in the film. He is extremely shallow instead of profoundly observant, borderline psychotic instead of passionate, and disgustingly sleazy instead of empty and sadly seductive. I originally saw his promiscuity as a coping mechanism-turned-addiction, by which the author had free leeway to explore sexual desire and physical love in its entire spectrum, from the desperate, to the comical, to the terrifying, to the paraphilic (and, yes, that's a term I just coined because I wanted to vomit when reading about Florentino and his 14-year-old ward-- which, I suspect, was the intended effect). It's very important to note, too, that in the novel Gabo takes on this subject very carefully and skilfully, with a sharp contrast in tone, symbolism and pacing that sets it worlds apart from the romantic kind of love that Florentino never feels for anyone but Fermina. In the film, however, all of the details were missing, and the previous analysis turns to dust -- why he's promiscuous, with whom and why. I daresay we never even understand the reason why he loves Fermina the way he does in the first place (which takes reading the entire book). In my opinion, this is due to poor characterisation of both on screen.
Fermina is a hard character to grasp, a tough nut to crack in the book, and I suspect that's her appeal. Florentino never fully understands her -- why she's so cold AND passionate, why she's so quiet AND so emotionally open at the same time. In the film, though, she's easy: a shallow woman who plays hard to get. Without her reactions for example, to her aunt's dismissal by her father, to the long trip to her cousin's, to Europe and everything it holds, and, finally, to being married to a man she loves but not in the way that makes her happy, the audience struggles to understand why she even deserves the title of Crowned Goddess. She's boring, at best.
Juvenal Urbino, the doctor who marries Fermina, much to Florentino's torture, doesn't fare much better in this adaptation. There's barely anything to him but his money and status. In the book, he's a very intelligent man who truly cares about his town and its health and culture, a highly organised snob and a decent husband. We just get the "decent husband" part with this film. He basically makes a deal with Lorenzo Daza and marries his daughter. It's not made clear that he loves her, whereas in the book, his affair being the only exception, the reader never doubts the kind of easy, comfortable, warm kind of love they have for each other till his dying day. Marital love, then, is not to be seen.
Finally, Lorenzo wasn't much of a brutish criminal in this, just an arsehole father, and characters like Euclides were completely missing.
Much is to be said FOR this film, though. It follows the story lines well, albeit with important missing bits. The music is good. The setting (whilst not correct in the sense that the story is set in a typical Colombian coastal tiny town and NOT a big city like Cartagena), is gorgeous. The acting was far from exceptional, but passable. I really liked the ending, but was annoyed by the fact that it was Fermina and not the Captain asking how long they were going to be on the boat.
This adaptation is faithful, and I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 3, because it's really unfair to expect filmmakers to translate phrases like "cataclysm of love" and indeed stories as complex as this into the screen. Gabo was THE master of Magical Realism and we'll be hard-pressed to find a film that does his works justice. He, of course, is very much missed.
Schindler's List (1993)
Masterpiece. Does it even need saying?
Precious little to say about this masterpiece. It depicts everything with raw, meticulous, explicit simplicity -- the unthinkable suffering of the Jewish people, the inhuman cruelty of their oppressors, the heroism of some and cowardice of others... It is the perfect juxtaposition of the very depths atrocity and the light of kindness and empathy and altruism and hope. "I could have saved one more." Gets me every time. Liam Neeson did Schindler justice. We see the compassion develop in his face and it is amazing. In short, you cannot die without watching this film. P.S. Itzhak Perlman is my idol and to have John Williams come up with the music for him was sheer magic.
The Invention of Lying (2009)
AUs and The Moral Argument
I loved this film for its ideas, its writing, and its characters.
THE IDEAS
In this film, Ricky Gervais imagines a very simple alternate universe: people have never evolved the ability to lie (or censor themselves). Throughout the story, needlessly said, it becomes much more complicated than that. First, he shows how dishonesty, when one man is capable of it, can be both morally bankrupt (inventing "The Black Plague," the fantastical, literally unbelievable story that makes him famous) as well as morally good (when he lies to the banker to procure a homeless man money), independently of the hugely suggestible nature of everyone else on this film. This immediately has real-world resonance.
Second, I admired the clever, satirical, but overall succinct way he dove into the birth of religious faith (in this case contextualised as the Judeo-Christian faith): a grieving man, Mark, who doesn't want his agonising mother to be afraid of death, does a very human thing, which no one in this universe has been capable of doing before. He tells her a lie, invents heaven, for both their comforts. Now, the brilliant bit is that it doesn't feel like satire at all at this point: it feels real. Like this is a very probable hypothesis to explain why the concept of heaven arose. And I must agree with Ricky on this.
The invention, of course, goes further. When Mark is pushed into explaining what he knows and how, though (funny how even gullible people seem to need some sort of evidence), he is backed against a wall with the whole of the human race patiently waiting on him, and comes up with "The Man In The Sky" (TMITS). The man who controls everything and both gives people cancer and cures them, capsizes boats and saves the drowning man. If it seems a half-arsed concept, is because, to Ricky, and most atheists like myself, it is. I would imagine the hilarious satire here is clumsy at best in the eyes of a theist, but, really, Ricky does a fantastic job of pinning down both the atheist take on the moral argument (people immediately need guidance on good and bad when faced with the knowledge of TMITS, when they haven't needed it for the whole of human evolution)as well as the problem of evil (TMITS "is kind of a good guy, but he's a prick, too"). In this universe, the rise of churches and diverging doctrines and everything else, of course, is not far off after the initial "discovery" of TMITS. Also funny how Mark creates hell out of basic annoyance at the people pressing him for answers.
Finally, I thought another well-put idea of the film is that whilst morality is complex, and people can and do use lies for personal gain and for altruistic purposes, morality is ultimately and foremost, a human construct. Mark, for example, could have easily convinced Anna to get together romantically with him by answering "yes" when she asked him whether being rich and famous would affect the genetic material of their potential offspring. He could have said to Frank, his suicidal neighbour, that he thought him truthfully a loser. But he doesn't. His reaction is "no" to the first, and "killing yourself is a bad idea; let's hang out" to the second. Also, he's intellectually honest in another respect that makes him different from seemingly everyone else in the film: he allows himself to seek out the truth about people in depth, beyond their appearances. And since there is no external morality (TMITS is merely Mark's invention), these moral things he does must be a product of his human empathy, his sense of compassion, his recognition of sentience outside ourselves deserving of respect. It's a human construct.
THE WRITING
Not much to say here. Ricky's smart-arse wit was there throughout. The callousness and hilarity of the truths and the absurdity of the lies was very well done.
THE CHARACTERS
Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) is a mercilessly advantageous, cunning bastard who's also kind and compassionate. I like him. Anna McDoogles (Jennifer Garner) is a superficial girl who grows throughout the film by getting to see beyond appearances. She ends up giving Mark a chance and finding out that she does like him for him after all. I liked their relationship, too.
I suggest watching if you like wit, satire, and thoughtful comedy. It could have been nonsense, but Ricky's way too smart for that -- he made it mean so much more than its premise. A testament to the effectiveness of simplicity.
God's Not Dead (2014)
Christianity Deserved a Better Defence
As an atheist, I was skeptical when watching this film, and there are three major things that irked me, despite the obviously Christian agenda of the story. 1. The portrayal of atheists as belligerent, insecure, self- righteous, coercive, unlawful, jealous, bigoted, mean-spirited bastards. Not okay. Blatant bigotry. And let's not forget that the professor in real life could have well undergone disciplinary charges, especially if it was a public university. 2. The portrayal of Muslims and the Chinese was paper thin and just as full of bigotry. As an atheist, I too criticise Islam and the totalitarian atheist regimes, but the use of convenient stereotypes to promote the agenda of this film is clearly not okay by any means. 3. The obnoxiously easy conversions. For me personally, the de- conversion process took YEARS. The acceptance of powerful arguments in this regard seems to be a slow process. It is simply not credible for such a deep change in ideology in the other direction to take so little time as the film portrays. So, yes, we can talk about the enormously wicked act of trying to convert a dying man instead of helping him live, about the bitchy girlfriend and the stupid point that atheism is just a hatred of God, but over all, these three things are what irked me the most. Thoroughly forgettable. Gave it a 2 out of 10 because I'm kind.