This is the movie review item.  Have you seen a good movie lately?
Whether you saw it in the theater, or on video, or on cable, or just on
regular tv, what movies have you seen?

327 responses total.

ABOUT SCHMIDT--  Saw this yesterday and its quite good.  Jack Nicholson
stars as Warren Schmidt, an aging insurance salesman who has been a slave
of routine for decades and suddenly everything changes, and this
precipitates a crisis where he starts to wonder what his life has meant.
He realizes he has spent most of his life doing a job anybody could do,
and living a life that was mundane and ordinary.  Suddenly he's in his mid
sixties, and as the structure of his routine starts to go away, he wonders
if his life and existence serve any purpose or has ever served any real
purpose.  He is grieving not over the losses he suddenly suffers late in
his life but over the fact that he had so little to lose.  

Jack Nicholson is great in this movie.  He is in virtually every scene and 
brilliantly captures the character of a hopeless, desperate old man who
is experiencing finally that moment in time when he sees his whole life
with perfect clarity and must deal with the fact that he doesn't like what
he sees.  Kathy Bates has an excellent supporting role here too.
Wonderful movie!

This response has been erased.

I have been looking forward to seeing About Schmidt but so far, it 
hasnt been released here. bah!

Seen LOTR - Two Towers Last Sunday.
 hmmm....
I am biased on how to judge this sequel to #1
Is it any less than #1? As far as story line is concerned, yes.
FX then? Well we have that already with Star Wars. They are alright.
Gollem is pretty convincing. Treebeard is not.
Acting? Gollem is pretty convincing, Treebeard is not.
Next to that, what's that with Arwen, Aragorn and Eowen?
If Aragorn doesn't stick with his lovely elf I'd gladly fill in that 
void. Liv Tyler is a babe. Besides, she was prepared to renounce her 
elfhood and give up her immortality. What greater sacrifice can be made?

Doing it with Viggo Mortensen?

I thought the pointy ears looked good on Liv Tyler, btw.  Could've been 
laughable, but very tastefully done as it turns out.

Aragorn's love life gets much less play in the books.  I always liked
Eowen the better of the two for no obvious reason.  Maybe I just like
humans.  Though Tolkien put few enough women in his stories, the ones he
put in were pretty good.  We've already seen Arwen's ride, and Jackson
will probably give Eowen's adventures in the third book plenty of play.

I was a bit surprised that as long as Jackson deviated from the book by
sending a contingent of elves from Rivendell to Helms Deep (how did they
get there so fast?) he didn't send Arwen along with them.  After all,
how would Elrond keep her from going to fight at Aragorn's side?  Then
we'd have Aragorn, Arwen, and Eowen all in the same place and we could
do the whole romance thing without resorting to psychic communications.
 Well, actually, I'm glad they didn't do that.

The Ent's weren't quite convincing ... but how do you make a convincing
Ent?  A walking talking tree is not as easy to make seem real as a
humanish character like Gollum.  I'd hoped for better Ents, but I think
they did a creditable job.  I think I would have chickened out and shown
them mostly in dramatically lit close ups, so you couldn't really get a
clear look at them.

What I really didn't like was the way Treebeard didn't know that Saruman
had been cutting down his trees.  No way!  An Ent would know about every
axe stroke.  Why were the Ents so down on Orcs if they didn't know Orcs
had been cutting trees?  Why hadn't they been watching the part of the
forest near Saruman's tower if they knew Saruman was up to no good?  If
I remember the book right, the council of Ents did decide to go to war
with Saruman.  Pippen and Merry mainly helped speed up the process, so
it didn't take the usual hundred years or so to make the decision.

I also thought the victory at Helms Deep was unconvincing.  Eomer's
cavalry wasn't so big a force that it seemed sufficient to turn the
battle.  (In the book Eomer was at Helms Deep from the beginning. 
Gandoph fetched some other army, plus the Ents brought the trees of
Fangorn forest up behind the Orcs, demoralizing them entirely.)

Perhaps the changes result from the compressed timescale necessary to 
keep the flow of the film working with all the elements from the books 
that had to be excluded in order to keep the films to manageable lengths.

the last recently released movie ive seen was frida. 
i give it a A for quality visual aesthetics
and a B- for overall goodness.

i was a little disappointed but my expectations were pretty high.
save your dollars for adaptation! (i can't wait)

Jan, that's exactly what I remembered.
It's also what bothered me about the Arwen thing. But I like elfs 
better than humans. They like trees.
I think I would have enjoyed the movie better if I hadn't read the 
books.

There are three current movies on my to-see list -- "Adaptation",
"Gangs of New York", and "The Two Towers" -- but I fear that they
shall have to wait until after Christmas.  Oh, also "About Schmidt",
but that hasn't opened in Ann Arbor yet.

I'm looking forward to seeing The Two Towers.  I mean, having read the books
and enjoyed them thoroughly, I *EXPECT* to be disappointed in some areas. 
And with the first movie I was.. but I still enjoyed the movie a whole lot.
After all, compare it to the cartoon version of "Lord of the Rings".  Bleagh.

From everything I've read in critical reviews, The Two Towers is even better
than Fellowship of the Ring.  It certainly did better in ticket sales opening
weekend (about 25% more ticket sales, according to an article I read today).

I've also heard that the Ents were done a little strangely, but how does one
really do a talking, walking tree that doesn't look somewhat odd or silly?

The treants weren't *quite* what I expected. But they weren't all that badly
done.

I just got back from The Two Towers.  I thought the Ents were fine.  I 
thought 75% of the movie was fine, but wish it had stuck to the 
original plot as closely as did the first movie.

Two Towers- spoilers, may not want to read if you haven't seen it yet:





I thought the Ents were really well done actually. As has been stated 
the whole idea isn't one that's easy to put into a more visual, 
workable context. The bit about them deciding NOT to go to was in the 
council kinda annoyed me, but it did go on to show Pip actually having 
a good idea- goes well with the growth the little Hobbit showed in the 
books.

Overall I thought Two Towers was done very well, and while I had a few 
complaints with the differences from the book I reminded myself that 
it's a visual adaptation of a textual original. I REALLY liked what 
they did with Gollum, and I really liked the conversation he had with 
himself (ending with Smeagol telling Gollum (basically) to go away) 
and thought they did a great job with it.

Come to think of it, the treants do look like the picture in the Third Edition
Monster Manual.

Drew, in Dungeons and Dragons they're "treants" but in the Lord of the 
Rings they're "ents".

Spoilers here too:

The Ents don't decide to go to war, Faramir begins to take the hobbits 
to Gondor to give his father the Ring instead of letting them go, 
Elrond is fleeing Middle Earth to avoid the war, and Theoden is a 
wimp.  In the book these are all decisive, principled people making 
good decisions and sticking with them even when there are difficulties.

        For anyone who only liked the first one because it was reasonably true
to the book (well, except for the bit with Tom Bombadil), you're in for a
rough ride.

Well, agreed that it's annoying that it wasn't closer to the book (I didn't
notice Theoden being a wimp as much as you did, but I was ticked about Faramir
and about Elrond's whole elves leaving thing..), but I thought that most of
the movie was well done -- it's HARD to do the middle books well, and most
of the criticisms I'd read were about how the tension was undercut by the
constant cuts between protagonists, which to me were exactly as it should be
given the books -- I was also annoyed by the whole "Aragorn being thought
dead" plot. Sheesh. 

Oddly enough, my daughter, who hasnt' read the books, was really irked at
Eowyn's obvious flirting with Aragorn. She thought that since he was taken,
Eowyn should have been hands off. 

        I thought that the Two Towers should've been the easiest of the lot
to direct, since the majority of the story is borne up by action rather than
dialogue.

        Normally a movie going that far off base irks me.  In this case it
didn't.  But I can see very few changes that were an improvement or a
reasonable compromise to change a written story into a filmed one.

I thought they did a good job with Eowyn (except I've always pronounced 
it "Yo-wen" but in the movie it was Eee-oh-win").  That's pretty much 
what she was like in the book, too; she was smitten with Aragorn until 
the siege of Gondor, in the hospital, when she flipped for Faramir.

I thought they did a pretty good job of switching between the scenes, 
with Frodo/Samwise, Peregrine/Meriadoc, and Aragorn and company.  That 
must have been confusing to anyone who hasn't read the book, but then 
it's confusing in the book as well.

I never found it confusing, I just wanted so much for each story line to 
continue that it was mildly frustrating when it jumped to a different 
one.  Of course, by the time it jumps back, I'm reinvested in the next 
one.  It's a very effective way of keeping my attention, and frankly I 
can't think of a better way to carry multiple divergent storylines along 
in roughly the same timeframe.

I don't see what the divergence from the novel adds to the story.  If it had
added soemthing, I would have been more comfortable with it.  

I saw "Two Weeks Notice." It was not nearly as good as I expected. One
weird thing: a scene I saw in trailers on TV wasn't in the movie, and
one scene I saw in trailers was similar but not the same as the trailer.

That happens fairly often, actually.

Re Two Towers:  I can accept a fair amount of adaption, so things like the
more densely interleaved storylines didn't bother me a bit.  Other stuff, like
the Rohirrim (mentioned in the movie also as the "horse lords") not having
very many horses drove me nuts.

There were a few neat things for those who'd read the books thoroughly, like
the statue at Helms Deep - a warrior with a big hammer, therefore he'd be Helm
Hammerhand, although nobody said anything about it.

Enough about The Two Towers already!  :)

Silvia and I just got back from seeing Catch Me If You Can. It's quite 
a good story. At one point, it really did have me on the edge of my 
seat. It also made me want to find out about what really happened.

I haven't read the books, and I didn't feel like I had any trouble keeping
track of the cuts between storylines.

  Just got back from seeing "The Two Towers" and my personal opinion is
  that the film drags almost as much as the book does.  And while I would
  not consider myself a story purist, I thought that the plot alterations
  added little or nothing to the film (so far as I could see -- I'll allow
  for the unlikely possibility that some of them might have been setting
  up for necessary alterations in part three of the story) and found myself
  in agreement with most of the previous objections from folks who may be
  more invested than I am in adherence to the original story.  In particular
  I thought the transformation of Gimli into a comic-relief character didn't
  add anything worthwhile, the fake-death scene for Aragorn was bafflingly
  unnecessary, and Legolas' shield-riding scene just looked like an
  embarrassingly prominent video-game tie-in.

  In addition I thought the movie was about an hour too long (I'd've cut the
  warg attack and most of the footage of the two Rohirrim children and the
  pillaging of their village) but perhaps I'm just feeling uncharitable
  because I was in a rotten mood most of the day..

I liked Catch Me If You Can.  Read the book, too.  And Abagnale's website (not
hard to find if you search on his name).

Just saw Die Another Day, and enjoyed it, despite some offenses against the
laws of physics.

I loved Abagnale's book, and can't wait to see the film.  Dan, if you want
to borrow the book, let me know....

16: Theoden wasn't a wimp at all.  He was depressed and deeply 
pessimistic, almost to the point of immobility.  That's the way he was 
in the book, too.  He starts getting his courage back toward the end, 
and, of course, turns into a fearless hero in The Return of the King.

I didn't notice Merry and Pippin drinking any "ent draghts" in the 
movie.  In the book, they drink too much of the stuff and have become 
several inches taller when they next meet Frodo and Sam.

I would have liked to have seen the Ent draughts. Bruce is more unhappy with
the movie now that he's reread the relevant passages in the books. (We found
the Red Hardcover that was my wedding present to him, lo, these 25 years ago,
and he's been re-reading.)

If Merry and Pippen did indulge in ent draughts, it'd be another 
marketing opportunity to sell "short" and "tall-short" action figures.

<sigh>  I guess the LOTR folks don't know how to make money.
Deviating from the book and all.  And of course people _should_
feel disappointment about a perfectly entertaining movie because
it lacks the slavish plot of the book.  

If you can't leave them laughing, leave them wondering what the
hell you ent.

Agora 14 <-> Cinema 52

Loved "Adaptation".  See, it's about orchids.  No, it's about being
passionate about orchids.  No, it's about being passionate about
anything.  No, it's about writing a book about all of the above.
No, it's about trying to write a screenplay from the book about all
of the above that won't bore the audience to tears and suffering the
deadliest case of writer's block of all time.

Well, whatever it's about, I loved it.  Nicholas Cage does a great
job playing twin screenwriter brothers (one of whom has the same name
as the actual author of the movie's screenplay), Meryl Streep is
excellent as the author whose book one of them is trying to adapt,
Chris Cooper is ditto as the redneck orchid hunter, in a movie where
it's hard to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins.

The director is Spike Jonze, of "Inside John Malkovich" fame.  That
tells you something right there.

  s/Inside/Being/

33: Having read the book adds another element of enjoyment to seeing 
the movie.  A certain type of reader, the author would probably say the 
best type, has already already produced a movie of the book in his 
head, and will come out of the theater happy about some things that 
were added or changed or left out and disappointed about others.  Can't 
be helped, but doesn't mean he didn't enjoy the movie.  Some of us like 
George Pal's _War of the Worlds_ movie better than H. G. Wells' novel.

(Re #36: Thanks for the title correction.)

I wanted to go see Adaptations or Catch Me If You Can but was talked 
into seeing Gangs of New York instead. It was the worst movie I have 
seen in 2002. Yuck. The acting was terrible. They had a 1/2 hour plot 
stretched out into almost 3 hours of torture. There was a lot of 
violence and gratuitous gory parts. I was with someone I dont know too 
well otherwise I would have suggested leaving. I wish I had suggested 
it anyway as the person I was with felt the same way as I did. 

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss