In light of it having been so long since I posted that my homepage was empty when I loaded up tannock.net, here’s a couple of quick summaries of movies that I’ve seen recently:
- Click
: A wretched piece of crap that should never, ever have been greenlighted. The first 10 minutes made a vaguely funny sketch, but after that, it deteriorates into schmalzty pap made worse only by an “aging” Adam Sandler getting pointlessly angry at himself.
- Le Samourai
: mixing American Noir with French New Wave Pop-Culture cool, this film is a masterpiece, pure and simple. If you love cinema, particularly crime drama, you owe it to yourself to see this film. You can see its influence on nearly every lone-wolf crime movie since.
- A Prairie Home Companion
: Like so many of Altman’s later movies, not so much a story as an extended scene, it is again filled with strong acting and a sense of actors having fun together. While I never bought the “world” portrayed within (being too aware at all times of the actors themselves), I enjoyed this one. Not his strongest, but if you’re an Altman fan, you’ll like it. If you don’t like Altman at the best of times, run screaming from this one.
- L’Enfer
: This film is perhaps more famous for how hard it was to finish (it took 30 years to make) that for the story. Depending on your point-of-view, it’s either an insufferably slow and over-dramatic French Film about nothing (Leah’s take), or a beautiful, haunting meditation on the destructive power of Jealousy (my take).
- The Pursuit of Happyness
: A strong performance by Will Smith in an otherwise fairly weak, predictable movie. I get that it’s based on a true-story but that doesn’t excuse the over-the-top manipulativeness of the direction. A subtler hand could have made an even more powerful film about the importance of vision, staying true to oneself, family, etc..