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jenise-louise
Reviews
The Girl in the Café (2005)
Too naive
Sometimes naive works. That is, sometimes you can suspend disbelief and that's a good thing. In this film, you can't and it's not. Bill Nighy's nervous civil servant is just a little too afraid of his own shadow for a man so tall and handsome (let's face it, when you're that good looking, people don't leave you alone), and a little too naive for someone who is a valued adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Now I understand the kind of person who is overly 'trusting' or unworldly, but it stretched the limits of credulity for me that she would accompany him to Reykavijk and only at the hotel desk would he realize he didn't know her last name. The events of this film are supposed to have taken place within the last nine months--the Asian Tsunami gets mentioned--so how realistic is it in this post-9/11 world that for her to be on the private flight with him he would have had to have submitted her last name to someone, even if he'd not have asked for it on his own account? The film is full of small logic errors like that, enough to make you feel like a fool for cheering for the inevitable outcome.
Music from Another Room (1998)
Somewhere in this movie, there was a good story
But it didn't come out right. It's as if they started out to make a serious film and then handed it over to a Wes Anderson type at the last minute. Plot lines that start in a good direction turn unexpectedly goofy. And some side plots that are meant to add humor--Martha Plimpton and her gun, for instance--are simply annoying.
Jude Law plays a scrawny bakery delivery boy who doesn't know when to shut up, and Gretchen Mol is the uptight sophisticate of her family who is already engaged to a man who is perfect for her. He drives the right car and bails her family out financially--she needs those things. So when he wants to buy her a book for her birthday instead of a flowered knit cap--well, Gretchen's character isn't the flowered knit cap type, and all the romantic lecturing of Jude's character about the hat vs. the book, however right in theory, doesn't change that. The movie never satisfactorily established why Gretchen would fall for Jude--in fact, the scene (SPOILER ALERT) where Gretchen and Jude get together, and then the next day she can hardly look at him--that was true to character. What happened later was not.
The best and most believable characters in the film were the mother, well acted by Brenda Blethyn, and the blind sister (Meg Tilly) and her boyfriend, Jesus. I loved Jesus! One last comment--whoever chose the music for this film should be shot--there's one really bad top-40 pop song that cues in more than once when Jude and Gretchen go for the kiss, and it cheapens the scenes.
The Notebook (2004)
Amateurishly overwrought
I can't believe I lost two hours of my life to this film. I'll never get them back, oh woe.
Good acting by Rachel McAdams and whoever played the young Noah--I'll give them, Sam Shepard, the actress who played the character Martha Shaw, the old cars and oh gosh, the woman who played her mom--a well known and excellent actress--three stars. But the rest of the film was amateurishly overwrought, to quote myself, both in the use of music (ridiculously loud and swelling at the emotional trigger moments) and many of the lines, particularly those given the older couple. The war scenes were fake-looking and gratuitous. And finally, terrible casting of Jim Garner and Gena Rowlands -- SPOILER ALERT!!! -- there's no way these two could have ever been the younger two in their past lives, particularly Jim who's too Jim Garner to play anyone else but himself.