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Just watched Fireproof. I cried. Yeah, it was cheesey at parts and the female lead actress wasn’t great but it had a lovely message. I wouldn’t discard it completely. sorry !

Ladybug Reviews are film reviews by my mother. Visit her at Ladyblog.

Watched Last Chance Harvey yesterday. It wasn’t quite what I expected. Predictable for sure but I REALLY enjoyed the chemistry between DH and ET. DH was great! It was a short movie too which I like.

Ladybug Reviews are film reviews by my mother. Visit her at Ladyblog.

The Signal is a pretty cool movie that I’ve been reading about for a few months. It’s a horror/zombie movie and what’s interesting is that it’s split up into three parts, each written/directed by a different person. The zombies concept was kinda cool, but it’s probably not entirely accurate to call them that, since they aren’t simply undead. After receiving some kind of “signal” either through the television, cell phone or radio, people are infected with a murderous rage that actually seems rational to them at the time.

Each third is clearly marked but I kinda wish it hadn’t been as I was looking forward to trying to figure out where each section began. Even with the sectioning, though, the different writing and directing styles are pretty obvious. The first third is a bit spooky, the second part is in a small setting and dialogue-heavy (and funny!), and the final section is a bit bigger as it climaxes and concludes the film.

This one is definitely worth watching and was great for me because I love zombie movies as well as non-conventional filmmaking styles. The story concept isn’t super brilliant, but the three writer/director thing really makes this an interesting and enjoyable watch. Lots of blood and guts doesn’t hurt, either!

This past weekend I watched two films currently in theatres, but in the comfort of my living room. Here are some comments on each of them:

Children of Men (2006, written by Alfonso Cuarón and Timonthy J. Sexton with David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James; directed by Alfonso Cuarón) was a grand film, and by grand, I mean BIG. The live sets, huge number of extras and extensive setpieces made it a pleasure to watch, especially combined with Emmanuel Lubezki’s striking cinematography. Unfortunately, films cannot be based upon extras and camera work alone; this film had little heart and generally unconvincing performances (a few scenes by Clive Owen aside).

I tend to enjoy post-Apocalyptic (or whatever they’re called) films so I was in no way tempted to press the stop button on my DivX player. Children Of Men had an interesting premise, some great jump! moments and even great war action (the really long single-shot going up the stairs in the apartment building was especially fun), but those things alone do not make up for a lack of believable characters, a satisfying ending or a deeper understanding of why you should care.

The Good Shepherd (2006, written by Eric Roth; directed by Robert DeNiro) was equally underwhelming. There were some good moments from Matt Damon, but the 168 minutes had you jumping back and forth between times, sometimes with flashbacks-within-flashbacks, and all the while Damon looked EXACTLY THE SAME. The topic (the birth of the CIA) was interesting, as was the WWII stuff, but it wasn’t covert, exciting or coherent enough for me to really get into it. Angelina Jolie’s performance isn’t even worth mentioning.

There were some really cool visual transitions, though. It looks like they used real post-WWII (and other) black & white footage of bombed out cities and then spliced in scenes with the film’s characters in them, while turning from black & white to colour. My favourite one was the sweeping overhead shot of Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, but only because I was there a couple of months ago!

Le temps qui reste (Fran?ɬßois Ozon) is about a man (Romain) who finds out that he is terminally ill and has three months to live. We then watch him as he processes this information. He decides to tell certain people and not others (some of whom we would expected him to have told). The way he handles certain relationships is very interesting as you watch him struggle between the desire to be alone and loneliness; with living life to the fullest and his mortality.

Ozon didn’t take the story where one typically would expect, which was refreshing. Romain is basically a selfish jerk, but unlike Hollywood formulas does not miraculously change into a different person. Yes, he does go through changes, but not in a cookie-cutter type of way.

Another refreshing thing was that Romain was not another gay characater dying of AIDS. Yes, films about gay men with AIDS are relevant and important, but they certainly abound; it was nice to see a film where a gay man was dealing with something other than AIDS, discrimination, or going to the gym.

Hostel (Eli Roth) was much more of a joke than I’d been expecting. I got the impression that Roth chickened out and went for some less realistic special effects. That’s weird, though, since Cabin Fever was pretty gross.

One cool thing was the cameo of Takashi Miike, whose films arguably define the horror-gore genre.

I thought the setup of characters and setting was pretty good. I guess there’s not much else to say about it, except that it wasn’t as gross or scary as I had expected, and I laughed at certain points. Oh, and the movie posters were pretty cool. Overall impression: not worth the hype.

The whole process of watching this movie was possibly more interesting than the film itself. Ian got it in some odd format that I can’t even remember. We stopped it partway through because we were hungry, but shortly after resuming, it just stopped. Turns out he had an incomplete file!

Now the movie isn’t necessarily good, but in order to start what we had finished, we went to Queen Video. It was out, though, so we had to hold our breath and enter Blockbuster (actually, I’m the one with the Blockbuster hangup – Ian was able to breathe normally).

All of this to say, Final Destination (James Wong) is fine. We got the impression from the special features that its success as a film, and now a franchise, was a total fluke. They showed the test audience reactions and some of the scenes that they had to cut out – absolutely terrible stuff! It was great.

Green Street Hooligans (Lexi Alexander) is about a kid named Matt (Elijah Wood) who takes the blame for something that results in him getting kicked out of Harvard, and then goes to England to visit his sister. There, he meets his brother-in-law’s brother, Pete (Charlie Hunnam), who is the leader of a “firm” of football enthusiasts who take their team VERY seriously.

It’s a pretty fun movie. There are a bunch of graphic fight scenes that caused me the occasional wince. They’re very glamourized and it’s obvious that a lot of care went into shooting and choreographing them. The story was fine, but it ended up being one of those coming-of-age movies where way too much comes and there’s not enough actual aging.

Anyway, Elijah Wood fan that I am, it was still pretty satisfying seeing the crap get beaten out of him. Apparently one of the reasons that he got this part was because he was perceived to be the exact cultural fish-out-of-water as his character.

It was written and directed by Lexi Alexander – I read that she is a professional kick-boxer, so her love of fighting and the like is the perspective that Green Street is coming from in regards to how it took precedent over story. Still good, though.