There is nothing like a brilliant actress playing a crazy person to get my juices flowing. Throw in some music and set it against the backdrop of Paris and I’m in seventh heaven. Well, who wouldn’t be, right?

If you’ve seen La Vie En Rose you can only imagine the heady state I was in as I walked out of the theatre. I’m new to writing reviews and am not well versed in “spoiler” etiquette so let me just say, if you’re the kind of person who is going to get all pissy about that sort of thing, I’ll let you know right now I’m giving it a thumbs up so you can stop reading, bookmark this page and run out and see the movie. When you’re finished, come back and continue reading immediately. I’ll be waiting.

Hey, I didn’t hear you come in, dija have a good time? Cool, let’s continue…

La Vie En Rose is the life story of French chanteuse/icon Edith Piaf. Piaf is an enigma to say the least. She was born and raised in squalor. The details of her early life are not accurately documented and this film pieces many details together to rather approximate the flavor of what her childhood was like as opposed to offering an absolute historical depiction.

In a nutshell, she was born to a street singer mother and an acrobat father in Belleville, Paris in 1918. From the opening scene we get that this was not just a slum but rather the crowning achievement of slum-dom. Edith’s father eventually took her from her crazed and/or drug addled mother and placed her in the care of her grandmother who ran a brothel in Normandy. Can you say, “out of the frying pan and into the fire?” The film details the ambiance of a post-World War I brothel in Normandy so thoroughly that it’s fast paced editing actually does it a disservice.

I found the setting so fascinating that I wanted the camera to linger so I could really soak it all up. Prostitutes also fascinate me but that’s another story. The film shows that Little Edith was blinded for several of her earliest years, according to Wikipedia likely due to keratitis or iritis. I couldn’t help but think it was God’s way of saying, “This sucks for you so I’m going to blind you just so you don’t actually have to see any of it.”

Eventually Edith’s father comes and rescues her from the whorehouse and takes her with him back to the circus. To-may-to/to-mah-to. Shortly after that the film kicks into the more accurately documented details of her life.

She gets hooked up with a boyfriend/pimp whom she pays from her earnings as a street singer, we’re lead to assume as opposed to a street walker. Good fortune finally smiles on Edith when she is discovered by Gérard Depardieu. Well, not the real Gérard Depardieu but the character he plays who is the owner of a nightclub. From there she goes on to become the Edith Piaf the world came to love and adore.

I can’t write anymore at this point without mentioning Marion Cotillard, the actress who plays Edith Piaf from her teens until her death at age 47. Remember her name because I will not be surprised at all if we see her walking the red carpet come Oscar time. She is breathtaking and heartbreaking. She gives the kind of performance that hits you somewhere deep down in the soul. While we could sit and quibble about the film’s structure, style or accuracy it makes no difference when it contains a performance of this magnitude.

I could babble on and on about this heavenly marriage of actress and icon but the bottom line is that she is magnificent, plain and simple. Edith Piaf lived a hot and intense life filled with poverty and pain, fame and fortune, disease and addiction, romance and glamour. Mlle. Cotillard delivers it all…in spades.

Oh yeah, before I forget it’s in French and subtitled. If that sort of thing bothers you, get over it. It won’t kill you to read a little bit.

The best way to see this movie is all by yourself on a rainy afternoon when you’re feeling melancholy. It’s the kind of movie to go see when you desperately need to feel connected with something or when you need to escape into a world that’s not your own. Isn’t it funny how experiencing someone else’s pain can make us feel better about our own? Maybe that is the beauty of great art.

Click her for a little teaser and enjoy La Vie En Rose

Love Actually is a wonderful movie. I was very skeptical since I thought this would be a standard “chick flick” for lack of a better term. I was pleasantly surprised particularly by the fact that it was more a comedy and everyone in the movie was somehow linked to each person in the film. I thought that this movie was hilarious. Especially the scenes with the older rock star and the scenes involving Liam Neison’s stepson. I found the plot to be highly entertaining and the acting to be outstanding. While this movie is about love and people finding, losing, and finding love again it is more about not getting bogged down with life’s depressing sides and atrocities. It is about noticing that no matter how bleak things seem love actually is all around us. This is a British film and it goes through the last five weeks or so until Christmas. The uniqueness of this story is that the characters involved are from all different walks of life from Prime Minister to a writer to a housewife and they are still connected by acquaintances and exceptional situations. I recommend watching this film. It does something that most movies fall short in it makes you realize that the world can be a great place and that there are redeeming qualities to the human race as a whole. The artistry in this movie wasn’t so much the breath taking venues or special effects or even the smoothness in which the scenes flowed together but rather that the movie exists in the first place and accomplishes what the story needed to convey.

Steven Defnall

This evening I watched a movie that I haven’t seen in years. It was thunderbolt and Lightfoot starring Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges and George Kennedy. It also had small roles played by Gary Busey and Catherine Bach from the Dukes of Hazard the original TV show.

This is one of those movies I saw the late show years ago on TV. This evening I watched it on Comcast on demand (one of those Free Movies). So I was able to see the entire uncut movie which has a little nudity and it in that 70s style where they try and hit you over the head and almost shock you with a naked woman as opposed to just being a little natural about things. Catherine Bach is not the actress that sheds are close even though she does get busy with Jeff Bridges in the movie.

The movie is about a hippie, Jeff Bridges, that happens along one day to run into a preacher that’s on the run from a madman chasing him with a gun that after shooting up his church, Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood is a preacher and not the madman with the gun.

Jeff Bridges has just stolen a car and gives Clint Eastwood a ride starting a reluctant friendship on Clint Eastwood’s part with Jeff Bridges hippie character. Jeff Bridges plays Lightfoot and eventually is revealed to Clint Eastwood is thunderbolt.

They go through some very strange adventures through the early part of the movie stealing more cars hooking up with Catherine Bach’s character, and getting chased by that crazy madman again. Eventually some of the mystery surrounding Clint Eastwood’s character starts to come out and it’s revealed that Clint Eastwood’s been on the lam for a bunch of years. He’s a Korean War veteran with a Silver Star that rob the Minnesota Armory bunch of years earlier. He and his gang unfortunately lost the money and the madman is actually one of the old members of a gang that thinks that Clint Eastwood stole the money. That madman’s played by George Kennedy.

So long story short, the madman and his buddy along with Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges team up to go rob the Minnesota Armory all over again. The idea is that it worked once before and no one will ever suspect that they’re going to rob the Armory in the same way.

Unfortunately they don’t have any money and so they all get jobs Journal of the money so they can buy the stuff they need to go rob the Armory. This is a little bizarre sense a group of them are just gone on a crime spree, stealing cars and driving people and now all of a sudden it’s important to earn a living so they can save up enough money to buy the stuff they need to go rob the Armory.

Today that section of the movie would’ve been cut lickety-split faster than you can say “Rewrite!”

So while they’re working their jobs they cannot case the place and starts looking like the stuff they need to get the job done.

Eventually they go pull off the caper but things go a little bit wrong and if you double crosses take place and before you know it Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges are hitchhiking alongside the road again. They’re ultimately redeemed in a very ironic ending and shortly after the redemption of all is lost once again but in a way you’d never expect.

The movie is a pretty good movie even though it’s starting to age a little funny. He liked 70s air car chases and shocking displays of nudity mixed in with a pretty good plot and average dialog and don’t forget about all those Clint Eastwood looks, and you probably like this movie.

Wall Street the movie is to Alpha males aspiring to be business mogul assholes as The Devil Wears Prada is to Alpha females that aspire to be business mogul assholes with good fashion sense in a size 4 or better.

This was basically one of those rehashed theme movies. Girl graduates from college with more brains that is good for a person. Unbelievably takes a job for a fashion magazine so that she can become a respected journalist?

Gets an extreme asshole of a boss, then proceeds to sell out herself, her father, her boyfriend and friends and coworkers to get ahead, by accident.

She ultimately sees the error of her ways because apparently she did not want to be successful and drops it all and magically gets a job as a serious writer for a newspaper based on a bad recommendation from her asshole boss (played by Meryl Streep).

The movie was bad and unless you live for each new issue of Vogue and like to destroy people with snide remarks about the way they dress, you will not like this movie. Oh and in case you are shallow enough to destroy people with snide remarks about the way they dress, you will not learn any good one liners in this movie. You’ll have to think up those snide remarks all by your lonesome.

Can you say conspiracy theory boys and girls? I knew that you could. I think that this was an excellent movie. Mark Wahlberg does a really good job portraying a man you don’t ever want to piss off even from extreme distances. Not only is he an excellent shot he is extremely hard to kill. This movie shows what is truly horrible about any government and how it can cover up things with misdirection. This movie just doesn’t quit at no point does it slow down even when you get the revelation scenes about the cover up. Danny Glover was wonderful in this movie he stepped away from any role I have ever seen him in and pulled it off with flying colors. I like the fact that it goes a little into the science behind what it takes to make shots at long distances. Having to calculate trig in your head if your target moves just a fraction and having to account for wind speed and variations. While there is a girl involved it doesn’t try and ruin what the movie is with a sappy love story thrown in just to get women to like it. I think that the movie industry should give women a little more credit that they can enjoy an action movie just based on the plot. I applaud this movie for that. The camera angles and quick scene changes help to smooth out the movies look keeping action flowing. The snow scene is brilliant in terms of its artistry and adds a little touch of drama to push this movie over the edge.

A good movie that keeps you guessing what will happen next. In the opening scenes a ferry full of U.S. service men explodes causing an investigation by the FBI and the ATF. At first glance this movie seems to be a guess who type of movie where you keep trying to figure out who committed the crime. Instead the plot twists where you can actually see the events that happened four and a half days in the past due to a discovery some Harvard grads accidentally found. I think the theories that explain this phenomenon are actually pretty cool but you don’t need a doctorate in order to find this movie Wonderful if a little confusing since it mostly follows Denzel Washington an ATF agent and I would have liked a little more background into the project that lets you see into the past even if it limited in its application or practicality. It also felt a little like an episode of quantum leap on steroids. I really enjoyed this move and I felt Val Kilmer should have had a bigger role as I feel he is an excellent actor even if he has put on a little weight. All in all the film artistically speaking is very much based in a high tech setting and feels a little like an editors dream studio with all the equipment that is involved.The style is captivating even if it is not bright the scenes seem contrived in brown and ambers especially the night scenes and everything that is viewed in the past almost like a sepia tone photograpgh with a few more colors added in. I think that it helped to separate the past and the present. I could not guess what was going to happen and that is a real feat for any movie to accomplish. I highly recommend this movie

Steven Defnall

We watched Deja Vu from PayPerView a couple nights ago, and then watched it again. It was a very good movie. (Lots of slight spoilers)

Denzel Washington plays an ATF agent investigating a Ferry Explosion. He plays one of those Sherlock Holmes types of agents that can deduce almost anything. This skill attracts the attention of a Government experiment controlled by the FBI (plausibility check here as its unlikely the government would ever trust the FBI this much).

The FBI has this experimental device that allows them to look back in time 4 and a half days and view on a monitor everything that transpired. They want to use this tool to figure out who blew up the ferry, but they don’t know where to look, enter Denzel Holmes.

Denzel has a crush on a dead girl that he met in the morgue. The dead girl appears to be a Ferry Explosion victim, but the funny thing is she died before the explosion. So Denzel has the team check out her apartment four days earlier where they proceed to ‘watch’ her in the past do all sorts of things including taking a shower, which helps cement Denzel’s puppy love for the dead girl. Those Sherlock Holmes ATF types tend to fall in love easily I guess.

Time Travel and Loops and Alternate Branch Theory

Ok, so about this time the geekiness of the movie diverges away from voyeurism taking the off ramp to Eintseinville.

Denzel Holmes discovers that its possible to disrupt or change the past. This leads the FBI, often known for their experimental ways, to agree to send a note back in time to attempt to prevent the terrorist attack.

That of course doesn’t change anything as its already happened. These people are operating on a different branch of time and don’t realize it. Then Denzel Holmes has himself sent back in time to save his new dead girlfriend. He makes it back far enough to make an impact but then the time loops kick in and things get tricky as they always do in movies involving time travel (think Back to the Future, Time Bandits, Superman 2, 12 Monkeys, Peggy Sue Got Married, Army of Darkness, Bill & Ted’s excellent adventures, Planet of the Apes, The Time Machine, Minority Report, Groundhog Day, Time Cop, Terminator series, The Philadelphia Experiment, Dead Again, Black Knight, A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court . . .. You get the idea)

The bottom line is time lines get complicated when things start getting woven together. Any thing is possible as all possible time line realities can exist and therefore its just up to the director and writers to pick their timeline of choice to make the movie do what ever they like.

Deja Vu does whatever it likes, and does it pretty well, even though there are some areas where the plot line is a little unrealistic (not including that whole time travel thing.)

I watched American Dreamz over the weekend on Cable. First, this is definitely a cable watch, not a rental and its long past being in the movie theaters.

What’s it About?

The movie features a spoof on American culture targeting President Bush and American Idol at the same time. In the movie, the President has been re-elected, but suffers from an emotional break down the morning after.

Mean while a talent show called American Dreamz is looking for talented but “extremely flawed” contestants. Publicly, they are looking for talented contestants, but the shows producers want very flawed people to make the show entertaining.

They decide that they want a super singing bitch, and then an Arab and a Jew to ultimately make it through to the final round. They then contrive to pull that off when they find their contestants to fit the profiles.

The movie completely ignores the Jewish contestant and focuses on the suicidal producer, Hugh Grant, and the other two contestants. The Arab was sent to the US from an Al Qaeda like training camp, partly kicked out of the camp because he loves ‘Show Tunes’.

He gets accidentally discovered when the talent search finds him instead of his untalented gay cousin that he is staying with in California.

The President’s Chief of staff then determines that the President needs to make a guest appearance on the show as a judge to increase his public profile after hiding out during his emotional break down. That spurs Al Qaeda to activate their sleeper cell operative that loves show tunes staying with a gay cousin who becomes his manager to blow himself up during the finally.

What’s the verdict on the movie?

The movie is one of those OK movies to watch when there is nothing else on cable. Its funny in an ironic way in several areas of the movie, but the focus often avoids the really funny actors in favor of the few actors that have dialogue that pushes the plot along.

The problem with this movie is that its very far fetched, but at the same time almost too realistic to be funny all the way through.

School Ties takes place in the New England area in the 1950s and is about a Jewish boy by name of David Green (played by Brandan Frasier), who conceals his Jewish identity while attending an exclusive preparatory boarding. 

Initially, David is a standout quarterback at his high school football team in a small poor industrial town in Pennsylvania. He is recruited to attend St. Mathews prep school and encourage to conceal his Jewish identity both by the coach who recruited him as well as the school’s management. At first, things go very well for him. He is leading the St. Mathews team to consistent victories, is very popular amongst fellow classmates and makes friends with Charlie Dillon (played by Matt Damon), and wins the heart of an attractive girl by name of Sally from the local female prep school.

However, as other classmates eventually find out about his identity, everything changes. He suffers abuse and torment through racial slurs and posting of swastikas in his room, Sally abandons him, and, finally, the movie reaches its climax with a cheating incident on the final exam, where the class has to make a choice whether or not to pin the incident on David, who is innocent of the cheating.

School Ties, although over-the-top at times, is an education film about anti-semitism in 1950s America.

I’ll readily admit that when I first heard about a follow-up to Bruce Almighty, my stomach churned like Lindsey Lohans after an all-night drinking binge.

Have we not endured enough lame Hollywood remakes?

But as soon as I got word that one Steven Carell would be the leading actor in this seemingly ill-concieved follow up, I jumped up and down like a gitty school girl who just got asked to the Saddy Hawkins Dance. Steven Carell has proven himself a capable funny man, but with style and sophistication. I believe this was made visibly apparent in Little Miss Sunshine, where he shined as a mordantly sarcastic depressant with a touch of zany. So then Evan Almighty should’ve been a cakewalk for Mr. Carell, no?

From start to apocalypse Evan Almighty was nothing more than an example of faith-based corporate-sponsorship at its worst. Even though it attempted to portray biblical narrative against the backdrop of environmental awareness, it failed miserably at concealing its one true purpose, which is pandering to religious moviegoers. Worst of all, the writing appealed to the basest levels, making Steve Carell look like an ABC sitcom dad. Moreover, it might as well have been in Pixar.

If you have more than two brain cells, I strongly recommend saving your loot. I only wish the mega producers of this film had taken that advice.