Change Your Image
nicholasrains
Reviews
Ready Player One (2018)
The remake can't come soon enough
The two good things about the book are the concept and the plot, and the movie has neither. It does have good performances from the leads, even if some of the character development abandons the source material in disappointing and presumably unnecessary ways-and it is slightly fun to watch if you forget what you should be watching and focus on the pretty lights. In the book, the story is driven by visual detail that celebrates a distinctive period in pop culture that was largely defined by the director; it was ready made to be turned into a movie that should and easily could have been far better than the book. What a sorry twist that such a poorly written book was turned into such a poorly directed movie. Maybe the licensing was just that impossible? Maybe they didn't realize there was an audience for the story in the book? Maybe another iconic eighties director can give it a shot in a few years?
Fishing with Gandhi (1998)
Hysterical, bizarre
In spite of its rather poor sound quality, this is one of the funniest films i've seen (~45 times). Borrowing some character and plot elements from Hamlet, and adding a few of its own, Fishing With Gandhi explores the farcical reality of coming to grips with grief and the failures of language in dealing with difficult emotions. The dialogue is intense and often outrageously funny (note, for example, the twins' memorable discussion of "electrical heart explosions"), and the characterizations weirdly familiar. Granted, due to the poor sound quality it took me ~10 viewings to figure out exactly what was going on - but that's really part of the joy of this film: every viewing offers new discoveries, most of them hysterical.