Mennan Yapo, USA, 2007, 96 min.

Sandra Bullock, a wife and mother, receives news that her husband died in a car accident. The next day, he arrives home alive and well like nothing happened.

The movie revolves around the main character predictably shifting through time. The problem is that the film-makers believe the audience is fooled and play everything as a tense surprise. The film trips its way through the plot and at the end I just didn’t care anymore.

This film wins the award “Most Boring Production Design” for its forgettable depiction of average upper middle class suburbia.

As you probably have seen, this website has become a little stagnant. Not because I haven’t been watching and thinking about films, but because I have a lack of confidence with what I have been putting online.

I have decided to rethink how I am approaching this website. People don’t really care about every movie I watch (to be honest, I don’t either), so I am going to discontinue the “Recently Watched” entry at the top of the page.

I am also going to change how I write my reviews and how I decide which film to review. I plan to find a way to distinguish this website from the sea of similar ones.

With LCD’s help, a design face-lift will be coming soon. But more importantly, we are hoping the content will make you want to revisit more and more.

UPDATE: I have decided I will mostly do two types of posts for this site. Film reviews will be the main posts. These reviews will be much shorter than I used to write. No one wants to read 500 words on most films.

To compensate I will rate films with a letter grade and for fun each film will get an award of my choosing. I hope to make these insightful and interesting and post them much more often.

At the end of the year I will collect all of the awards from that years films, adding a few more, and post the results in our yearly award show.

The second type of posts will be essays. These will be more detailed in-depth discussions of various film-related topics. They may cover one film, or many, or something else entirely. Those will be posted less frequently, but I hope to keep the content very memorable.

I don’t want to wait for LCD’s redesign, which I am sure is forthcoming, so I am going to start this change today with the above post for the last film I watched.

Enjoy!

Kick-Ass - Even better the second time!
Death at a Funeral - The original one. It’s funny, because it sets a foundation of reality and slowly gets crazier and crazier.
Kick-Ass - Well paced, full of action, comedy and charm. A lot of fun. More»

Bryan Singer, USA, 1995, 106 min.

The story involves a group of criminals brought in for questioning regarding the robbery of a truck full of weapons. The cops can’t pin it on any of them, but this fortuitous meeting brings about a string of prosperous jobs for the group.

On their way up they seem to have warranted the attention of an almost mythical crime lord who makes them do a dangerous job for a potentially grand pay-out. We see in the opening scene that this does not go very well.

Most of the film is told by the last surviving member of the group, a low-life cripple con-man played by Kevin Spacey. The story of what happens to everyone else he tells to the cops, who think they have figured out the case.

This film is like a magic trick. It is designed to deceive. What we think is happening, may not be the truth. When the end of the film comes along, we find out what really has been going on and realize that we have been fooled.

99% of the film is flim-flam. Sleight of hand. And like the lead-up to the magic trick, it is purely there to make the audience think of something else so the ending will come as a surprise, and when it is over, is instantly forgotten.

The film is a below-the-belt cheap trick. Without any real substance or style, the whole thing just doesn’t feel worthwhile. If you take away the twist ending, is there anything left? Not really.

In no particular order:

• Pomp, circumstance and fashion are lost on me. I’m just here for the movies, dammit! Ebert derisively put it best in his live twitter:

“They pose the actresses in their gowns, ask them to pose, and let the camera lick them from toe to head.”

• I don’t pretend to understand cinematography (anyone who has seen my films can attest to that), but does lighting generated on a computer count? I’m surprised Avatar won.

• 10 Best Pictures? Including more films makes the category less important.

• Sandra Bullock did a decent and forgettable job in The Blind Side. She didn’t deserve the Oscar but she seems nice and had a good speech so good for her.

• The White Ribbon, my vote for best film of the year, did not win Best Foreign Language Film. I’m ashamed that was the only one I saw in that category.

• Pixar has done no wrong in the past few years, and the Academy has thankfully recognized that.

• Bigelow wins for best director! The Hurt Locker was directly very well, and she deserves recognition, but in my mind more for Point Break and Strange Days then for her most recent film.

• District 9 did not deserve any nominations, let along Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay? I don’t care what LCD says.

• I was voting for Carey Mulligan. Her performance was subtle and true.

• I happened to catch all of the 10 Best Picture Nominees and I give them a 60/40 good to bad ratio. The best of the lot was A Serious Man, which I saw too late to put on my Top 10 of the Year.

• I don’t really like John Hughes.

• If the Academy allows Foreign Language Films and Animated Features to be nominated for best picture, they are logically saying that all the Best Picture Nominees are better than all of the nominees from those other categories. That is why I don’t like the Oscars.