Tag: movies

After a nice week­end in Barcelona I sat down togeth­er with my bet­ter half to watch X‑Men 3, which was final­ly released on DVD. My over­all impres­sion: anoth­er kick-ass super­hero movie and a wor­thy series finale (I do hope they real­ly stop). Some minor gripes: there were quite a few new char­ac­ters (which is good) but they did­n’t get enough time to build into full-fledged per­son­al­i­ties. Most notably Archangel. I also felt the movie start­ed to buck­le under the weight of the huge epic action sequences by the end. I pre­fer small­er scale bat­tles like we had in the first two movies, where you can clear­ly see the indi­vid­ual mutants use their pow­ers (a huge part of the fun of these kinds of movies). All in all: recommended.

This film pro­vid­ed what I expect­ed of it: a typ­i­cal apa­thet­ic look­ing Bill Mur­ray who finds him­self in var­i­ous bizarre sit­u­a­tions. The film seems to be about noth­ing, and lead nowhere, but in the end you find it under your skin, some of its images lin­ger­ing. I par­tic­u­lar­ly like the way in which the set­up (Mur­ray as John­ston receives a let­ter from an unknown ex-part­ner) has you con­stant­ly look­ing for clues as to who of the four women is the moth­er of John­ston’s alleged son. It plays on and por­trays the way the human brain des­per­ate­ly looks for pat­terns in ran­dom phe­nom­e­na — any­thing pink is loaded with sig­nif­i­cance, just because the ini­tial let­ter is pink. Recommended.

(Also, the jazzy, “Ethiopi­an” music is very nice as well.)

I final­ly got around to watch­ing Crash on DVD yes­ter­day evening and I must say it’s one of the best things I’ve seen in quite a while. The sto­ry revolves around a large group of seem­ing­ly uncon­nect­ed char­ac­ters whose lives get inter­twined through a series of car crash­es. Mag­no­lia did this before expert­ly, this film does it even bet­ter per­haps – nev­er giv­ing you the feel­ing the run-ins between peo­ple are forced. The dri­ving force and main sub­ject of the film is racism, I’ve hard­ly ever seen the top­ic han­dled so thought­ful­ly. There’s a lot of ambi­gu­i­ty, no clear-cut good or bad guys and as a watch­er you’re forced to con­stant­ly re-exam­ine your pre­con­cep­tions about the char­ac­ters. In short – huge­ly enjoyable!