Critic's Corner

Monday, July 10, 2006

Darkness

I sat down to watch this film because so many people have told me how great it is. All that I can say is "meh." It was certainly clever, slow in the beginning, a bit predictable, but overall okay. There were no "AHA!" moments when you realize who the characters are... anyone who considers themselves a suspense movie fan could see it coming a mile away.

For those of you who will never see it, it's a movie about a family who moves into a house in Madrid, Spain (by the way, nobody speaks Spanish in the entire movie) The little boy is all of a sudden afraid of the dark because it eats his colored pencils. The mother is a nurse and the grandfather is a doctor, the father has PTSD but they call it something else. Anna Paquin doesn't want to live there and wants to go back to the states but apparently she stays because her little brother means so much to her... everything in the movie seems so convenient. A father who is psychotic and has to have his throat cut by a loved one to release the evil in the house... his daughter finds out and it just so happens that the father chokes and the daughter has to do a tracheotomy... while the mother tells her how to do it. It's all a little contrived, to be quite honest.

Then the ending was a bit abrupt, which didn't seem to flow with the story at all. The story was long and drawn out and then poof! it's over.

It just kind of left me flat. I didn't hate it, I didn't love it. It was really just okay.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Schindler's List

http://theafibest100.blogspot.com/2005/12/9-schindlers-list-1993.html

Failure to Launch

This was a cute movie. Cute. Nothing more, nothing less. It was your typical romantic comedy: boy meets girl and falls in love; he finds out she's a liar and they break up; she changes her life, he forgives her, they get back together. The End. It really was nothing spectacular.

I am an animal lover, but the "peaceful animals attacking" was a total waste, in my opinion. There had to be a better way to show that "Nature was upset" with Tripp. A lizard giggling? Give me a break. I understand you want to show something funny, but these sophomoric storylines are better suited for a tongue-in-cheek comedy the likes of Happy Gilmore or Billy Madison.

But the premise of the movie was pretty cute. Sarah Jessica Parker was okay... Matthew McConaughey was the same as he always is. I like both of them. Zooey Deschanel was okay but she's done better, like in Elf and The Good Girl. Overall, it was just an okay movie.