Stu's Movie Reviews 2013 Father’s Day Edition Note I’m definitely not a pro reviewer. It’s just that if I don’t jot down impressions of movies I watch, I tend to forget them in a week. I rarely see blockbusters, usually stick to films that gross less than 10 mil. As a joke, I started rating these movies to three significant figures sometime in 2011. That way I could say I was the most precise (if not accurate) movie reviewer in the world. I started to add rambling riffs at the end of reviews sometime in 2011 as well. Warning! The reviews have typos and weird sentences with Yiddish grammar galore. Ignore the typos but not the opinions. My Rules of Thumb If it isn't funny, it better be damn good (mediocre and funny is OK); if it has subtitles, it better be fantastic. What You’ll See Mentioned Time and Time Again The script is lousy, but the acting is excellent. A Modest Request You can disagree with me, but don’t shoot me. This Year I’ve Added Color Coding Red: Run, do not walk, to your library to get a copy. Orange: I like it. Black: If you’re sick at home with a fever and this thing shows up on TV, why not? Blue: Brain cell killer. 2 All Time Favorites This is a good way to see if it’s worthwhile to read my reviews. If you shake your head at the list below, go no further. American Splendor Drama Annie Hall Comedy Bananas Comedy Beaufort Foreign Being John Malkovich Comedy Best in Show Comedy Big Night Drama Bonnie and Clyde Drama Boys Don't Cry Drama Breaker Morant: Drama Capturing the Friedmans Documentary Chicken Run Comedy Chinatown Drama Citizen Kane Drama A Clockwork Orange Drama The Conversation Drama The Deer Hunter Drama Duck Soup Comedy Ed Wood Comedy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Comedy Everest: IMAX Documentary Fargo Drama A Fish Called Wanda Comedy Forrest Gump Drama Genghis Blues Documentary Ghost World Independent The Godfather: Part II Drama The Godfather: Part III Drama The Heart of the Game Documentary Hedwig and the Angry Inch Music & Musicals High Fidelity Comedy Horse Feathers Comedy The In-Laws Comedy Into the Arms of Strangers Documentary The Interrupters Documentary The Italian Foreign Late Marriage Foreign The Lives of Others Foreign Living Out Loud Drama LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring: Action & Adventure LOTR: Return of the King: Action & Adventure 3 LOTR: The Two Towers: Action & Adventure Marat / Sade Classics Maria Full of Grace Foreign Melvin and Howard Drama Monkey Business Comedy No End in Sight Documentary Nowhere in Africa Foreign Nurse Betty Comedy Pan’s Labyrinth Foreign Please Vote For Me Documentary Psycho Drama Raging Bull Drama Ratatouille Children & Family Searching For Sugar Man Documentary A Separation Foreign The Shawshank Redemption Drama Sideways Comedy Sleeper Comedy Sling Blade Drama Sondheim: The Birthday Concert Musical Theater Spellbound Documentary The Sting Classics The Straight Story Drama Sweetgrass Documentary The Sweet Hereafter Drama The Tillman Story Documentary This Is Not A Film Documentary Toy Story Children & Family Toy Story 3 Children & Family True Romance Thrillers Up The Yangtze Documentary Up Series (7 to 49) Documentary Vera Drake Drama We Live In Public Documentary West Side Story Classics When We Were Kings Documentary The White Ribbon Drama Winter’s Bone Drama The Wizard of Oz Children & Family Wonder Boys Drama Zero Dark Thirty Drama 4 Recent Short Reviews (alphabetical listing) Adam's Apples You rated this movie: 2.0 Part Ingmar Bergman and part Three Stooges, this absurdist parable I’m sure has an audience, but it’s not for me. A faith-filled, kind-to-the-point-of lunacy-pastor battles a Hitler-loving evil-to-the-point-of-lunacy misfit. One unbelievable thing happens after another. The battle escalates (that’s the plot). The pace is incredibly slow. If you like slow-going, foreign, sort-of-comedies with attempts at deeper meaning (Eling, The Band’s Visit), this one might work for you. You wrote this on 2009-07-06 Adventureland You rated this movie: 3.0 Greg Mattola made a wonderful movie about a decade ago, The Daytrippers. It was subtle and intelligent. Then he made a raunchy coming of age comedy that I thought was unwatchable, but made a ton of money, Superbad. This third one is somewhere between the other two. Adventureland is a paint by numbers coming of age movie set in an amusement park. This kind of movie has been done so many times before – not the setting but a romantic comedy with people who should have pimples but don’t because it’s Hollywood – that it’s hard for a new one to stand out. This one doesn’t. If you were born in about 1965, this movie might work because of the nostalgia factor: the movie takes place with 20-somethings in 1987. Otherwise I’d skip this movie. It’s a decently done and acted, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl tale that’s ultimately forgettable. On a side note, a movie like this can live or die on its soundtrack. According to the music supervisor, the music budget for the movie was very low. It shows. You wrote this on 2009-10-01 After the Wedding You rated this movie: 2.0 I read somewhere recently that Danes were among the happiest people in the world. You’d never know it from this film, which has more close ups of grim faces and tears than I’ve seen in a while. That the characters are sad is not the principle reason this film isn’t very good. This is a movie that sacrifices depth for plot. There is just too much going on to allow me to suspend my disbelief. Take one billionaire, one illegitimate child, one long lost affair, one dying person, one newly sprung affair, one wedding, one long lost child, hundreds of orphans in India and you have this messy soup of a movie. On the plus side, the cinematography is excellent and the actor who plays the billionaire is outstanding. But the script needed some serious doctoring. You wrote this on 2009-06-06 Ahead of Time You rated this movie: 4.0 5 Ahead of Time is an inspiring account of a remarkable woman, Ruth Gruber, who marched to a different drummer. The movie covers the time before Ruth Gruber was married. Brooklyn born, she attended NYU at 15 and received her Ph.D. in Germany (during the rise of Hitler) at the age of 20. She went on to become a journalist who not only covered the plight of Jewish refugees – most notably the refugees on the “Exodus” in 1947 – but also helped their cause. Amazingly, it’s something she still does today in her 90s. The interviews show her to be a serene woman with guts, honesty and morality who never falls to cynicism and possesses a strong duty to both inform and help others. You walk away from a movie like this inspired to be a better person. You wrote this on 2010-08-02 Ajami You rated this movie: 3.0 The movie is good for what it is, a cinema verite type-look at the gritty underworld of Arab Israel. An average Israeli-Arab family gets pulled down into a life of crime after a shoot out in their family cafe causes them to owe a ridiculous amount of money to a Mafia-like syndicate. You can tell that non-actors are used and that much of the dialogue is improvised. Almost the entire movie is in Arabic. There is a lot of fast cutting and use of hand held cameras in poor lighting, all of which add to the realism. But ultimately, I as a viewer like tightly scripted, well-acted dramas focused on real people and where people aren’t shot every 15 minutes. So if you like gritty crime movies, you’ll probably like this one. If you have to turn your head when confronted with violence, however, you’ll probably end up missing a good third of this movie (me). You wrote this on 2010-09-19 The American Folk Blues Festival: 1962-1966 You rated this movie: 4.0 If you’re a blues enthusiast, these German DVDs are probably a must see. If you’re just a casual music fan, then they’ll bore. But for me, both the cultural context – those funny little German TV show sets trying to depict back porch life in the American South – and most of all, the ability to see the musicians I saw as old men in the mid-1970s play in their prime live on a TV show are wonderful. On the negative side, the DVD just goes from one musician to the next without any effort to maintain continuity or give any feel for what the TV show was about. On the plus side, the quality of the video and audio is excellent. Clearly, coming to Europe was a treat for these musicians. They are dressed to the nines and look like happy as can be. You wrote this on 2011-01-19 Amour 2.96 out of 5.00 I could see Amour as an art installation. You’d walk into a booth and watch a 20- minute loop of a misanthropic couple, the woman sick from a stroke, interact with each other. The loop would show the man caring for the woman in unflinching detail. You’d walk out of the installation and feel disturbed, unhappy, but also emotionally 6 enriched.