Finding Neverland

Marc Forster directs this adaptation of Allan Knee's play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan", which tells the story of James M. Barrie and what inspired him to write "Peter Pan", perhaps the most wonderful story of all time, and the result, as Peter himself says at the end of the movie, is magical.

Johnny Depp plays Barrie, who meets Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslett), a widow and mother of four young boys, George, Jack, Michael, and Peter, and by playing and having fun with them, is how he gets his inspiration to write the story about the children that didn't want to grow up, and that with the power of imagination and believe, they make it possible.

Depp is wonderful as the writer, with a great sense of imagination, making you believe in the children's games and plays, and showing a great love for them. A great performance that will surely get him another very deserved Oscar nomination.

Winslett plays Sylvia, the mother of the children that put their imagination to run free, and together with James they go through great adventures. She plays her part perfectly and her final scenes, in which James shows her Neverland, are between the most wonderful and touching scenes ever portrayed.

Julie Christie is the protecting mother of Sylvia, Mrs. du Maurier, who doesn't like Barrie very much, as he gets closer to the family, and because he's a married man, she doesn't like him being around much as that interferes with Sylvia's finding of somebody to take care of her and the children.

Dustin Hoffman is Charles Frohman, in a small part that though very well played, is not as important as the rest of the cast's.

The kids are a great part of the movie, specially Peter of course, played by Freddie Highmore with big blue eyes and an innocence that makes you believe he's the boy that doesn't want to grow up.

Thanks to beautiful storytelling and magical scenes by Forster, and great performances by Depp, Winslett and the kids, I finally saw Barrie's Neverland, and it's a wonderful place where I'd like to be.

The Grudge

I can't believe Sam Raimi is saying that this is the scariest movie of all time. Oh well, maybe because he produced it. And this is supposed to be exact like the Japanese version (called Ju-On), so I guess it's all the same, well, except that the Japanese version probably doesn't make us believe that all this happened because a woman became obsessed with Bill Pullman.

But really, I didn't like The Grudge at all.
The movie had lots of scares, or jumps followed by laughs actually, which happened a lot of times. And the really bad thing was the score, it was really telling you in advance when the scares would come and you'd jump and then laugh.

And overall, I didn't like the story and its connecting of the characters with the backstory and the Grudge.
I really didn't get why he wanted to kill them all. At first I thought that he was killing everybody that went into the house, but some other cops went it there and they didn't die. And that one security guard had nothing to do with the house.
Then I thought it was about everybody that had something to do with the Japanese family that lived there before, but the Grudge didn't kill Pullman's wife.
So I really didn't get why was he doing it.

Being PG13 really hurt the movie as we don't get to see how any of the characters die and of course, no gore, no nudity and no insults. And it's not like it needed to be there, but come on, it's a horror movie with dead people (a jaw removed from a girl's head for example), a shower scene and ghosts, those things should've been there.

It hasn't been a really good horror movie in a while, and this one wasn't it, just because they put together scenes that make you jump and scream it doesn't mean that the movie is good.

Alfie (2004)

This remake of Michael Caine's 1996 Alfie (which I haven't seen) is a movie that is not bad, but it's not good either. And it sucks cause I've been waiting for it for a while, specially after reading all those comments about Jude Law's performance. Yes, he's very good here, but the story is missing something.

To me, the movie had the same feeling as Hugh Grant's About a Boy. The guy's a womanizer, and realizes that he's got nothing, that he's alone. The problem with Alfie is that he doesn't have a kid to care for, someone to make him change it all, instead, here he realizes this all by himself, and there's no change, just inconclusion.

[SPOILER]
I think the movie would've been much better if Alfie would've gone back to Sienna Miller's Nikki. She was going to be perfect for him. She was going to change. I believed that in her. But he decided not to give her another chance, and instead he went to the arms of Susan Sarandon's Liz, a female version of Alfie but much older and wiser.

She lives like Alfie, going away when things get too close, but she decided to keep it that way. So of course, her arms didn't catch him, instead, he got an excuse that wasn't the real one, "he's younger than you" she said, but that's not the real excuse, "he's just another one" would've been much better. Because that's what it was. The age wasn't a problem for her, she was with a much older guy before. But was just like Alfie, and so when things got closer, she changed him.
[/SPOILER]

So the movie was disappointing for me. I expected a heartwarming story about a loner changing through the power of love (like some of my faves Garden State, About a Boy, Notting Hill) and ended up with an empty story and no satisfying ending.

*****************************************************
Alfie Rethought: I really love Alfie. It took me some time to savour it but I no longer think it's not satisfying. The ending is perfect, because he should've gone back to Nikki, but he didn't and now he's lost his chance. It's perfect because there are many people like him in the real world, and they never change, always pulling away when things get close, and it's sad. Alfie captures that perfectly, and for him to have a happy ending all of a sudden would've been wrong.
And I failed to mentioned the soundtrack before. Headlined by Old Habits Die Hard. All the songs from Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart with a few tracks featuring the excellent vocals of Joss Stone. A great soundtrack to own.

Surviving Christmas

Surviving Christmas started really good, well, the whole first hour is great, but from the point when Drew's (Ben Affleck) girlfriend's family shows up, the movie got stupid. And the ending was lame and rushed to tie things up.

Ben Affleck was really good. He was very energetic and charismatic. They were all good actually, though Catherine O'hara was the less developed, really a waste of a wonderfull and very funny actress. What happens to her (which I wont spoil) was a total waste, they just forgot about it.
And I also liked Christina Applegate, another good comedic performance by her like in Anchorman. She's having a good year.
James Gandolfini was very good too, and he's make a great Santa for if Bad Santa didn't exist.

The movie overall was just ok, but nothing we'll remember next year.

The Final Cut

The Final Cut is a small but excellent science fiction movie.
It's set in a world in which people can buy this very expensive Zoe Chips for their unborn kids, little brain implants that will record all that person's life from the moment their born until they die.

It stars Robin Williams as a cutter, someone that edits these memories from a person and uses them to create little movies called 'Rememories' which are showed at the person's wake so everybody can see how good that person was and remember them that way.
Of course, there's all those dark moments too, which are deleted by the cutter forever.
The memories are chosen by the person's family and friends, and the cutter can only include those in the Rememory.
The cutters have codes, which doesn't allow them to share the information they delete, nor can they sell them, and personally, a cutter can't have the implant himself, as that would reveal, because is in his memories, all the other people's memories he worked on.

Robin Williams is very good, in a portrayal in the style of One Hour Photo and Insomnia, as a cutter that finds while working on a rememory of one of the executives of the company created the Zoe technology, a childhood friend that brings him hunting memories of the past, so now he needs to find what really happened.
Jim Caviezel is a retired cutter, now the leader of the organization that is against the Zoe technology, and is trying to get that same rememory that Williams is working on, as it will show what kind of person that man really is, and it will destroy the company.
Mira Sorvino is Williams' love interest. A useless character that has nothing to do and it's only there cause they needed a woman in the movie what's better than to use an Oscar winner that hasn't done anything worthy since then.

The movie has this great effect when showing the memories, specially how it's all shown through the person's eyes, so the images have this colored layer according to the person's eye color.
Very recomended little movie that could've been huge if Steven Spielberg would've done it (instead of Minority Report for example), but Director Omar Naim used what he got and created a top class sci-fi story.

I Heart Huckabees

This is a movie I'll need to see a few more times. I understood everything that was happening in I Y Huckabees, but I have no idea what writer-director David O. Russell meant by it.

The movie plays with the meaning of it all and existentialism, which is no easy thing to explain, and I'm not going to.
All the characters talk about it, and it sounded great, but after the movie ended, I don't know what they finally found or realised.

Excellent performances from a very impressive cast that includes Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Isabelle Huppert, Naomi Watts, Jude Law, and the two better ones, Mark Wahlberg and Jason Schwartzman who are brilliant.

The score is worth talking about cause it's great, composed by Jon Brion who also worked on the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind score. Both are very similar but different, and great.

I Y Huckabees is a great movie right now (one of the best of the year, not top 5, but up there), with beautiful performances, an excellent score, and lots to think about, and when I get to that, I'll understand its meaning, which I'm sure It'll be after a few more viewings. I'll take a little work, this isn't for everybody, but for me, after I get it, I know I'll love it even more.

Team America: World Police

This is one of the funniest movies of the year. The second one in my personal list with Anchorman being in the top but this is really excellent.
This contains some spoilers but there are no twists so there really is no harm. Also, this movie is Rated R as much as possible and so is the review.

Team America is a movie anti-anti-terrorism, but is not pro-terrorism either.

Bad guy and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has Weapons of Mass Destruction and is giving them to the terrorists so they can create chaos, leading the world to believe that they're the ones behind it all and not him.

Team America comes to the rescue in the opening scene in France to kill the terrorists, and while doing it end up destroying Paris and all their landmarks. An excellent opening scene where everything happens, and after defeating the enemies, one of them comes back to take the life of one Team America member.

Theater Actor Gary Johnson is then recruited by Team America's leader, Spottswoode, to join members Chris, Sarah, Lisa and Joe, so because of his excellent acting, he can infiltrate in terrorist territory and found out where are the rest of the WMD and stop them.

They're puppets, so anything can happens, and it happens.
The so much talked about sex scene, which was cut from the original 3 minutes is excellent. 20 seconds of pure laugh and all the positions available including oral sex, anal sex, 69s, and all you can imagine.
The puking scene is also excellent in the gross department.

The action scenes are like watching GI JOE commercials. Their little planes and jeeps and boats and helicopters are excellent. And the fight scenes are nonstop laugh too. Specially the first one.

The songs, awesome. "America, Fuck Yeah!" is going to the Oscars I'm predicting. Excellent song. And the others are great too like the one Kim Jong Il sings.

The movie also features a lot of well known actors (none of them approved their appearances though) including Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Matt Damon, Liv Tyler, Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Glover, Helen Hunt and more. And they're included very much in the movie.

The whole speech that goes all along story about Dicks, Pussies and Assholes is excellent like the whole movie. Oh yeah, the puppets look awesome too.

PS: the movie really doesn't have any politics in it, and shockingly, George W. Bush is not portrayed nor talked about. Michael Moore is.

Ladder 49 - Thirteen

Ladder 49 is a true homage to firefighters. No bad guys at all, just the good guys doing their job.

Joaquin Phoenix stars with John Travolta and Robert Patrick, all pretty strong performances, as the movie stars with a big fire when an accident leaves Phoenix's Jack Morrison hurt and trapped in the building on fire. Travolta's Captain Mike Kennedy arrives to take command of Patrick's firefighter Lenny Richter and the others including Morris Chestnut and Jay Hernandez, to go in the fire and Jack out of there.

While the guys try to make their way in there, the movie flashbacks showing Jack's first days in the firehouse, his first fires and rescues, as well as him falling and love, marrying and having kids with Jacinda Barrett's Linda.
We see all the good times, like the parties, the rescues, awards they get; but also the bad times, like losing friends in a fire, and Linda's terror of that red car arriving at the wife's door when their husbands are late from work to inform them the worst.

The entire cast pulls very strong performances in this drama that shows the real stuff firefighters go through, and for that we must applaud.



Thirteen is a movie that can totally freak parents out: young teenage girls gone wild, taking (and selling) drugs, drinking alcohol, stealing stuff, piercing their bodies, and having sex.
Nobody wants to believe it, but it's true, and this original story written by Director Catherine Hardwicke and star Nikki Reid is no lie. After all, Reid was 14 when she wrote it, and from own experiences.
She also co-stars the movie as Evie, the wild one, who transforms Evan Rachel Wood's Tracy good girl into a sexed and drugged up girl that mom Holly Hunter can't control.

All the girls, Hunter included, but specially Evan Rachel Wood, make for excellent performances, and the direction, though sometimes kind of shaky, shows us all the wildness as closer as possible, and it makes for a very good movie about something that's very scary to think of, but true.

The Motorcycle Diaries

What a movie! And not a political film like many think.
Based on a Che Guevara's Journal, written while taken this same trip portrayed in the movie (the writing of the Journal is also shown), this an extremely well adapted story about adventures and selfdiscovery, that transformed and molded the way the two characters saw things, and what they wanted in life.

Ernesto 'Fuser' Guevara (he wasn't 'El Che' yet) and Alberto Granado are two twenty-somethings medicine students that go out on a trip through Latin America, starting in their home country of Argentina, with the goal of doing their residency in a Leper Colony in Peru. They travel of course, in their motorcycle, a 1939 Norton 500 that they call "La Poderosa" (The Mighty One).

Gael Garcia Bernal plays Ernesto, and he's very good. I had trouble with his accent for the first 40 minutes or so, basically because he's from Mexico, and if you speak Spanish (the movie is in Spanish with English subtitles), you can easily spot his trouble with the language which is very different between those from Argentina/Uruguay, and the rest of Latin America.
You mostly note the difference because of his co-star, Rodrigo De La Serna as Alberto. An excellent performance that includes some comic parts (as they're at first also in search of fun and women) and finishes, like Garcia Bernal's, very strong and dramatic.

The fun and adventures of the trip finish, as well as my problems with Garcia Bernal's accent, or any other problem I could have, once they get into the Leper Colony in San Pablo, Peru. Both actors really grow here, and you start seeing the guys discovering themselves, and what they want to do with their lives.
The sick people in the Leper Colony (which I still can't believe are actors) are helped by Ernesto and Alberto, and are the ones thanks to which the young friends grow to be the men they'll later become.
The movie hit me very hard in this part, and is this what makes you realize (in part) why Ernesto would follow the path he did. Both guys, by the end of the movie, know what they want to became, and result is history.
This movie is one of the Best of the Year and one I'll treasure for ever.