This one’s for my fellow cinephiles. If you haven’t seen STOKER, you must. Beautiful, riveting, and twisted is only the beginning. The score is amazing, too, and I’m especially grateful for the introduction to Emily Wells, whose song BECOMES THE COLOR brings the film to a perfect close.
This week’s Movie Monday features Warrior, an amazing film from 2011 starring Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as estranged brothers who face off in an MMA championship match.
Now anyone who knows me knows I’m not a sports fan. I’ve tried. I watched my boys play baseball (and watched baseball games with them) and soccer, learned to play golf so I could play with my ex-husband, and attended every one of Caroline’s softball games
And while I love watching my kids do anything – the sport itself? Not so much.
But sports movies are an exception when the character development and human interest part of the story is powerful. Examples for me are The Blind Side (aside from the fact that I spent the whole movie stifling sobs), Invictus, Miracle, and now, this one.
The thing I loved most about this movie was how well it avoided overused tropes of the genre. There was so much depth to the characters and so many gray areas, you never really knew who you were rooting for.
Kind of like life.
It also featured some truly incredible acting on the part of Edgerton, Hardy (who is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors), and Nick Nolte.
But the coup de grace for this movie was the final scene, to my mind one of the most powerful final scenes in any movie. I’ve posted it below the trailer, but if you’re planning on watching the movie (it’s currently streaming on Netflix), don’t spoil it for yourself!
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Watched this great little Indie, LIKE CRAZY, over the weekend and absolutely loved it. It’s a quiet film with a great story, fantastic acting Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones, and Jennifer Lawrence are all fabulous), and something to say about how much we change as we move trough life and how very hard it can be to hold onto even those we love most.
Highly recommend if you get the chance to watch it (Redbox has it right now). It’s my pick for this week’s Movie Monday!
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This past week I watched three movies. The first was The Debt, featuring Helen Mirren, Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, and Tom Wilkinson. This is a great movie set in the 1960s (through flashbacks) and today. It centers around three secret Mossad agents trying to abduct a known Nazi war criminal for the purposes of bringing him back to Israel for trial. When the mission goes awry, the trio make a decision that will alter the course of their lives and ultimately, mean a debt that must be repaid. I loved the coloring of the 1960s scenes and the acting was stellar. Mirren just gets better and better and Jessica Chastain (Tree of Life) is fast becoming one of my new favorites.
On Saturday, we re-watched I Am Legend, which I originally saw in the theater right after it was released. I forget how awesome this movie is, but it was at the front of the current Dystopian trend (and if you want to see the original, see the 1971 film Omega Man). This is a winner all-around – great acting by Will Smith, an of-the-moment premise, and a great score by James Newton Howard.
Lastly, we opted out of our usual Sunday documentary because after a pipe burst in our basement (and after spending all day Sunday dealing with it), frankly, I’d had enough reality. Instead, we opted to watch a quirky independent comedy called Jack Goes Boating. Phillip Seymour Hoffman both stars and directs, and while this wasn’t an edge of your seat movie, it’s a sweet story about love later in life – both finding it and losing it. It’s streaming on Netflix, too!
I have a confession to make; The pressure of Mystery Monday finally got to me!
It’s not that the world isn’t full of mysteries. It is! It’s just that I’d wait until the minute to choose a topic and inevitably stress myself out hunting for a subject, link, etc.
So I decided to make a change with the new year. I’ll still do Mystery Monday from time to time when I have one, but when I don’t, we’ll talk about movies, because as you all know, I ADORE movies. Between DVDs and streaming, I watch at least two a week, which should give us plenty to talk about.
Let’s start with David Lynch’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I say “David Lynch’s” because a Swedish version was made first, and I have to say, I LOVED it. It was dark and brutal and the scenery was gorgeous. Plus, it’s interesting how the actors they chose (all of whom did an amazing job) didn’t have the slick, homogeneous beauty of American actors. I liked that about it!
David Lynch’s version was different – slicker, a little more subtle, and definitely Americanized – but I still enjoyed it. If you haven’t read the books I should tell you that it’s not for the faint of heart. This is a graphic mystery/thriller about men who hate women (so much so that that was the original title of the first book in Larssen’s Millennium Trilogy), a damaged, badass woman who takes matters into her own hands, and a man who loves women and fights to see that they get justice.
The casting was dead on with Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Slander and Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist and while the score (done by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails) was, in my opinion, too generic for such an intense story, the overall film held it’s own with the Swedish version.
On another note, if you haven’t read the book and like this kind of thing, you should. It’s an incredible trilogy.
Here’s the trailer;