Category: Three Sentence Movie Reviews

So I’m just going to talk about Shawn Levy’s list.

http://blog.oregonlive.com/madaboutmovies/2010/01/the_best_of_the_naughts_top_fi.html

First off, Shawn Levy has seen 2463 movies in the past decade! Yikes! I like movies, but I don’t think I could hack being a movie critic.

Okay, he starts with Lord of the Rings, which I liked, okay, especially for someone who has never been able to read the books, but that third movie was so darn long that it sort of dragged down the whole trilogy. But then, his next pick is Far from Heaven, which was a movie I loved, not just for the costumes, which were fabulous–so many fantastic coats alone–but for the excellent acting brought by all parts. This movie is totally overlooked, and I’m guessing many men didn’t see it, but I loved it and I love him for putting it second in the decade.

Other things I love in his top ten:

The Lives of Others. Because then you get to discuss the directing and say the director’s name, Floren Henckel von Donnersmark, which is totally fun to say. Plus: most of the movie is a guy listening through headphones. Could have been incredibly boring, but instead wonderfully gripping.

Memento. Yes! It gave me a headache I was concentrating so hard!

Angels in America. Mormons! Angels! Al Pacino portraying an evil man! Emma Thompson! Meryl Streep in the dowdiest haircut ever! Heartbreaking and fantastic all at once.

Disagreement: Waking Life. Interesting in concept, but I was bored.

Still to see: The Best of Youth, The Motorcycle Diaries.

Movies 11-20:
We are in agreement: An Education. Perfect, just as he says. Once and Before Sunset. Both movies that say so much in a limited amount of time. Before Sunset has the distinction of being one of the happiest surprises in my adult life. Really! The Incredibles. An incredibly funny film that also is animated.

The rest of 11-20 I’ve not seen.

21-25: No Country for Old Men. Mesmerizing. So good I had a random conversation with a stranger at a bus stop.

The rest of the 25:
Amelie. Yep. Delightful.
Billy Elliot. Also set in Europe and delightful.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Incredibly fun to watch. Sort of a cackling-with-delight movie. This was also the movie where I realized George Clooney isn’t afraid to make himself funny looking.
The Queen. Tension filled, in an extremely low-key way.
The Royal Tennenbaums. I hate to think this might be Wes Anderson at his greatest, but it might be.
Shaun of the Dead. Funny, scary and gives hope to all the sad-sacks.

And why should this movie be any different than those watched over Winter Break? It was fine, a bit engrossing in parts, and ultimately I’m most interested to see if the book cuts back and forth between the present and the movie just like this movie did. Not the worst way to spend two hours and four minutes, but I’ve had better.

Another not-so-captivating movie watched over Winter Break. Everything was fine in this movie: the story, the characters, the color scheme. I think scenes from this movie will stick with me for years, but overall, it was not a super memorable movie.

I hadn’t seen this since I was 13 or so, and watching it at 35, I think I got a lot more out of it from my adult perspective than my early adolescent one. Classic lines abound in this film (Well, I like art, I work in a gas station, my best friend is a tomboy. These things don’t fly too well in the American high school…) and it is always interesting to see the lack of adults in a John Hughes world. Sometimes what you think you want isn’t what you actually want.

His name hasn’t come up in the “Goodbye Dead Famous People” lists of 2009–at least not the one’s I’ve seen. Checking IMDB, it’s not hard to see why. Looking over the list of movies Hughes wrote from 1991 onward, tells us that an entire generation has grown up only knowing him as the writer of (sigh with me, Gen-Xers) Dennis the Menace, Beethoven’s 4th, Baby’s Day Out and Home Alone 3. But let’s roll back a screen or two. Scrolling over the movies Hughes wrote in the 1980’s is a treasure trove of lifetime movie highlights.

Mr. Mom. (1983) I wasn’t even ten, yet my entire family watched and enjoyed this movie. Among other things, this movie opened my eyes to the idea that one shouldn’t assume that the husband is going to get a new job before the wife does, and an iron makes an excellent instrument for warming up cold grilled cheese sandwiches.

Vacation. (1983) My family didn’t watch this movie until 1988, after we spent a month driving across the country and back in a station wagon, but oh we did laugh. Classic scenes, classic lines, classic story.
Sixteen Candles. (1984) A preview of what it would be like to be a teenager, though I knew even then my teenage years would be a lot more of Joan Cusack, and a lot less of Molly Ringwald.

The Breakfast Club. (1985) Lori Tollinger’s mother came downstairs at just the wrong moment, leaving me with an awkward memory of the most dramatic scene. This movie also fed my bad boy fixation and I worried for years that my hair would unknowingly be as dandruffy as Ali Sheedy’s. Now, thanks to psoriasis, it is, though my adult self handles that better than my teenage self ever would have.

Pretty in Pink. (1986) Girls who can sew do get the guy. Also Annie Potts as the coolest small business owner ever.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (1986) Forshadowed my teenage years: upon viewing with my mother and brother I grew annoyed that my mother kept saying, “Principals aren’t really like that,” “Parents aren’t really like that,” “That isn’t even possible.” Being an adult and not a pre-adolecent like me she missed the point. This is the perfect movie about what we all wish adolescence was like. Also includes one of the most beautifully filmed visits to an art museum ever. And Charlie Sheen as a bad boy. Which it turns out he really is. Hughes could have stopped here, with this movie, he really could have. But he continues.
Some Kind of Wonderful. (1987) This movie will forever remind me of Lori Tollinger. Captures the delecate negotiation between parents and children. What happens when their dreams are different? Also a reminder that getting the girl isn’t the point, sometimes.

Uncle Buck. (1989) Aside from starring the funniest fat man ever, John Candy, it also includes the best illustration of why a toothpick is not the best prop when trying to make a good impression on a girl. I saw this the first week of school my ninth grade year, on a school night and it will always represent that freedom of adolescence, even if I can’t really recall much of the plot.

Home Alone. (1990) I saw it. You saw it. Heck, everyone saw it. The irony of John Hughes in my life was that by the time I had actually caught up to the age of his characters in his best movies, he started writing movies for children the age I was when I started watching his movies about teenagers. But Kevin McCallister’s fight against burglars will forever be remembered by millions of Americans.

And thus ends my relationship with John Hughes. He went on to write movies that I consider really awful, though I’ve not seen most of them. I went on to face my high school years without movies about teenagers. But what he did write about teenagers before I came of age, I found to be true to my experiences. When I watch John Hughes movies, I’m usually reminded of the elementary school me who saw those films and tried to figure out what being a teenager would be like. He offered a portal into a world I hadn’t experienced yet, and many of his observations turned out to be true to my experience.

I like to think that, had he not died this year, he would have turned some corner and begin writing movies that mattered again. But maybe not. Maybe his movies that mattered only came at a certain time in his life. That would have been okay too. They were enough.

It turns out that the best movies watched in 2009 list became folded into the “Top 49 Movies Watched in the Last Five Years” post which will be coming in January. Stay tuned.

Man, has this been a vacation of not-so-great movies. This movie is excellent for the following: looking at Robert Redford; fun 70s fashions; wondering whatever happened to singing, scantily clad campaign workers; and Don Porter’s excellent performance as Senator Crocker Jarmon. I got this for free from the library, so I guess I didn’t lose much, aside from two hours of my life.

Yet another movie I just didn’t connect with. The story was interesting, the characters were fully formed and well acted, and yet, if the power had gone out in the middle of the film I would have happily moved on to another activity. I’m so ambivalent, I can’t come up with a third sentence.

This was my first Pedro Almodovar film and I don’t think it was the best starting place. I didn’t really connect to any of the characters, though I thought their fashion sense was interesting. When the Mambo Taxi Driver is the most exciting thing in the movie, something hasn’t worked.

Despite good reviews, the concept of this movie weirded me out and I didn’t see it. Recommendation by a movie watching friend convinced me to watch it and while doing so I realized my feelings were similar to the characters in the movie. This is a sweet, fabulous, hopeful movie about the human condition, and one innocent enough–I kid you not!–that you could watch it with your church-going grandmother.

ps. Paul Schneider! Patricia Clarkson! You MUST see this!