Movie Reviews Catching Up

I'm not very consistent about blogging. I'm generally pretty busy all the time. Here are quick reviews of other movies I have seen.

The Dark Knight Rises
This was a good movie.

My Summer of Love
My Summer of Love was generally a pretty good movie. One problem with the version of it I saw is that the spoken lines did not match up at all with the video. This was very frustrating. I initially thought that it was because it was originally shot in a foreign language, but after carefully studying the main characters' mouths during some dialogue, I concluded that this was incorrect.

The basic plot is that a poor girl meets a wealthy girl. They fall in love and engage in a youthful romance over the course of the summer. The poor girl's brother is hyper-religious, sort of the born again variety. She, herself, is very passionate, almost to the point of insanity. The wealthy girl is a masterful manipulator and deceiver who ultimately breaks her heart and goes back to school.

I would recommend this to most folks.

The Darwin Awards
This movie was hilarious. The plot is: a detective gets fired after he allows a serial killer to escape under comical circumstances (relating to his fear of blood). He then goes to work for an insurance company. There's a big plot hole here; he is trying to sell what seems to be an aggregate analysis system to help insurance companies properly underwrite life insurance policies by injecting a "probability of dying as a result of extreme stupidity" element into the underwriting algorithms. But, what he actually ends up doing is post-claims auditing to deny insurance claims filed by people who do extremely stupid things. So, I don't see how his original premise matches up with the assignment he is ultimately given.

That point aside, the movie was hilarious and touches on the humanity of people who die under circumstances that are so stupid as to be kind of comical.

Donnie Darko
This was a great movie. Based on the fact that everyone who knows me has said that I would love this movie, I will assume that everyone who knows me has seen this movie. It is weird, it is quirky, it is enjoyable. Watch it.

Little known fact: a young Seth Rogen appears scattered throughout Donnie Darko. By that, I don't mean to say that he was chopped up and his body parts were scattered in various sets in the movie (which would make sense), but that he appears in numerous scenes throughout.

Weird Science
The main lesson I learned from Weird Science was that the 80s were a dark and frightening time, and I'm glad I had only very limited consciousness of my existence throughout them. The story is that two high school geeks use their computer to create a living woman out of a toy doll. She has more or less magical powers (I'm sure the creators intended her to just have super-physics powers but, hey, what's the difference?). She embarks on a quest to not only make them cool by being their hot older woman friend, but to also make them actually cool, mature young men who stand up for themselves and the people they care about, and stand up to bullies and dickish older brothers. She is successful in this quest.

I would definitely recommend this movie to most folks. It's kind of geeky, but funny, so people should see it.

Malice in Wonderland
The trouble with Malice in Wonderland was that I was drunk when I watched it, and it was kind of a spacey interpretation of parts of Alice in Wonderland, which I haven't read in a long long time. I remember liking it quite a bit and feeling that the reviews were unduly harsh. The plot is that a girl suffering from amnesia gets run over by a cab driver in London. The cab driver is a drug dealer who's late for a party at a criminal kingpin's house. The kingpin is about to set up a bank robbery, and it is believed that he will divvy up jobs for the robbery (and, hence, its profits) to whosoever should bring him the best gift. The amnesiatic girl is the daughter of some high power, criminal-type businessman. Anyway, there were lots of little adventures that were fun to watch, and I'd recommend people seeing this.

The only line I remember from the movie was the riddle "what has no conditions but one condition" (the obvious answer being "love"). I remember this because I thought it was oh-so-insightful in my drunken stupor.

TiMER
This was a fun movie! The premise is that a company has developed an implant that can read a person's internal signals and calculate the precise moment when they will meet their soulmate. This resonates with a theory my father has espoused for most of my life--that people marry the people they marry not for who they are but because they happen to be ready to settle down and get married at the time they're dating them. Another way I've heard this theory stated is: "don't think that you're going to be the one who can convince another person to settle down. They'll be ready to settle down when they're ready to settle down and if you happen to get them when they're not ready, you're fucked." I happen to think about that topic an awful lot--whether perhaps I've met the right person but just wasn't ready to be with the right person or the right person wasn't quite ready to be with their right (see graph below for a representation of this thinking)...anyway, I digress.

The movie has its funny moments, and the un-timer-ed romance in the midst of it is sweet. The male object of that romance was possibly the prettiest man I've ever seen in a movie. It's weird being a guy and seeing a guy and thinking "wow, I could really agree that he's pleasant to look at" is a weird experience. I digress again. In the end, the various romantic developments turn two sisters against each other, and the protagonist ends up meeting the man of her dreams one morning while out on a jog.

Ultimately, this movie could have been a lot better than it was. It didn't utilize the dramatic tension well enough, and it could have been funnier. But it's a good way to enjoy an evening at home alone or with someone else if you're both in the mood for some goodhearted fun.

12 Monkeys
12 Monkeys is pretty widely known, so I'll be brief. The plot is that a man from the future keeps getting booted back into time to discover and/or stop the source of an outbreak of plague that more than decimates the human population and drives the remainder underground. He repeatedly runs into the same psychiatrist (who initially treated him as a paranoid schizophrenic on his first trip back in time), and ends up kidnapping her and convincing her of the veracity of his claims. In the end, he almost stops the release of the plague and dies in front of his childhood self in the past. It is pretty well-acted, and the effects are silly enough to be enjoyable.

Ruby Sparks
This movie tells the story of a washed out, high school drop-out author of a wildly successful book at the age of 19 who has writer's block at 29. As part of an assignment from his psychiatrist, he creates a character named Ruby Sparks, the girl of his dreams. Then she steps out of the page and into his life. This theme has been done a few times before, and this telling of it was charming. The best, most insightful scenes are at the home of the protagonist's parents, where you see that the protagonist really is not very comfortable in his own skin around other people who are comfortable in theirs. He is rude, ungrateful, and withdrawn, largely because his mother does not fit into the mold that he believes his mother should fit into. This behavior drives Ruby away before he decides to manipulate her by writing new facts about her into his story, which forces her to do whatever he's written. Ultimately, he releases her and wipes her memory, and turns the whole story into a novel that sells very well.

The movie is, at heart, about the folly of forcing people into the boxes of our expectations for them. The lead character is driven by his view of the way people should be, and when he encounters a divergence from his pre-set vision he (1) ignores it so thoroughly that he doesn't notice it, (2) runs from it and hates the person who diverges from his image of them, or (3) tries to force a change to make the person align with how he thinks they should be. Freud once defined love as "the overestimation of its object" (this is actually a misconstruction of what Freud said; he was only talking about sex). In my opinion, you can't truly love a person until you accept them as they are and love all aspects of them. A quote I came up with when I was 17 (i.e. this isn't a new theory for me): "perfection makes us beautiful, our imperfections make us lovable."

I think that's all the movies I've watched in the last three weeks or so.