“You were gonna kill me?”
“You were gonna kill yourself!”
”... I’m allowed!”

The thing that shocked me most about this after all I’d heard about it is despite, yes, it’s full of swears and violence etc … how genuinely warm it is. By the time the climax comes, though these characters are tremendously flawed and potty-mouthed, you really feel what they’re going through as they get their come-uppance etc in the end. Again there’s quite a Grosse Pointe Blank-y vibe to this movie, the juxtaposition of the violence there with the small town, here with the tourist spot, and the awkward relationship between two hitmen. It’s easily the best film I’ve seen so far this year, Carter Burwell’s score is typically gorgeous, and Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are perhaps the best they’ve ever been. (Incidentally sorry for the short and scattered reviews this week: Second Life and new Mac have taken precedence lol)

This will most certainly require a second viewing some time because I definitely think I like it but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what it was all about. There’s something Wag the Dog-ish about it, something massively Grosse Pointe Blank ish about it too, and not just due to the presence of two Cusacks and Dan Aykroyd. Let it be said that any movie starring John and Joan pretty much has me at hello anyway. Hilary Duff is surprisingly watchable here too, I didn’t even recognise her at first. It’s very weird, very varied, and at times very funny. Like I say I can’t wait to see it again.

Much as I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (I haven’t yet seen The Science of Sleep), this is yet another 2008 release I wasn’t overly excited about seeing – as expected, I’ve somehow despite really not watching that many movie and chat shows etc (honest!) managed to see most of it in clip or trailer form. It’s very contrived about getting to its gimmick – Mos Def and Jack Black recreating movies on less than a shoestring budget, though you probably know that already – and though it does attempt to touch on something more than than the humour that comes from that (it’s kind of a microcosm of Hollywood or any movie/entertainment industry, it’s successful, business rears its head, and ultimately originality is spawned etc) ... I couldn’t help in the end but think of how much I’d prefer to be watching the far better (in humour and emotion) Bowfinger or the cosy Nickelodeon.

That said, considering the awfulness we’ve had to endure elsewhere so far this year (though this is by no means an excuse for anything) it’s not bad ...

Hmm … I had a feeling this would leave me with little to say and I’m sad to say I was right. While Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine are perfectly fine here and the script gave me a few through the nose sniggers, I couldn’t help but find myself wondering where the classic status comes from. It seems to me the movie is 2 hours of a man finally telling a bunch of bullies to step off, with a little suicide in the last third. I’d seen the champagne scene before, of course, and again, though it’s clever, I never before saw it as heartstoppingly powerful as others seemed to, and I can’t say having seen the whole production that I’m any wiser. I guess it’s one of those that’s simply not for me.

Yeh, I hadn’t seen this yet, so sue me And I really have no excuse – never mind that it’s one of those movies that “everyone” has seen … I’d forgotten that it also marked the debut of Gaby Hoffmann, in what would prove ultimately to be one of her biggest parts. Even the fact that this is technically a sports movie shouldn’t have deterred me from watching it so long.

Anyway, as to the sports part – I seem to recall a lot of those “what’s the best sports movie?” type polls listing this high if not at the top, in some cases exactly because it’s not all about the sport (Jerry Maguire is the same). There’s a weird moment where the screenwriter seems to make a case for it being so, when Liotta I think talks about it being all about the game, that baseball is America etc (ah, thank you IMDb: it’s James Earl Jones who says, “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”); but it doesn’t really work and the movie is best as a metaphor for a lot of things rather than specifically America “learning to think for itself again”.

Mostly, though, to my pleasant surprise, I found it one of the funniest movies I’ve seen – I laugh too little sometimes in movies but this one really tickled my funny bone the right way. I love Amy Madigan’s reaction to her husband basically going crazy, lol, it’s so atypical of this kind of story. There’s a corny scene where she basically tells him, “go with it if it’s what you really feel you need to do,” etc, but after that, her face is just a wonder as she takes all the strange goings on with this, “sure that makes sense” bemusement. I love when she turns a whole community meeting around to being against censorship early on in the movie, rushing out into the hallway energised giggling, “It’s like the Sixties again!” which connects to a moment with the similarly exuberant James Earl Jones, when he first meets Costner and says with mock enthusiasm, “You’re from the Sixties!” then proceeds to chase him out the room with an ancient bug sprayer yelling, “Go back where you came from!” LOL.

If there’s one moment it really falls down it’s the moment where Hoffmann gets caught in a tussle between Costner and his brother-in-law and is literally dropped off the back of the bleachers, lol. It shouldn’t be funny, but frankly it is, and it’s such an awful set-up for the plot-point that follows that it threatens to magnify and highlight all the other contrivances of the screenplay that would otherwise be completely excusable.

Overall, however, it’s as wonderful as I’d heard; moreso, in fact, for the humour. It bears that rare wonder, a James Horner score that doesn’t sound like a James Horner score, Hoffmann is adorable, and James Earl Jones and Amy Madigan are simply priceless.

The adventures of a girl and her horse? Initiate biased mode

” ... when we’re riding, all I feel is free …”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this production (outside of the bizarre boycotting story concerning apparent animal cruelty on the set? I’ll just leave that one alone …) is that 3 years after her scarily convincing performance as a teenager in Matchstick Men, Alison Lohman was still playing 10 years younger than her actual age, and again rather convincingly, lol.

That quote above pretty much sums it up for me, though. When they’re riding – whether she’s on the horse or it’s just Spirit style aerial shots of wild mustangs galloping across the plains to the main theme music – this movie cannot fail to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. It absolutely has the gorgeous moments I want from such a movie. Outside of those moments … not so much. The score definitely owes something to Hans Zimmer’s work on Spirit (to be fair I think it would be hard for any composer to write anything different to horses running after seeing that movie) but outside of the main theme it’s pretty simple melodramatic stuff, as is the story.

Lohman is great – though I’d certainly prefer to see a younger, more age appropriate newcomer given a chance, if they really needed the extra hours on the set then Lohman is probably the best choice there is, and she’s the best thing in the movie. For her and the horses it’s nearly worth watching. And you can’t really argue with a movie whose end credits consist of a sickeningly sweet barrage of pictures of (presumably) real little girls and their horses accompanied to the cheesy but irresistible Tim McGraw song “My Little Girl”, lol. But for all other purposes, I absolutely recommend Spirit. Even if you’ve already seen that movie … see it a fifteenth time, lol, you know you want to It’s that or International Velvet. Or Dreamer. Okay there are lots of them, make a day of it hehe.

Edit: I just realised I forgot to even mention that the movie is directed by none other than Michael Mayer, who made one of my (and I think nobody else’s lol) all-time faves A Home at the End of the World. It was one of the first things I noticed in the credits that really got me more excited than just over the girl-horse thing. I guess that I forgot to even mention it speaks volumes of what a disappointment it ultimately was. While I’m adding to the review, I’ve also gotta say – gorgeous poster ... I really I hope I can find a copy of it sometime.

Yikes. I thought this would turn out to be the best of the three movies I watched last night, I love Rebecca Miller’s Angela which I mentioned in the Ripe review, I must watch that again and review it some time – but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I normally love this kind of thing – Nine Lives springs to mind, obviously Short Cuts ... I love strong independent female characters like this, and I love all three of the actresses playing the parts. Even the Little Children style voiceover didn’t bug me so much at the start, in retrospect because I figured it was going to be a Little Children style voiceover.

Well, let’s focus on the voiceover. It basically ruins the movie and is best summarised by one of the lines in it at the end following Fairuza Balk’s character spotting cuts and bruises on the arm of a hitchhiker she picked up – “She saw the edge of a wound, bruises …” he says … yes, thank you, we just saw that. It just bugged the hell out of me all the way and that was the last straw. I’ve read a couple of reviews, including Roger Ebert’s, that singles out the Balk story as the most engaging, and it’s true, but honestly even there I just wasn’t grabbed by this movie at all as much as I expected to be. The subtitle reads “Three Portraits” and I’d honestly rather see three beautiful photographs of the actresses – or even blown up stills from the movie, they all certainly have their standalone moments – hanging on the wall of an art gallery. The 90 minute blessing really doesn’t apply here, I’m afraid.

From giggly teens to a sultry (hey, not my word, it’s on the DVD cover! lol) barely-teen … I’ll admit, sometimes I have to be fairly predictable to get myself back in the movie-watching habit. This movie is gorgeous from the get go, cooling water you can practically feel on your skin in every scene, and I fall for New Zealand accents even when they don’t belong to a pair of eyes like those on Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki, who pretty much carries the movie on her own. Again it’s a 90 minute wonder, and it has a wonderful soundtrack, most if not all of it by Neil Finn, I didn’t realise until I saw his name in the end credits, all I knew was I was loving it.

It’s fairly uneventful and ultimately fairly predictable – though there is a great twist on the old, “older guy with a camera alone in the woods with an underage girl” scene while the slightly disappointing bulk of the ending transpires in the background. It’s another movie I don’t imagine falling over myself to see again, but for Wierzbicki it’s more than worth the time.