I can’t believe that Ben Kingsley starred in both of these roles. For some reason Gandhi made it onto the Liston netflix queue. It sat around our apartment for about a week before we sat down and got to Gandhi watching business.
I watched this film with my ninth grade world history class. Mr. Ernst (who was known for his dime-sized dandruff) compared Gandhi to Jesus Christ for his impact on human history. As wierd as Mr. Ernst was, I thought this was a very cool comparison.
The movie uses lots of staring contests to heighten drama a little too much, but other than that I really enjoyed it. There are lots of awesome shots of India and South Africa. And the story is pretty good too. Even though the pace was pretty deliberate, the three hours went by before I knew it. It is a much more satisfying 3 hours than King Kong.
Carrie and I watched this thing at the second run movie theater last night. Thank goodness we only paid three dollars for it. While there were some funny parts, I was left with the sense that the humor would have been much more effective on the stage than it was on the big screen. There was some fun choreography, but the show lacked any memorable music. Nathan Lane was effective, but I spent a lot of the film wondering how Jason Alexander would have portrayed the character. Neither he nor Brodrick have impressive singing ability, though they did hold their own. All in all, we were not upset that we missed the first ten minutes of this adaptation.
Melinda and Melinda tells two different stories of a woman named Melinda. One is a romantic comedy and one is a tragic drama. Maybe its just the Woody Allen style or perhaps it is the total lack of music. Ferrell makes the comedy pretty interesting, and the cast works pretty well off of him without overdoing it. But the drama kind of hurts to watch. By the end we were anxious for the comedy to restart.
This film documented how Seinfeld created a new act after the end of the TV show. It really gave me new respect for stand ups. I knew they worked hard before, but this is ridiculous. You also get to watch a lot of conversations that comics have with eachother.
This is a film I ended up showing to a class as kind of a last option for a movie with an anti-hero. I didn’t want something violent or blockbusterish and the teacher had suggested this. It also has Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Billy Wilder’s film won like a gagillion awards in 1960 or 61. So I was pretty excited.
I liked the movie. It was like a snapshot on 1950’s corporate life. Little worker bees, elevator girls and executives who drank and bedded as many women as possible. Lemmon was pretty good as a dorky nice guy trying to make it and MacLaine was a sultry, nice yet manic depressive elevator girl. Still, the parts I liked most were these wide angle shots of a the dudes typing away on their little desks.
Did I mention the fact that the movie was in black and white? That pretty much did it for any significant portion of students paying attention.
I watched this thing again a couple of weeks ago to show Carrie that I do watch DVD’s I own. Anyway, It was fun. I still like captains Sparrow and Barbossa and the annoying heros aren’t too annoying. It reminds me of a part of Funny in Farsi where she talks about how much her dad loved Disneyland. “Pirates of the Caribbean was the apex of modern man’s cultural and scientific achievement. More impressive than putting a man on the moon to my father.” (or something like that) This thing just tries to blow your socks off from as many angles as possible.
So I rented this film from Scarecrow Video to show to some a Special Ed reading class I was subbing for.� (Turns out that it is not listed on the IMDB, so i submitted an update.)� It was part of a unit they spent reading a book called A Taste of Salt, about some poeple in Haiti during the rise of Aristide.� The case said it was on Haitian history going from 500 years ago to the present.� I thought it would give them some good visuals of what everything the country/culture looked like.
� The film did have a lot of cool background and some neat pictures.� It spent an inordinate amount of time on modern artists who painted pictures depicting scenes from Haiti’s history.� Then it hit me A Painted History!� It goes without saying that 90 percent of the students slept through the film.
When I heard that Peter Jackson was redoing Kong, my first question was, “Why?” What attracts a Kiwi hippie to remake the first blockbuster? Then I started hearing raving reviews about how cool everything looked and what a great story it was. The fastest three hours you’ll ever spend, I was told. The most promising part of my pre-Kong experience was the previews and the posters. Oooooohhhh, so he fights dinosaurs. Now I am interested!
That is how I found myself watching Kong to celebrate MLK with Kate with a mixture of excited anticipation and a sense of forboding of what could come. I actually liked the beginning of the movie a lot. Even though some of the characters and plot devices seemed a little canned, they were engaging enough to hold my interest. I had been very apprehensive about Jack Black, but ended up enjoying him.
When we got to the island I got my first taste of Jackson’s real talent in this movie, freaking me out with gross, messed up stuff. The natives were hideous, where does he find these people, do they have a quality ugly school in New Zealand? Yikes. I did like the ape and all the running around and stuff, though this part of the movie loses a lot of its tension because we know that he is going to end up liking her and with her back in New York. So instead, we have to be entertained by all the fancy special effect dinosaur fights. Even though I had really looked forward to this, I ended up a little tired. I mean three T-rexes? I know they have tiny arms/brains, but . . . The only thing that did surprise me during this part of the film was the crews ability to come to the rescue out of nowhere along with another classic gross/freakout scene at the bottom of the ravine. Poor Cookie, poor poor Cookie.
The stuff back in New York was fun, but again, we basically know what is going to happen. It was cool watching Kong knock airplanes around, boy were they surprised.
Overall, I think that the film did a lot with an old story line. And there was some fun stuff along the way. While I also knew what was going to happen in Lord of the Rings, for some reason that seemed like a more enjoyable re-creation. While Kong kept me interested, I was not left thirsting for more.
I love the talking babies!
