MaestroReviews

Deb and I are artists, painters actually. We go see films as often as once a week. That's right, we go to the theater and sit in a dark room with strangers to see movies. We rarely rent. We like "little" movies, foreign and documentary films. We try to stay away from mainstream and blockbusters whenever possible, but a couple sneak in each year. We seek out the obscure. We try to avoid violent movies, and that really limits our choices, most film makers seem to think violence makes a story interesting.
I try not to give anything away in the reviews, but offer an honest reaction.
We rate them 1~10, 10 being highest.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

I Am

Deb 10 Me 10

Here’s a cool little movie whose topic has been in recent conversations around the house. It’s a film by Tom Shadyak, a guy famous for making movies I’d never see like the Nutty Professor and Bruce Almighty. He’s obviously good at what he does, it’s just something outside my range of interest. The film opens with a brief look at his career and the reason for deviating from his accepted genre and making this movie. He poses the question “What’s wrong with the world today and how do we fix it?” to a pretty distinguished panel including Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky and various writers and scientists.

Eventually the question finds a deeper root and the topic sort of shifts to the many ways we are connected to everything around us.

This is when it gets familiar and fun for me. The idea of everything being connected in deep but unseen ways is not new, but I find that people who take acid and alchemists seem to have the most conviction in its apparent truth. I didn’t know most of the experts in the film, but they were clearly identified and their credits given. And I’m not sure about some of the science they quoted, but it didn’t matter since I already agreed with their conclusions and didn’t need to have it clouded with facts.

I thought it was a pretty happening flick, the product of having a bijillion dollars so you can have guys like Tutu spout their smiling opinions and I’ll watch it again, might even get a (heaven forbid) DVD of it.

True Grit

Deb 7 Me 4


Here’s another piece of garbage. Maybe that’s a little harsh. The stars did a fine job, the beginning was more reminiscent of The Sting than True Grit, and that’s not all bad; at least it was a remake of something. I'll tell you what pissed me off, and its really not the fault of the movie, but it was rated PG. They hang people, shoot people, some point-blank after torturing and dismembering them, some from a distance. The King's Speech got rated R because they use the "F" word. What are we telling young people? I have a very low tolerance for this industry, probably the main reason I try to patronize films made outside the system. This is just pornography.

The Company Men

Deb 6 Me 2


So I went to see a mainstream movie. Good looking cast doing their job well in a predicable excuse for a story. Two hours I'll never get back.