Crazy, Stupid,Love:
This review says it far better than I could, so check it out:
http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2011/08/crazy-is-as-crazy-does.html
not that I won't still try!!
Okay, first hand me a bib for my drool over Ryan Gosling. I mean, is it just the perfect body, the cute face? The slight, sexy "New York Thug" accent? No, all that is great, but it's that melancholy sweetness that infuses his face in repose. A lot of kerfluffle has been made over what an amazing actor he is (and he is great) but my personal theory is that he is most likely bringing out some heretofore hidden side of his kaleidoscopically complex personality, which in a sense isn't acting, it's just being, but I'll take it.
The plot is a cute tangle of various people being in love with each other, some requited, others not. The main plotline is hapless pre-divorcee Steve Carell finding Ryan's character (called Jacob) in a bar, and getting a man-over to emerge from his divorce cocoon ready to date.
I have to say, the music in the movie is really stupendous. The scenes in the bar have earthshaking, thumping, fuzzy not- quite- dance music (think club remix of Kylie Minogue) that is very real and very, very sexy (not the bossa nova crap they usually show in "clubs" in movies). Whatever music they play while the camera pans up and over a leonine Ryan Gosling as he lounges over a second floor balcony surveying his prey while waiting for Steve Carell to show up is *perfect*.
The style of the movie is well done- it's light, which is something you don't often see in movies like this--the movie lightly *shows* you things rather than having reams of exposition, or worse, leaving you wondering "wait, how does Aunt Myrtle own a classic 1963 stingray again?"
The movie was really enjoyable, with a few laugh out loud moments, but the last few minutes dragged, after a truly inspired slapstick routine that expertly tied all the plotlines together in one crazy rainbow of comedy and tragedy. Delightful. And then the movie limped along for like another 30 minutes. It was kind of like Sex and the City 2...you kind of hoped it would end 3 times before it really did.
But other than that one flaw, it was well worth it.
Rating: 3 out of 4---would have been 4 if not for the crippled ending.
Columbiana:
A very, very stylish romp through the gun- heavy fairy tale world of another Luc Besson muse: A female killer who's touched with angelic madness.
Luc Besson does one thing very well: he creates and populates a dense, heavily archetypal world and sprinkles a soupcon of humor, sex and pathos over it, and serves it up piping hot. His world is full of characters that get 2 seconds of screen time (the Gemini Cartel twins, in this case) that you somehow want to know more about. "If you don't know everything there is to know about these twins, you don't belong in this room" the lead FBI agent tells us during a routine ex-positional briefing. But I DO belong in this room! Damn it!
I actually have a more lot to say about this movie. I really liked it. Here's what I liked about it:
The earliest setting, in 1980's Bogata, made me nostalgic for my own neighborhood in the Philippines; "HEY! That's just like MY baranguy!" I thought as the bad guys chased the girl heroine through the tattered and colorful tropic streets, crashing in and out of houses full of religious icons and ladies cooking and doing housework, the camera pulling back to go aerial over the maze of concrete, lush flowers, and laundry EVERYWHERE.
The color palate is really well controlled, so that a simple scene where the grown up heroine rests on her side on a bed is as beautiful as a Vermeer painting.
The set dressing and costuming is well done- everything feels "right", like that character would really choose that item. The movie never seems to skimp or go cheap, another Luc Besson characteristic is screens filled to the brim with meaning- everything is going to be used in one way or another- but it never feels cluttered or obvious. When the heroine takes two wooden toothbrushes with bright light neon blue bristles to defend herself, you 1) believe the bathroom she's in would really stock them and 2) enjoy watching the colorful bristles flash around light butterfly wings in the intricately choreographed fight scene that follows. When the camera pans around the small, cheerful kitchen that orphaned Cateliea comes to at first, it skips and dances over the very ordinary ceramic wall decorations and red and white wallpapers; we later see those same bright, homey decorations mocking her as she wails over the body of her murdered adopted mother.
I also like the way that the story just *is*, there's hole after hole in the plotline, it's basically a crocheted afghan of a plotline, but you don't cay-uhr! Because the movie's so fun. You also kind of go with it, the movie doesn't explain ANYTHING, leaving you floating in the crazy, sexy, stylish and odd world of Luc Besson.
4 out of 4. Go see it. Just go with it.
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