Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the Best Movie of 2004 tied with Kill Bill volume 2.

I though I'd start with that since that's the phrase I've been repeating all year long. Today it came out on DVD, and I had to go and pick it up, and I just finished watching it, and I realized that I hadn't written anything about here or in the forums I visit so here it is.

Charlie Kaufman is a mastermind, his stories make for totally weird and mindblowing movies like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation (and also the not so much mindblowing Human Nature and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) which are some of the best movies I've ever seen. Excellent writing he does, with Eternal Sunshine following Malkovich and Adaptation with its weird concept, which added to the Direction of Michel Gondry, who creates some really great and imaginative scenes, makes for a truly magical movie.

The premise is not so easy to get, Clementine (Kate Winslet -give her the Oscar right now) has gotten a procedure by which she got his boyfriend, Joel (Jim Carrey- please finally nominate him), erased from her mind. All the memories she has of them together are gone, and also gone is everything that could remind her of him.
Joel finds out, and decides to get the procedure too, but while in the middle of it, he realizes how much she loves her.
Now comes the weird part, as Joel tries to stop the procedure from inside his head, while reliving his memories with Clementine, at the same time as they're being erased by Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Jim Broadbent), head of Lacuna (the company that provides the procedure) and his assistants (Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Kirsten Dunst). All these have their own stories too going on.

The acting is brilliant, with Kate Winslet being perfect as the quirky, really magical character of Clementine. You'll fall in love with her just like I did. And her performance is truly Oscar Worthy.
Of course Jim Carrey's Joel also fell in love with her, with Carrey being truly excellent here. This is the year they have to give him a nomination comes Oscar time. I loved him in the also Oscar worthy The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, but he's so much better here.

Kirsten Dunst is really great too, specially towards the end when her character has the biggest part. She really can act (just watch Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides) and really I wish she's get more roles like these. I'm in love with her btw.
Ruffalo, Broadbent and Wood provide really good performances as well.

After watching the movie, I played all the extras, and I loved something that Jim Carrey said in one of them while explaining the movie, something that I have been saying to everybody this year while recommending them the movie, and it's that this story, is what I've always wish and dreamt for it to happen to me. I'm also very shy and can't make eye-contact, just like Joel, and I'm waiting for my Clementine to come some day and rescue me.
The movie obviously hit me really hard and personal, and hope the same happens to all those that watch it. But seriously, it's the Best Movie of 2004, and one of the best ever.

Saw

Just got back from an advance screening of SAW with Director/Writer James Wan and Star/Writer Leigh Whannell in the theater for a Q&A. Awesome Movie!

The movie is like a mix of Se7en and Cube with a lot of gore and a lot of very tense scenes. The actors play it very good and Leigh Whannell in his acting debut is very believable and has some very good comedic parts too.

The plot is simple, two guys wake up and they're chained to some pipes in opposite corners of a room. They start finding stuff to use to escape and clues from the person that got them there. With many scenes being flashbacks to how they got there and a lot of great scares, the movie plays very good, and the ending, which I wont spoil at all, is very cool.
And there were only a few scenes when you'd go like "do that!" and the character would get in trouble for not doing something that was obvious, but all in all it didn't hurt the movie so it was ok.

Jason and Leigh said after the screening that they actually didn't have many deleted scenes. "Just a few seconds cut out for gore" they said and only one deleted scene that didn't make sense and was crap. The movie was very cheap too, they said, though they were only allowed to say "under 10 million".

So in resume, and cause I love how it sounds, I Just saw SAW and it was Awesome!!!

Shall We Dance?

I'd like to open this by yelling a big 'Shut up!' to all you Musicals/Movies about music hatters. And ok, I'd accept if you're a JLo hater, but this movie is about Richard Gere, not her.

Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon are the stars here, with Stanley Tucci and Jennifer Lopez next.
Tucci is particularly excellent every time he's onscreen, and Jennifer is just hot. And we all know she can dance.
Richard Gere looked very real and I really loved Susan Sarandon. She was beautiful.
The smaller parts were very good too with Anita Gillette as the dancing teacher for Gere, Bobby Cannavale and Omar Benson Miller who were also good. There 2 or 3 more good characters too.

The story is pretty simple with Richard Gere being the guy with a boring life taking dance lessons to get close to Jennifer Lopez but he starts liking it and even participating in a tournament.
Susan Sarandon is his wife and thinks, since he hides the fact that he's dancing, that he's having an affair.

So the movie is very good. It has comedy, romance, some drama, and it has dancing. Very good ballroom dancing. Very Classy.

Silver City - Bright Young Things - The Forgotten

Three very different movies. I didn't like any of them.

Silver City is a political mystery mixed with comedy, and it has lots of big actors like Chris Cooper, Darryl Hannah, Richard Dreyfuss, Kris Kristofferson and Tim Roth to name some.
The movie is directed John Sayles who, pardon my ignorance, is supposed to be controversial. And apparently Silver City is controversial. Cooper plays a to be governor of Colorado who's kind of 'dumb', this being a joke on Bush it seems.

But the problem is that the movie is boring. REALLY boring.
Too many characters, and many of them have nothing to do but to bring up subplots that are not important. And the story moves slow. Not recommended.


Bright Young Things is a British dramedy set in the 1930s. Directed by Stephen Fry and starring Stephen Campbell Moore and Emily Mortimer with a supporting cast with the likes of Dan Aykroyd, Jim Broadbent and Stockard Channing.
The movie started good with young people dancing in rich people's parties, but then it started getting slower and slower, and after the first 30 minutes it got boring. I don't know what was I expecting from this movie but getting bored wasn't it for sure.


The Forgotten hasn't had much publicity, and it's plot, from the trailer, sounded good. A woman somehow gets all the memories from his dead son deleted from her mind, and now there's nothing to prove that she ever had that son. If she in fact did have him.
Is it something the government is doing? Or is it aliens? That last shot in the trailer with somebody being sucked from the skies suggest the latter.
And the movie does answer that question, but leaves many, many others unanswered.

The acting is regular from everybody, Anthony Edwards, Alfre Woodard, Gary Sinise and Dominic West are all ok. But star Julianne Moore is ok too. And I was expecting her to be great here so I could rescue something good from the movie. Which I didn't.

The plot doesn't make any sense at the end, and you'll leave the theatre angry at the movie and asking what the fuck just happened there. Very disappointing movie.

Wimbledon

I've been waiting for this movie for a while now. I love romantic comedies (same studio that made Bridget Jones and Notting Hill), I totally love British movies (or American movies that happen in the UK), I truly love Kirsten Dunst (specially since I first saw her first in her first non-child part in one of my favorites, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides), and, to not say love again, I really like Paul Bettany which was awesomely good in both comedic (A Knight's Tale) and dramatic (A Beautiful Mind) in 2001. So now I've seen it, and it's very, very good.

Though Kirsten has first billing here, Paul is the star of the movie, as a washed up tennis player who once almost was somebody but choked, and now is playing his last tournament before retiring. And this tournament happens to be Wimbledon which is, of course, his home land (though has never a British player won it- this in the movie and real life).

Kirsten is a young American player, number one in the world, playing her first Wimbledon tournament, which is the most prestigious of all the Grand Slams with even the Royal Family attending the final games though they're not even mentioned here. Just realized that. She likes to yell to the judges and also likes to loosen up whenever she has a chance though her father (played by Sam Neill) would like for her to focus on her game a lot more.

This movie plays very much like Notting Hill at first, with him being the nobody, and her the star. But then he starts winning, and also falling in love. She's also falling in love, but her father's pressure makes her leave him and that's when their game changes for rest of the games, and movie.

I loved the chemistry between Paul and Kirsten, and the fact that he's eleven years older than her in real life didn't affect the movie. And they played great tennis, specially Paul. The scenes playing were just a few, looked very real and well played.
So a very recommended movie that has sports, comedy, and love.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Sky Captain is a wonderful, awesome adventure. A true masterpiece.
I loved the whole comic book style and I definitely felt that some parts were inspired by other movies/comic books like the first city scenes where I was hoping that Superman would appear flying from the sky, or the scene in the forest that had a feel to the first Jurassic Park that I loved. It also had a Star Wars feel to it. Marvelous.
The story happens in Gotham City in the '30s so it has that old feeling too.

As we've all heard, this movie was shot entirely on a blue screen so the actors (and the stuff they're grabbing) are the only real things in it. And yeah, it looks all computerized, but it looks great.

The performances are great with Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow taking command of the story as Sky Captain himself and Polly Perkins, his former love, respectively. They play them like what it is, an old couple getting back together after a long time and the comedic lines are great.
Angelina Jolie co-stars. Her part is small, as Capt. Franky Cook, all eye patched but very sexy and she was also a former lover of Sky Captain. Her character is awesome, my favorite of them all by far.

I really liked the movie, but I think I'll start loving it after repeated viewings, as this first watch had me checking the CGI all the time which kind of distracted me keeping me from enjoying the story to its full, so I'll see it again as soon as possible. A must see movie, sure to be a classic.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Pretty good. If you liked the first Resident Evil, you'll like this one the same or more.
Lots of action, a story related to the videogame, and an ending [SPOILER] that like in the first one, will continue the story in a third movie that is sure to come.

The cast was good with Milla Jovovich as Alice, leading the pack against Umbrella, but now she has 2 more characters (Sienna Guillory's Jill Valentine and Oded Fehr's Carlos Olivera) kicking zombie ass with her, and then Mike Epps making the jokes as L.J. (loved the custom guns btw).

Nemesis wasn't very well done though, he looked kind of fake, but at least it was a costume instead of making him in CGI which could've make him much worse. And I didn't like the acting of the bad guy either.

Also, I loved how the movie starts before the first one ended, and then the stories merged perfectly. Very well done.
Can't wait for the next one.

Shattered Glass

Journalism. I'd love to write for a living someday.
And movies about it? I love them. And this is no exception.

Shattered Glass, the story, based on true events, of Stephen Glass (Anakin Skywalker himself, Hayden Christensen), this very young guy writing in a huge Washington DC magazine. Everything (or almost) he ever wrote was fabricated. And pretty awesome stories too, the kind people like to read.
But then it all blew up, and it made for an excellent movie (and also a book that the real Stephen Glass published about all this that I'm definitely going to read).

I love Hayden's acting (not only here, Life as a House is excellent, though I don't like his Anakin character), and my love for Garden State is making me watch every movie Peter Sarsgaard has ever been. He plays Glass' Editor Chuck Lane here, and he's awesome too.
The rest of the cast (Chloe Sevigny, Melanie Linskey, Rosario Dawson, Steve Zahn, Hank Azaria) doesn't participate much, but these two are amazing to watch.

So again, a really great movie, excellent performances from the leads (Sarsgaard was nominated for everything except the Oscars that year) and a very good supporting cast, and the story is what makes the movie. Loved it.

Criminal ***Spoilers***

Good movie. Not as good as I was expecting having seen and loved Nine Queens (the Argentinean masterpiece to which Criminal is the remake of) but it was still good.

Now, I don't know how it'd play not having seen Nine Queens before, but since I have seen it, I have to compare them. And Nine Queens is a million times better than this one.

First, all the tricks (and I mean ALL) that they pull off are taken exactly from Nine Queens (well, except in the location), and the whole story and backstories (Diego Luna's father, John C. Reilly and Maggie Gyllenhaal's problem with the inheritance) are taken from Nine Queens too. Having said that though, they are very well done, very well.

John C. Reilly and Diego Luna are very good (still not as good as their Argentinean versions though) and Maggie Gyllenhaal is ok though she doesn't have much to do, which is much less than the same part in Nine Queens.
The rest of the cast is ok, nice to see Enrico Collatoni in there (from Just Shoot Me) though he's not a good actor.
What I really hated was the scene of John C. Reilly confessing to his little brother. Awful scene by the actor playing the brother, displaying some horrible acting there.

The main story about the job they're pulling off is not as well explained as in Nine Queens, and it's much simpler here.
And the characters didn't have the chemistry that Nine Queens had, specially John C. Reilly and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Not very convincing as brother and sister. Their story with the inheritance didn't seem as important and problematic as in Nine Queens.

They also left some stuff out from the original, like the song that Diego Luna tries to remember in what scene. That little story runs all along the Nine Queens. Here they just barely mentioned it.
Then the ending, which is not as good as in Nine Queens, though it still ends in the same way but the bank part is different. And it didn't have all the energy and and tension that Nine Queens had.

One thing I liked, is how they translated the Argentinean feel of Nine Queens to Criminal's LA.
When I heard about the movie being remade I said: "No way they can pull it off. Nine Queens is too Argentinean.", but now, I see how it worked, by putting Diego Luna, if he wasn't here, and they would've gone with an all american cast, the movie wouldn't have worked.But by putting him, they added all the latin characters and story and the spanish speaking which all worked great.

So all in all, the movie is good.
If you have seen Nine Queens, it isn't going to be as good, and you'll call it rip off, but that's what they tried to do so it's ok.
And if you haven't seen Nine Queens, you'll like Criminal a lot, but you still need to see Nine Queens.

Cellular

Very good movie. I thought it was going to be disappointing because of the PG13 rating but they managed to say 'dickhead' and 'shit' a lot.

Kim Basinger was very good after a start that was kinda overacted by her I think. All the crying and screams seemed really real.

Chris Evans was better than I expected and now I'm even more excited about next year's Fantastic Four.
Also, loved that Eric Christian Olsen was there for a Not Another Teen Movie reunion. He didn't have much to do though and let's not talk about Jessica Biel who had just a few lines and that was it. Weird casting there.

William H. Macy's character was very weird too. He had lots of comedic scenes and seemed like a sissy desk cop but then at the end he kicked that guys ass. Seemed unrealistic.

I don't like Jason Statham, never liked him. He always plays these types of roles, even when he's the good guy (The Transporter, The Italian Job).
I actually believe he doesn't know how to act at all, so he just looks for roles that want him to do the tough guy that looks mad all the time type.

The scene when they took away Kim Basinger was really good. Didn't expect them to enter that way.

So all in all it was a good movie. Nothing too serious (there was a lot of comedy) and a good ending with not many stupid decisions from the characters (*** SPOILER)

The movie would've been MUCH better if it they made it Rated R though.

(*** SPOILER)

One thing that was stupid IMO, the scene when Kim Basinger gets her son out of the shed by crushing the truck into it, well, she could've perfectly get the van instead of the truck.
She didn't know she was going to find the keys in there so it would've been a much better idea to get the van which already had her husband inside and she knew that.

Donnie Darko: Director's Cut - Shaun of the Dead - Hero

Haven't written anything lately because I didn't have time but now I'm back with the latest movies I've seen:

First it was Donnie Darko: Director's Cut which I watched last week. I'm a huge Donnie Darko fan, but the Director's Cut was a let down.
What I love about the movie, is that I don't understand it completely. I have a few ideas of what happen, but none of those is the sure thing for me because there are some things in the movie that make me completely disregard that idea.
Now, the Director's Cut is made for all those out there who watched the original cut, didn't get it, but unlike me, didn't care to think about what they just saw. So Director Richard Kelly explains everything that happens in every scene using the pages of the "Philosophy of Time Travel" fictional book. Now everything is explained, and the movie loses its mystery and its magic.
The original still has it for me, so I'm back watching it and loving it, and forgetting about the DC.

Last night I watched Shaun of the Dead, a British Zombie Horror Comedy. Really good movie, which is getting excellent reviews from everybody, specially the horror fans.
The movie has lots and lots of gore, and lots and lots of comedy. Plus its British which is always awesome. Love the way they talk.
The Director/Writer and the 2 stars of the movie were there for a Q&A that was totally hilarious with the guys explaining about the rating of the movie (Rated R here and +15 in the UK) though it has a huge amount of gore and 'Fucks' (which they used instead the original 'Cunts' wanted they said).
Anyway, very worth paying movie which opened in the UK last year and opens here in the States on September 24.

Finally, just got back from Hero, the "Presented by Quentin Tarantino" martial arts movie that was nominated for an Oscar in 2002 (Best Foreign Language Film) but it was never released here in the States by Miramax until now that QT put his name in the commercial though he has nothing to do with the movie. No writer, director, producer, etc. Nothing.
The movie is very artistic, of the same style as Oscar Winner Crouching Dragon Hidden Dragon, but this one is slower. Really slow paced. There were some points where my eyes were closing and I couldn't take it anymore.
The fights are great though (if you liked CTHD's flying sword fighting) and the performances are very good specially from Jet Li playing the Hero of the title which actually doesn't have a name and its called "Nameless".
Only way you'd like this s if you liked CTHD, which lots of people did and I did too, but the slow pacing in this one killed me, and left me not wanting anymore of this Hero.