Last week was pretty miserable in regards to photos, and I was feeling pretty crappy in general that weekend, so I decided to combine those photos with this week’s to make the post less pathetic looking. So it looks like I have taken heaps this week!
See? Heaps! You get to be jealous of my local cafe’s Ploughman’s lunch, my nail polish skills, and my housemate’s cat.
We’re visiting Ben’s parents this Easter Long Weekend, so the last two photos are from the train ride down to the south coast. They live in the middle of nowhere compared to what I’m used to, so we’re getting started on this week’s movies. Helluva party weekend here in St George’s Basin!
This week had the theme of “Smash and Grab: how to plan a movie heist”. I went through a phase of watching movie heists when I was younger, and was excited to see that I hadn’t seen any of the suggestions this week. Hell, I am pretty sure I hadn’t even heard of any of them, let alone thought about watching them.
Friday involved getting entirely too drunk and commiserating over Sydney losing a soccer game, so for a nice quiet Saturday night I sat down and watched Out Of Sight. Jack Foley (George Clooney), a man who makes a career of robbing banks, tries to escape prison and in doing so encounters Attractive Latino Policewoman (Jennifer Lopez), Karen Sisco. Attractions follow, and while he tried to pull off one last big job, she tries to find him and catch him.
I think because George Clooney was the main lead guy I kept comparing this to the Ocean’s Eleven remake. I think that sadly Out of Sight’s storyline was more believable than that, so I was having this weird mental argument because I liked Ocean’s Eleven more but it’s just so over the top that I kinda wanted to take this film more seriously. But it is still also over the top and silly. I guess that is why it’s the Friday Movie, because it’s pretty easy-going entertainment. I could only pay half attention to it and get the gist of what was going on well enough. But at the same time I kinda just wanted to watch Ocean’s Eleven.
One thing that really stood out more than anything else was Jennifer Lopez and her character. And it didn’t stand out in a good way. Jennifer Lopez is not a particularly good actor, and her “Attractive Latino [person]” character is pretty boring seeing as that is all she does in any film she’s in. Throughout the film I kept thinking that the criminals were much more interesting characters, and wished there were more scenes of them in jail, or doing heists or generally just interacting with each other instead of the lovey-dovey sexual tension bullshit between Lopez and Clooney. You guys want to bang, we get it, no one cares. I want to see Don Cheadle act like a tough guy and not have an awful cockney accent, dammit. I don’t want to see your stupid Jennifer Lopez Face. Get off my screen. The fact that everyone else in the movie were more interesting and better actors really hammered home how boring and bland Jennifer Lopez was. I think that really let the film down, even a pulpy trashy movie like this.
On Sunday we chucked Bonnie and Clyde on, thinking we should watch it seeing it’s a classic or whatever. We got maybe ten minutes in before turning it off. We didn’t even make it to any sort of real bank robbery type scene. We just got sick of “oh I am attractive. And SO LONELY.” and “I am dangerous, look how dangerous I am. DANGER.” It was full of over acting and was pretty boring on top of that, so we skipped it. Maybe some other time when we’re more accommodating of old movies.
We moved swiftly on to Dog Day Afternoon. Al Pacino is a Vietnam Veteran turned luckless bank robber; his sidekick is a bit of an idiot, the bank has hardly and money in it, his hostages aren’t scared of him, and soon the bank is surrounded by hundreds of policemen. Nothing’s going his way.
This was a slow burner of a film. There wasn’t really that much of a classic film progression in this one; the film starts right at the bank robbery, with very little lead up, so the viewer is kinda thrown in to the action (or lack there of) and left to try and work out what’s going on yourself. I didn’t want to watch this at the beginning; it was too slow and I wasn’t really in the mood for this kind of film so it just felt boring and I wanted to turn it off and watch something easier instead.
But then it got interesting. Al Pacino’s character, Sonny, got intriguing, and his motivations got deeper than “I need some money”. While it still never really fully grabbed me, I did start paying more attention to what was going on and wondering what was going to happen. Al Pacino was also really good in this. You start to feel for his character after a while and when things just keep going wrong for him you get more sympathetic. The whole scenario seemed to drag on and unravel more as it went along that it got a bit frustrating towards the end, but that seemed to add to it all. Apparently it was based on a true story about a botched robbery in New York and the impending hostage situation, and the dragging out of the film feels like it echoes the tension that would have occurred at that time. I can understand why Marc Fennel said it should have won more Oscars than it did.
This was definitely a thinking movie, but we weren’t really in the mood for a thinking movie. I feel a bit bad that I didn’t really appreciate it because I wanted something more like Out of Sight, but I still enjoyed it to a degree. Maybe we’ll watch it again some other time when we’re ready to think.
The other suggestions this week included Heat (Criminal leading lots of heists is feeling bored of it all; Cop chasing him down feeling the same way. ) and Rififi (French dude fresh out of prison for stealing jewellery organises the Biggest French Jewel Heist). I feel like maybe Rififi would have been a better choice than Bonnie and Clyde, but after a week of French cinema last week I didn’t really want to watch mroe films with subtitles. I do think it was our loss though, it sounds really good. Next week we’re visiting Ben’s parents, but will still be sitting down to watch our Wizarding movies for the theme. Who knows, maybe his parents will give their opinions as well?
This week’s theme was “The Delicate Delicacies in the Delicatessen of Jean-Pierre Jeunet”. I really enjoyed The last French Cinema theme with Luc Besson, so I was hoping this week would generate a lot of things I wanted to talk about but couldn’t quite work out how to get them straight in my head. I think I liked Luc Besson’s stuff better, but I still have a fair amount of thoughts from what I watched this weekend anyway.
We started off on Saturday Night (Friday was full of birthday party shenanigans) with Amelie. A lot of people have raved about how great this film was and I’ve been meaning to watch it for ages as well, so we figured it was a good choice to start off with. An eccentric, loner girl (Audrey Tatou) decides to help people be happier through acts of whimsical kindness. In the process she encounters a similarly eccentric loner guy, falls in love and proceeds to woo him through acts of whimsical wooing-ness.
I’m not really sure how to feel about Amelie. I liked it, but I’m not sure how to feel about it. It was a very oversaturated film; the colours were really bright and vibrant, the characters all a bit wacky and over-the-top, and the plot is suitably ridiculous. I can see why, out of the five films suggested this week, this has been the most popular. People connect with the awkward characters and have hope that they too can find their special anti-social weirdo to fall in love and ride off into the sunset with.
While I did enjoy the film, and laughed aloud at some of the scenes, there were a few things about it that irritated me a bit. The biggest thing was probably the times that Amelie broke the Fourth Wall to talk to the audience. That is one of my big pet peeves, it really just ruins the immersion of the viewer, and kinda the point of a movie is to immerse the viewer into the story. Also it gets a little too saccharine after a while. These characters were so perfect, it got tiring. I mean, sure they all have issues, but there never seems to be any consequences or negatives to their issues. All in all it left me with a sad, wistful feeling at the end of the movie, like my life isn’t interesting enough. I don’t really like that feeling, or comparing myself to fictional characters and coming up lacking, so that kinda ruined the mood.
On Sunday I was home alone, so I put on Delicatessen. It’s a dystopian future where there is little to no meat left available. A butcher who is also the landlord of an apartment building gets creative when supplying his meat. Enter the new maintenance man (an ex circus performer) who is supposed to be their next meal but instead things go awry.
(the official trailer for this is pretty dumb, and another one I found I couldn’t get any that allowed embedding, so this is part of the intro to the movie that I think works well enough as a “trailer” even though it’s noly 30 seconds long)
This was definitely not what I was expecting after Amelie. Delicatessen is just as over-the-top as Amelie, but instead of oversaturaing everything, it’s undersaturaed. The setting’s drab and depressing, the colours are all muddied, the characters are dreary, but they’re all still ridiculous. Delicatessen seemed a little more forcefully wacky than Amelie, so maybe Jean-Pierre Jeunet was still working on that balance when he made this. There is definitely a similar tone between Delicatessen and Amelie; it’s easy to see they have the same director. The characters were pretty strong, in that they were interesting and seemed to leave more of an impression than Amelie’s characters. The Troglodite characters were probably the weakest of them all, but I also think if we’d seen more of them they might have been quite interesting.
While the premise of Delicatessen was sound, it seemed to drag on a little and get a bit confused in the second half of the film. I think it was then that I started to get a bit bored with it. It’s almost as if he didn’t really know where he was going with the story, so the film starts off strong, then starts meandering in the middle, and then they realise that they need to start wrapping things up so it rushes through to ultimately get to the happy ending. That, really, is probably the biggest weakness of the film; the pacing lets it down.
The other film suggestions this week were A Very Long Engagement, Micmacs, and The City of Lost Children. I was going to watch A Very Long Engagement on Sunday after Delicatessen, but I felt more in the mood for something a bit more light-hearted than a WWI romance/detective story, so I skipped it. The City of Lost Children sounded interesting in a really really weird way, but it also sounds like the kind of film I need to watch in the middle of the day so that I don’t psyche myself out. Marc Fennell says it needs to be watched late at night to enjoy it properly, but I think this is one of those times where I ignore his advice. Either way it will probably wait a while until I have time to get around to it. Next week we’re learning about movie heists, and none of the Ocean’s series are in there, so it might be enlightening!
Good afternoon my lovelies! It has been a pretty quiet week for me this week, but I still managed to take a few photos.
Only four photos this week. I have been sleeping in a lot this week (old excuse, I know) and having to rush to work to not be late. Also, blue is a hard colour to find, it seems! I had more trouble finding blue things than I thought I would. I am thinking maybe themes aren’t as good an idea as I initially thought.
Anyway, there is a birthday party happening at Le Maison Calvert, so I should go and make sure the cats haven’t popped all the balloons. See you on Monday for movies!
So, this week was called “For The Love Of God, Why Are We Doing This?! Why messing with DNA is a bad idea”. Five films dedicated to demonstrating how genetic engineering was going to be a big mistake, and just how big a mistake it would be. We went out on Friday night, so the first movie had to wait until Saturday. We didn’t even get to do Pizza Night until Saturday, too.
We started off watching Gattaca. It seemed interesting enough, some time in the future where people could genetically engineer out any faults from their unborn children so they can be the best. Then a naturally-born guy takes over the identity of one of them so he can try and realise his dreams. But in reality the main character seems pretty boring and his voice is so monotonous. The fact that almost all of the start of the film is narrated by said monotonous voice meant that we shut it off after about 20 minutes.
After that little bit of a false start we moved on to Black Sheep (my choice). A New Zealander goes back to his old family sheep farm, that he hasn’t been to in a long time, to sell off his share of ownership to his sheep-breeding brother. While there he finds out that his brother is trying to breed a super sheep and in doing so has infected the sheep in such a way that they get a hunger for human flesh.
I watched this a few years ago when it first came out on dvd and loved it. It’s such wonderful schlocky horror movie that you can’t help but laugh at, even with the gruesome parts. The actors were pretty good too, and you could tell that everyone was having a good time. It does take a little while to get going, though. At one point Ben whinged that he was bored and I told him to be patient, and he ended up cracking up over some of the scenes. Maybe if we’d been more patient with Gattaca we’d have finished watching it, but we’ve gotten a bit impatient with movies since we’ve been watching them regularly; we try to give them a fair go (Gattaca was probably the shortest we’ve watched before changing it over), but if they don’t grab us then we move on. Plenty more films to watch. I’m glad Ben seemed to enjoy Black Sheep, because sometimes I am not quite sure what he likes, so I worry about making a wrong decision and making him sit through something he doesn’t care about. Sometimes I do it anyway because I love to watch terrible things, but it is good to get things right on occasion.
On Sunday I watched Jurassic Park, or at least most of it. I’m sure most of you know the plot. Some rich guy builds an amusement park after somehow managing to get the DNA of various dinosaurs and cloning them. Somehow. He then invites some Dinosaur Sciencey People (that’s definitely the technical term) and a Chaos Theory Mathematical Dude to check it out before it opens, but something goes wrong and the dinosaurs are able to roam about and kill people.
I tried to watch this when I was younger and couldn’t deal with it, so I was a bit reserved when it came to watching it now. But at the same time I figured there was no harm in it really, because if I didn’t like it I could always turn it off. It was ok. I had it playing on the computer while I did other stuff, and it didn’t really grab my attention that much so I wouldn’t call it a great movie. But then again, I also didn’t finish it. I had full intention of watching it all, but it was getting late and I should have gone to bed early anyway, so I had to shut it off about half an hour before the end. Maybe the end makes it all worthwhile, who knows? I guess I should probably watch that bit so I can see that they all make it out alive. By the way, in writing this, I came up with a few fairly obvious plot holes that Ben explained away with “…magic?” I know that recreating Dinosaurs to put into an amusement park is not the most realistic of situations, but it still irritates me when plot holes are that obvious. I guess I’ll probably finish watching it eventually, but I doubt I’ll watch the sequels.
The other films suggested this week were Splice and The Fly. I have a deep instinctive fear of The Fly, so I refused point blank to watch it. Instead we watched Robocop because I downloaded it for way back in week four. It was, uh… interesting to say the least. Next week is more French cinema, so get your berets and cigarettes ready.
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