DVD catchup
B. has gone off to the moovies to see Harry Potter 7.5. Here's what I've seen lately at home:
Unknown. Liam Neeson plays the Harrison Ford role, as a man who wakes up one day to discover that he does not exist. Hasn't that happened to everyone? It's a great premise, and it was a great premise when Philip K. Dick used it several decades ago. But even Philip K. Dick couldn't come up with a good resolution of that plot, and this movie does no better. In fact, the eventual explanation of this one is so all-encompassingly stupid that only a movie screenwriter could have thought of it.
Supporting cast: January Jones of Mad Men plays the woman who may or may not be his wife. Either way, she can't act much. Frank Langella tries to be soft-spoken, but he doesn't fool anybody. Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in all those "Hitler Rants" videos, plays a retired East German spy who doesn't know that cyanide will degrade if you keep it for years unsealed in a coffee can. Fortunately for the plot, the cyanide doesn't know it either.
Black Swan. Natalie Portman, proving that she can indeed act (years of Star Wars films had left that seriously in doubt), plays a ballerina who cracks up after she lands the big role. It could equally well be described as the story of a woman who finds her passion when she learns to masturbate. I agree with this guy: this is nothing but a 1970s psycho-thriller with better production values and an inflated sense of self-importance from its high-art setting. You won't actually learn anything about ballet, at least anything both accurate and worth knowing, from this film either.
Supporting cast: Barbara Hershey channels Joan Crawford as the creepy mother. Mila Kunis plays a ballerina with a big honking tattoo on her back: would she really? Vincent Cassel, who voiced the arrogant French bandit M. Hood in Shrek, plays an equally arrogant French ballet master here. I kept waiting for Princess Fiona to come back and kick him in the head again. And I'm still trying to get used to the idea of casting Winona Ryder as an aging bitch, OK?
Unknown. Liam Neeson plays the Harrison Ford role, as a man who wakes up one day to discover that he does not exist. Hasn't that happened to everyone? It's a great premise, and it was a great premise when Philip K. Dick used it several decades ago. But even Philip K. Dick couldn't come up with a good resolution of that plot, and this movie does no better. In fact, the eventual explanation of this one is so all-encompassingly stupid that only a movie screenwriter could have thought of it.
Supporting cast: January Jones of Mad Men plays the woman who may or may not be his wife. Either way, she can't act much. Frank Langella tries to be soft-spoken, but he doesn't fool anybody. Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in all those "Hitler Rants" videos, plays a retired East German spy who doesn't know that cyanide will degrade if you keep it for years unsealed in a coffee can. Fortunately for the plot, the cyanide doesn't know it either.
Black Swan. Natalie Portman, proving that she can indeed act (years of Star Wars films had left that seriously in doubt), plays a ballerina who cracks up after she lands the big role. It could equally well be described as the story of a woman who finds her passion when she learns to masturbate. I agree with this guy: this is nothing but a 1970s psycho-thriller with better production values and an inflated sense of self-importance from its high-art setting. You won't actually learn anything about ballet, at least anything both accurate and worth knowing, from this film either.
Supporting cast: Barbara Hershey channels Joan Crawford as the creepy mother. Mila Kunis plays a ballerina with a big honking tattoo on her back: would she really? Vincent Cassel, who voiced the arrogant French bandit M. Hood in Shrek, plays an equally arrogant French ballet master here. I kept waiting for Princess Fiona to come back and kick him in the head again. And I'm still trying to get used to the idea of casting Winona Ryder as an aging bitch, OK?