Meredith's Movie Reviews

Netflix: Ice Castles

Ice Castles

Okay, it is completely my fault that I watched this.  The description was too good to pass up:

Considered too old for a professional ice-skating career, 16-year-old Alexis (Lynn-Holly Johnson) nonetheless triumphs to become a champion. Tragically, she falls and suffers a brain injury that leaves her nearly blind. With the help of her father (Tom Skeritt) and her boyfriend, Nick (Robby Benson), Alexis attempts, against all odds, to again become a top-ranked skater in director Donald Wry's Oscar-nominated romantic drama.

The only good thing about this movie was Lynn-Holly Johnson.  Seriously.  Colleen Dewhurst and Tom Skeritt were at their usual worst, and Robby Benson's character just made me want to barf.  But Lynn-Holly Johnson, who is apparently a professional ice skater, is also a pretty darn fine actress.  Her blindness was believable - how often does that happen?!

The story itself, frankly, sucked.  If I had a dollar for every hokey minute in that movie, I'd be buying a new iPod Shuffle.  It just wasn't enjoyable...a sense of glurge permeated the whole thing.  (Which, again, was quite apparent in the description.)

Oh, there was one other good thing - all the funny 70's hairstyles on all the girl skaters.  Ha!

Catwoman

Catwoman

I caught Halle Berry's Catwoman at a friend's house.  We had just finished watching something else and this was coming up next.  We decided we would give it a few minutes, and if it sucked, we would change the channel.

Little did we realize that it would be so bad we'd end up watching the whole thing!

Seriously, this movie was just amazingly bad.  Halle Berry's acting has never been more fake, I've never seen her perform so badly.  This is not even the same actress that we know from X-Men, Gothika, or just about anything else she's done.  It's just THAT BAD.

And the movie itself has virtually no plot.  I remember glancing at the clock while we were watching, and I was amazed that we were 90 minutes into the film and it hadn't started yet!  It doesn't get much worse than Catwoman.  When it was in theaters I really wanted to see it but I am SO glad I didn't pay money for this.

The Departed

The Departed

A friend of mine overseas had seen The Departed and recommended it to me - I figured it won best picture, so why not?  Before we left for the theater I checked out the keywords on IMDb, and I just had to laugh at this collection:

• Shot To Death
• Shot In The Face
• Shot In The Chest
• Shot In The Head
• Shot In The Forehead
• Shot In The Knee

I thought the movie itself was okay.  I think the main reason it won Best Picture is because of its complexity.  So-and-so is a mole for the good guys, while so-and-so is a mole for the bad guys, and neither of them knows who is who, and we all go around in circles.  I also think Leonardo DiCaprio turned in a pretty good performance, so it surprises me that he didn't get nominated.  In fact I was surprised Mark Wahlberg did get nominated...his character was very one-dimensional and his acting struck me as wooden.

I'm trying to think "what kind of person would this movie appeal to?"  I am going to go with fans of Mafia films, because it is heavy on that type of intrigue, although I'm not sure Jack Nicholson's gang can really be counted as Mafia.

Thirteen Ghosts

Thirteen Ghosts

Okay, so I was browsing around the TV guide, and I saw Thirteen Ghosts was about to start on the Sci-Fi Channel.  I figured it would be one of their more dopey offerings, like some of the other silly stuff they show.

Holy crap, this movie scared me!

Maybe it was because I was watching it by myself, and it's nighttime, but damn.  I freely admit that I was scared!  It wasn't just the usual startling type of scary that you get from movies like The Blair Witch Project - there was the startling kind, but there was also the kind where it makes you wonder even when you're not watching the movie.  During a commercial break I got up to go to the bathroom, which is next to the closet...and I found myself wondering if there were invisible ghosts in my closet that I couldn't see without the special glasses!

I almost went downstairs to sit with my roommates after the movie was over, but I managed to stay on my own.  I'm watching My Super Sweet 16 now, which is about as unscary as it gets, at least in the horror sense.

Hello Kitty Phenomenon

Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon

Ken Belson

I got this book as a present and I read it pretty quickly.  It was quick and easy to read and I liked it.  I was a little surprised that it was so poorly copy-edited, but the book as a whole was good.

One especially enjoyable aspect was that it included information about Japanese culture as well.  It turns out that Hello Kitty is a very integral part of Japanese kawaii culture, and she's not seen as just for kids there the way she often is here.  Oh, don't get me wrong, plenty of adults are into Hello Kitty in the United States - but she's not quite as revered by all age groups here as she is there.  She's primarily a kid's cartoon here.

Her background was really fascinating to read.  How she was originally developed, how Sanrio came to be, and how maintaining Kitty's appeal is a full-time job for several people.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Hello Kitty - it's a really in-depth look at Kitty and is well worth the time spent reading it.

Netflix: Fried Green Tomatoes

Fried Green Tomatoes

Well, I can't say I particularly enjoyed Fried Green Tomatoes.  I put it at the top of my queue because my wife was surprised that I had never seen it.  I was surprised when she started crying during one of the death scenes.

But aside from the concept of fried green tomatoes themselves kind of squicking me out a bit, I just felt the movie tried too hard.  Is it just that I'm cynical or something, that I can't enjoy a truly good movie?  It just seemed over the top to me.  The Idgie character was just so unbelievable...most people do conform to some extent, rather than being as rebellious as Idgie.

But hey, now I understand the Towanda! bumper sticker that Northern Sun Merchandising has carried for so long.  I was surprised that it came from something as recent as 1991 - I had always figured it was some 1970s-era feminist cry, or something like that.  Now I know that it's about female power but not necessarily feminism exactly.

The Bone Collector

The Bone Collector

I thought I posted this via Vox's mobile interface, but it looks like it never actually got posted...sorry about that!

Anyway, I caught The Bone Collector on TV a few nights ago.  It was compelling enough that I stayed up till the end, mainly because I had no idea who the killer was!  It wasn't an outstanding movie - one of Angelina Jolie's more scenery-chomping performances - but it was still pretty cool.

I do wonder if the technology shown in Denzel Washington's character's apartment really exists.  Can somebody really control all that stuff with a fingertip, voice commands, and a sip/puff switch?  For that matter, do many quadriplegics who are so profoundly affected retain (or regain) the use of a single fingertip?

I remember wanting to see this movie when it originally came out in theaters.  Now that I've seen it, I think it would have been worth the ticket price if I'd seen it back then.

Letters from Iwo Jima

Please forgive the lack of reviews!  I need to get more on the ball with them.

Today I saw Letters from Iwo Jima, which is the companion to Flags of Our Fathers, which I reviewed here.  To be honest, I have no idea why Letters is getting more attention than Flags, because I liked Flags much better.

Ken Watanabe is nice to watch in this movie, but he is the only real high point.  I didn't particularly have sympathy for the other main character, a foot soldier named Saigo.

Actually, wait a minute.  Maybe I know why Letters isn't as strong - not because it's the "other side," but because we didn't have as much to go on.  One of my favorite things about Flags of Our Fathers was that it really showed what the fighting was like - I felt like I didn't have to just imagine the Battle of Iwo Jima, I was watching it.  In comparison, Letters feels forced and surreal...more like a movie than a documentary or any other actual depiction.  But again, perhaps this is because there weren't many Japanese survivors of Iwo Jima.  The movie is largely based on letters sent home and drawings, and we don't have the same kind of actual first-hand knowledge that we do of the American perspective.  So maybe that's why it's not as strong.

And yet I think it may also have to do with the lack of sympathy for the characters.  The only ones that I really felt for were General Kuribayashi and Takeichi Nishi (the equestrian), who was played by Tsuyoshi Ihara.  Those two performances were outstanding...the rest of the movie, not so much.  I wasn't touched at all by Kazunari Ninomiya's performance...the guy is from a boy band, it's like watching Justin Timberlake trying to act.

But I can't help but give major kudos to Clint Eastwood for telling both sides of the story.  For decades, Americans have only known our side of Iwo Jima.  In fact, I would imagine that many Americans, when they think of the Japanese soldiers in the battle, still think of them as worthless slime, even if the modern image of the Japanese people is much improved.  And for that matter, it's hard to remember that we thought the Japanese were so evil.  How could any people be seen as evil?  How could we not sympathize with the regular people of another culture?  We did it with the Soviets too, and I think we're not immune to it in the current war in Iraq, either.  So let Letters from Iwo Jima be a lesson to us...the other side has a family too.

Netflix: The Pet

The Pet

First of all, let me say: I did not have high expectations when I rented this movie.  I first heard of it on a BDSM-related bulletin board I read.  Someone signed up for an account there and pretended they had heard of this movie and they were really hoping it would be good; of course we all immediately identified this as a shameful attempt at promotion.

Then a few people from that board saw the movie.  I like one of their quotes: "Take your disbelief out in the backyard and shoot it before you watch this movie."

But you know what?  This wasn't quite as bad as I was expecting.  Don't get me wrong, it was terrible...but I was expecting worse.  The audio and video never did quite synchronize, it was like watching a dubbed movie except they were speaking English in the original anyway.  The movie also doesn't have anything to do with BDSM after all.  There's some full frontal nudity, and it's supposed to be about puppy play, but none of the actual effort behind it is shown.  The girl immediately falls in love with her master and immediately learns how to be a puppy and is perfect in every way.  And then, just when she's happy, in come the human trafficking goons.  Oh, did I not mention that it's half puppy play and half organ harvesting?  Yeah.

Skip this one whether you are into BDSM or not, because it really doesn't have anything to do with it.

Two Short Reviews

A Scanner Darkly: Not bad.  I am not a huge fan of animated anything, my favorite type is Pixar-quality (think Monsters Inc.) but this was bearable.  Of course it was live action with animation over it, so that might be why it was okay.  I hadn't read this PKD story, so the twists all surprised me.  I didn't like how they did the scramble suits, though.  The "inside the suit" shots of Keanu Reeves were good, but the suits themselves were weird.

House of the Dead II: Bwahahaha!  High-freakin'-larious.  This came on Sci-Fi just when I was going to bed (after having watched Route 666, which was bad), and I was thinking "well, I'll just watch a few minutes."  But it turned out to be fantastic, even if the black slime in the zombies' mouths was ripped directly from the Thriller video.  IMDb describes this as "Action/Comedy/Horror" so I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be as funny as I found it.