my apologies to twilight fans everywhere

i have been watching twilight. all i can say is:

movie review: lars and the real girl

this is the story of lars. he's a sweet, reclusive man who lives in his brother's garage and does whatever it takes to avoid human interaction. he develops a delusion wherein he believes that his new 'real girl' doll, a life-sized, highly detailed sex doll, is an actual person. his brother and sister in law freak right out, unsurprisingly, but the witty, wise, beautiful family doctor/ shrink (!?!?!?) tells them to play along with it. lars brings his 'girlfriend' to church, an office party, his childhood haunts, etc.


most of the acting is excellent (although bianca, lars' 'girlfriend' is a little stiff.... *giggle* *snort*) the setting is perfect and the story is both sweet and interesting.


i do, however, have a couple of problems with the film.


it's the job of filmmakers to construct a scenario and the job of an audience to believe it's real. when the filmmakers do their job right (the truman show or et, for example) the audience easily believes a fairly ridiculous situation to be real. it's called suspension of disbelief. i had a hard time suspending my disbelief while watching this film. the people are too good. a gentle, lonely man goes crazy and carries an anatomically correct, well endowed doll around with him, talking to him. everyone he encounters looks at him askance for about three seconds and then plunges headlong into pretending it's normal. a whole midwestern small town cheerfully goes along with the ruse, even forming emotional attachments to the inanimate object. if just a few people had persisted in finding the whole thing ludicrous the movie would have worked for me. but a whole town commiting to helping out a man with a mental problem? the stereotype sticks in my throat. the actors may as well have worn placards that said 'this is a small town in the midwest and 'round here we support each other and stick together, goll'durn it!'


my other issue is the way the movie repeatedly opens potentially interesting cans of worms and then abandons them. lars' horror of physical contact, his terror when confronted with the idea of childbirth, his desire for a rite of passage, his relationships with his brother, sister in law, doctor and the cute girl at work... i understand that there isn't time in the movie to really delve into multiple complex subjects, but rushing past all these topics was annoying and frustrating.


all in all, this movie was ok. it had huge potential and failed to live up to it, but it wasn't terrible.

batman: the dark knight

i couldn't stand the new batman. i know that puts me in the vast minority of humankind, but there you have it. it was too dark, too violent, too disturbing, too long... plus they hid heath ledger's gorgeous face. they could at least have given me that.

basically it's the joker (working alone as an agent of anarchy, good at blowing stuff up but otherwise unskilled) vs. batman (strict personal ethics, has two assistants and vast resources, plus all the latest gadgets). it's a fair fight, since the joker always has the element of surprise on his side (no one ever knows what he's going to do next) and he doesn't have to worry about a secret identity, a self-enforced code of conduct, or hurting other people. but batman is batman.

there's a subplot about how batman can never be the hero gotham needs because he wears a mask, blah blah blah. without it, harvey dent couldn't have been in the movie, but that doesn't really redeem it. allegedly the politician can be a hero that the people of gotham can really look up to and so on and so forth... it all seemed really abstract for a movie about guys killing each other.

i can't deny that it's an excellent film. it's incredibly well crafted. i normally never notice camerawork, but the skill in this movie was obvious. the script was good, the acting superb... the whole thing was fantastic, except that i didn't like it. i like artful violence (think crouching tiger hidden dragon) and this was just brutality.

so if you like being startled, scared, bored and shocked in turns, this is the movie for you. but not me.

but if you're looking for reasons to see it, here are three:
or if those three aren't your cup of tea:
but, if you're like me, this will be the image that makes you happy:

pirates III

instead of 'at the world's end', the subtitle should have been 'the movie even johnny depp couldn't save'. seriously. he was the only good thing about the movie. i generally take every chance i can get to ogle mr. depp, but this one wasn't worth it. the plot was incoherent, the writing was like nails on a chalkboard... none of us (roomate, hubby and i) had any idea what was going on at any given time, and we were barely drinking. it seemed like one long, stupid sea battle with brief scenes on land thrown in just to confuse the viewer.
i loved the first movie (how many movies can you describe as swashbuckling? a good time, what's wrong with that?!?!) but the second one was garbage and this was even worse. i will never get those hours of my life back, alas.

although there was a scene with about 100 of johnny depp in the same frame, some of his incarnations were shirtless...