Where do I start (I am a little out of practice in writing reviews, sorry for being gone for so long). I really liked this movie so much. It’s about Frida Kahlo, from when she was a student and got into a really bad accident, to when she dies when she’s 47. She was a painter who lived in the 1920s in Mexico City, Mexico and was married to Diego Rivera, another painter. The movie was directed by Julie Taymor, who I really like too. It had a lot of guest stars like Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton, Ashley Judd, and Alfred Molina. The soundtrack was incredible and  had people on it like Chavela Vargas, who was close to the real Frida Kahlo when she was still alive.

The accident that Frida gets into happens on a trolley car. It crashes which breaks her spine and breaks her legs and makes it so she can’t have children. Her family doesn’t think she will ever walk again. Because she is in bed recovering, she starts painting. Then, she starts to get some paintings together and takes them to for Diego Rivera to see. Rivera was the most famous painter of that time, and he had a lot of influence. He was also a communist and he’d been married twice and had lots of affairs.

They fall in love, and get married. They have a really interesting life. They travelled all over the place like New York and Paris. They paint a lot together, and apart. They also They both have a lot of affairs with other people on the side, too. This means that they break up, for example Diego had an affair with Frida’s sister and that made them divorce. They also let Trotsky stay with them when he is on the run from Stalin.

Throughout the whole movie, Frida is sick. She gets sicker and sicker, and finally has to stay in bed all the time. I think the main point I got from this movie is that just because you maybe have an accident, that is not an excuse not to live a really interesting and full life. If Frida can live like this from her bed, we can all decide to have lives that are worth the time.

-Plum

picture from lovefilm.com

I really really loved this film; it’s about how hard it is to grow up, and about how much harder growing up is when you can’t really express yourself and you’re living in a tough neighbourhood. It reminds me of another movie called This is England that I wrote about, because it seems like there are a lot of films out there by young directors about growing up in the 80s and showing what it was like to be a young man then based on themselves.The director’s name was Dito Montiel, and he wrote a book about his life that has the same name, and he made it into a movie. The actors that play him in this movie are Robert Downey Jr. as as man and Shia LeBoef as a teenager.

This movie is about a group of teenagers that are growing up in NYC in the 80s. The 80s in New York were pretty rough, most people think, because there was a lot of things going on in the city that were hard to deal with. There was crime, and some of the kids had abusive parents, and some of them had parents that weren’t really involved in their lives or couldn’t really help their kid because they were going through a lot of stuff themselves.

At the beginning of the movie, Dito was hanging out with a group of friends that were really negative.  He had friends who are interested in just getting girls and fighting and hanging out. A typical Friday night for them would be for one of them to throw knives at their girlfriends. This was the only life Dito knew and it was really interesting because he didn’t really like it but he didn’t know there was  anything else.

Then, Dito met a new kid at school. It was a Scottish kid named Mike who had just moved to NYC. The kid had a dog walking job and Dito went along. His friend Mike also had lots of ideas about things they could do, or fun ways to spend their time, or ways to learn, or ways to do more stuff. So, Dito started hanging out with Mike more and getting influenced by his positivity. Mike had seen more of the world and he knew that the only thing in the world wasn’t the Bronx.

As the movie goes on, things started getting worse and worse. One of his friends was hit by a train and killed when he was just playing around. Dito also had this guy who kept threatening to beat him up and kill him because of little things, so he was really nervous. I don’t want to say too much, but things get really bad for Dito, and he doesn’t seem to be able to get a lot of information on why, or what it’s all for. He decides he wants to leave his old life behind, cause it’s full of pain.

So, Dito decides he wants to go to California. He says he’s had enough of New York cause he can’t breathe amd everything goes wrong. So he leaves and doesn’t come back. And the movie is about him looking back on that time in his life.

I don’t know why the movie is called A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, but it’s probably the best movie I have seen in 2010.

-Plum

picture from novaczik on picasaweb

I saw this movie before I saw Slumdog Millionnaire and it ruined Slumdog for me. I think Slumdog is a cheap ripoff of Salaam Bombay, which is a movie that has real taste and characters that are human and have depth to them.

It’s a movie about street kids in Bombay. It starts with a little boy named Krishna. He does something wrong so his mother tells him he has to work at the circus in order to pay for it and he can’t come home until he does. So then he works at the circus but one day his boss sends him out on an errand and when he comes back the entire circus has left without him. So he is all alone.

So then, Krishna decides to go to Bombay and work so he can get enough money to go back to his mum. He makes some friends with street kids like Manju and a drug addict named Chillum. He also falls in love with a girl named Sola Saal who he wants to save from becoming a prostitute. He does some bad things like robbing and old man and setting things on fire, and he has bad things done to him, like being robbed and treated badly in his chai tea delivery job. He keeps hoping to get back to his mother the whole movie so he can go back to his little village.

I liked this movie because the kids in it were real children who had been through difficult things, like in the Brazilian movie Pixote, which was made in 1981. I really like movies about street kids. It’s like these kids didn’t have anything to do with getting where they are but they have so many problems to deal with. Movies like this make me feel very lucky and they also make me want to do more to help street kids who aren’t as lucky as me.

-Plum

Thank you.
Plum

This film was directed by Frederico Fellini and made in 1960. I really liked it and after I watched the film I watched the director’s cut and I read an article on it. The film is the very first film that has the paparazzi as a main character in the film. The main character is a reporter for a tabloid newspaper, and so he is one of the paparazzi. His name is Marcello.

The film has a structure that is made up of seven episodes. Each episode lasts for about a night. The episodes start at night and end in the morning, and in each episode the main character Marcello has a problem that may or may not be resolved in the morning. Some examples of these episodes are:

1. Marcello goes out with this rich aristocrat woman and then comes home the next morning and his fiancee has tried to kill herself and he has to take her to the hospital.
2. Marcello goes out walking around with a movie star named Sylvie and he tries to make her like him but then the next morning her fiancee tries to beat him up when he takes her back to her hotel.
3. Marcello goes out with his father to a club and and they hang out then his father leaves to go home the next morning.

One thing that I tried to make sense of was the ending of the movie. In a lot of movies, things are said that are really important at the end, or the main problem in the movie has been solved. First, it’s hard to tell if this is really the end of the film because you never know if the episodes were shown in order or not, so that is something to think about. But let me tell you what the movie’s ending was. In the end, there was a really big party that got kind of crazy and in the morning, everyone who was still awake goes down to the beach. They see this really big dead fish on the beach that looks prehistoric, and it is dead. No one has ever seen anything like that before. Then, Marcello sees a girl that was his waitress before, and she is further down the beach. She tries to tell him something, but he says he can’t hear her and goes back with the people who are having the wild party.

When I watched the director’s cut, the film critic that was talking over the movie said that this meant that Marcello was seeing a vision of Christianity that was dead, which was represented by the fish. Then, he said that Marcello saw the young girl who was his salvation but he doesn’t listen to it and because of that, he stays lost.

I think thats a really interesting way to think about the movie, because all of the different episodes that they show in the night time basically have people doing whatever they want and they don’ t always do what they think is right, for example Marcello is always cheating on his fiancee with other women. So, you could say that the director Fellini is showing how no one in that time had any morals.

I would definitely recommend this film because it is supposed to be one of the best films ever made.

-Plum

picture from passionforcinema.com

I watched this movie last week and it was pretty good. It is based on the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and it is starring Robert Redford who started the Sundance Film Festival which i hope to go to one day.

Jay Gatsby was a really rich gentleman. He had all these grand parties and he was really mysterious– no one knew who he really was and what he was really like. People were a little scared of him but they came to his parties because he was rich and they had a great time.

Then you learned his history during the movie.  Basically when he was young, there was a really rich woman named Daisy and she was in love with Gatsby but she couldnt marry him because he was poor. So he went away to the war and he said that she should wait for him cause he would make things alright. But then, she went ahead and married a really rich guy.

I didnt really understand this film very much, I guess because I have never been in love and I can’t imagine doing that for another person, or why he was so mysterious. I thought it was shot really well though. I really liked the scenes with the parties because they just really showed how out of control the people got and they got the mood of things; the parties almost seemed like they werent fun because they were so crazy. I would recommend this movie probably for older people. I dont think teenagers or children would neccessarily be able to understand it.

-Plum

picture from movieberry.com

I really loved this movie, and I’ll tell you why. It follows a guy who does whatever he needs to do to follow his dreams. People tell him he can’t and that he’s not perfect or he doesn’t have the potential to do what he wants to do, and he just does it anyways.

It is starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman and Jude Law. They’re members of this futuristic world where everyone’s genes have been chosen for them before they are even born. Some people’s parents have the money to make perfect kids with their doctors, and some parents don’t. People who don’t have perfect genes are discriminated against, like how today there is racism or xenophobia. Ethan Hawke is named Vincent, and he has always dreamed of being an astronaut at the space station called Gattaca. He can’t get in even though he works very hard because he wasn’t born perfect. He has a high percentage of risk for heart problems and no one would take that risk on training him if he was going to have health problems.

So, he becomes a “borrowed ladder.”  He takes on the genetic identity of another person who has a perfect genome. That person is played by Jude Law and his name is Jerome Morrow. So, Jerome gives Vincent samples of his blood, fingerprints, urine, hair, skin, and everything Vincent needs to pass substance tests and to make people think he is Jerome Morrow. Then, when he has someone else’s genes, he can use his own brain and talent to move up and follow his dreams.

But that’s just the beginning of the movie. The movie is about how Vincent almost loses his dream of going on a mission in space because the police think he has committed a crime. And also he falls in love with Uma Thurman, so there is a lot of drama that he has to go through but he has to stay focused on his dream and make it a reality.

I like to watch this movie whenever I get discouraged about something, because it helps me to see that you really can do whatever you want to do, if you just work hard enough and stay focused on what you’re doing. My favorite quote of the movie is:

Director Josef: “We have to ensure that people are meeting their potential.”
Investigator: “Not exceeding it?”
Director Josef: “No one exceeds his potential.”
Investigator: “If he did?”
Director Josef: “It means that we did not accurately guage his potential in the first place.”

It’s something we should all think about.

-Plum

picture from extraneousflickassery.files.wordpress.com

I loved this film — It’s the best British film I’ve seen in a long time.  It follows a young boy named Shaun (who is a lot like the director Shane Meadows) in the 80s in England who is trying to find himself and fit in, and he somehow gets into situations and hangs out with people that are a bit older and more complicated than he should be involved in.

The movie begins with Shaun getting teased for how he dresses and getting into a fight becuase someone makes fun of his dead father who died in the war. On his way home, he meets some friendly skinheads that make him feel like he’s a part of something. He has fun with them, including getting to date a girl, dressing cool, hanging out and fitting in. He gets to finally have some good experiences.

Through his friends, Shaun meets more skinheads, and they turn out to be very different from his first friends. They tell him that to make his dad proud, he should stand up for England by being racist and xenophobic. Somehow, through trying to make his dad proud of him, Shaun gets involved in hate crimes, violence and hatred.

I think that it’s interesting that all Shaun wanted was to feel like he belonged and he was sad because he lost his father and he was trying to deal with it. I think it’s interesting, and it kind of reminds me of Tyson– how young men get involved in activities to try and deal with their hurt and pain and somehow it can go wrong when they were just trying to feel better and a part of something and feel loved. I definitely recommend the movie. The song at the beginning of this post is a great song from the soundtrack; it’s the song Louis Louis by Toots and The Maytals.

-Plum

I figure I should do what everyone does who has a movie blog and review Avatar. The reason I want to review it is because I think it is actually a really good movie.

Of course, the main thing about this film is the technology. I was watching some interivews online, and the actor Laz Alonso, who played a Na’avi warrior, said that there were 197 cameras filming each scene, so the actors could mix in their performance with light and motion detectors, and then they could feed that into CGI and make them into aliens who move and talk and have the same facial expressions as the actors.  Hopefully if the movie is successful, it will be the first of a 3-D revolution that will change the way that we watch movies.

Everyone also says, and I think so too, that the story isn’t anything special. It’s basically like Pocohontas.  However, the acting is really great.  I feel like Zoe Saldana for example was completely in character and committed to her performance, and I appreciated that. Everyone was giving it their all, I felt.

If you want to know my recommendation, I would say watch the movie, but make sure that you have an open mind. A lot of people don’t like it beacuse they say it’s too simple and obvious.  I think if you’re making a movie with 200 cameras and all new technology, and you’re making a world that no one has ever seen before, you should make the story more simple so people can get used to it. Then, in the second and third movies, they can branch out even more in terms of the storyline.

-Plum

picture from northshoremovies.files.wordpress.com

This movie was about Mike Tyson’s life to try and get people to understand who he is. I think it’s a good lesson not to judge a person because you don’t know where their life has taken them and you don’t know how you would react if you were in their shoes.

The things that I had heard about Mike Tyson before the movie were:

1. He was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
2. He was married to Robin Givens who was an American actress and who he was abusive towards.
3. He bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear while he was boxing with him.
4. He was accused and convicted of raping a woman named Desiree Washington.

All these things make him seem like a really bad guy. I wasn’t sure if I would like the movie but I read a review of it on the website Sunset Gun, and I got really interested in the movie. There were a lot of things I didn’t know about his life though.  Here are some of those things:

1. He didn’t have a good relationship with either of his parents, which makes him very sad even now. His dad left the family when he was really small, and his mother died when he was only 16.
2. He started fighting because he kept being bullied.  He was always overweight and he had a high pitched voice as a little kid. His first fight was because he had lots of pet pigeons and some older boys were killing them in front of him. He just got really upset because they were pulling their heads off –  he went for it and won the fight.
3. He began boxing in a juvenile detention center that he was in because he was arrested over 30 times before he was 13.  His trainer said he wanted him to do something with his life, and he was Tyson’s hero and he said he’d do anything for him. All his old friends from when he was growing up are either dead, on drugs or in jail.

This just goes to show for me that you can never condemn someone outright, because you never know what their life story is, the things they’ve gone through, and the choices they’ve had to make.

-Plum

picture from collegian.psu.edu

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