Today we were both busy watching 5 films together and I thought I'd review them because I have quite a few things to say on each.
A film I had wanted to watch for a long long time, which many cite as their favourite film of all time. To continue our journey through Christmas film, this James Stewart classic was a heartwarming and adorable story about a man contemplating suicide who is saved by an angel by showing him what life would have been like had he never existed. The biggest surprise for me was the amount of time of film devoted to George's life and the amount of time in his alternate reality - about 1 hour 50 minutes for the first act and 20 minutes for the second. Before viewing, I would have thought this would have been the other way round. However now I think the film works well like this and maybe only 15 minutes should have been taken from the first part of the film and given to the second part where the angel shows George the alternate reality. Brilliant performances from all the cast, even though I felt like James Stewart was too old for the role, especially in the scenes when we saw George in his late teens and 20s. However I also felt this with Stewart's role in Vertigo 11 years later. Extremely uplifting and enjoyable, this is a new potential favourite Christmas film for me and I'm sure I will watch it again next year. I can certainly see why many say this is their favourite film.
8/10
I don't want to write much about this because to be honest it's a load of rubbish. A typical 'lets get loads of famous people on board to hide the fact the script and story is utter shit' film (see Movie 43 and New Years Eve for more details), this film focuses on way too many stories at the same time, so much that hardly any of them develop and everything just seems to end without resolution. If 3 or 4 of the stories had been cut and more focus had been put on some of the stories I preferred (such as Liam Neeson's story and the two office workers who were in love, of which the female had a mentally ill brother), then maybe it would've gained a few more points. But its nothing new, another boring interlinking romcom that middle aged British women lapped up because of Hugh Grant, Colin Firth and the soundtrack. Think of a worse version of Valentines Day, set in England. It gets points for attempting to capture the spirit of Christmas and having certain funny moments, especially with Alan Rickman, Rowan Atkinson and Kris Marshall. If you want to see a good Richard Curtis film, then watch About Time instead.
4/10
This is a film that I bought Rosie for Christmas. We bought each other 4 DVD's, and this 90s horror was one of them. I came across this by accident (on an IMDb list I think) and the plot sounded very interesting. The story involves a priest who is investigating a statue of the Virgin Mary who is bleeding warm tears in Brazil and a girl who begins to show signs of the 'Stigmata' in the USA. After enjoying other religious based horror films such as The Exorcist, The Omen and Rosemary's Baby, I wondered what a more modern take would be.My expectations weren't that high to be frank. However this was surprisingly good. The acting may not be Oscar worthy, nor the directing for that matter, however the story and ideas and overall enjoyment of the film outweighs all of that. This is a horror film with real thought provoking deeper meanings, with ideas and themes of control, worship and the figure of the church.The film almost has an anti-Church message, suggesting that you don't need to worship and attend Church to be a devoted Christian but that Jesus is in all of us and you don't need to necessarily pray. The best thing about this film is that it is able to maintain a good story, at times almost turning into a drama film, while still containing very scary horror sequences. Extremely dated (at times it looked as if we were watching an awful music video from 1991), more so than films I have seen as early as the 50s, overall this was very enjoyable and had a lot more potential and I feel deserves a lot more recognition in a genre where original ideas are hard to find. If anyone reading this ever gets round to watching this by the way, I prefer the theatrical ending rather than the directors alternate ending.
7/10
Definitely the best film we watched all day and the best film we have watched for a while. A Danish film about retaliation, violence, forgiveness and the difficulties in childhood, this powerful drama has two complimenting stories - two children in a town in Denmark, one easily led, and one emotionally angry from the death of his mother, and one of those children's fathers who is working in a refugee camp in civil war torn Sudan. These two tales show the startling similarities between these supposedly different worlds. It's hard to put into words how good this film is and the things it made me consider. At times dark and at times liberating, a great cast and great director won this film countless awards when it was released in 2010. Danish cinema never fails to impress, although I have only seen two or three Danish films, all of them have made an impact on me. Everyone should see this film. My only negative comment may be that the ending was too happy. Some things just don't resolve as easily as that.
9/10
This was a film that was low priority on my Lovefilm account yet for some reason was sent to me last week. Starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, this is a film that sounds a lot better in the plot description than it actually is. A 'true story' (more on that later), the film follows a married couple who have a relationship breakdown and then the wife goes missing. The first hour of this film was jumbled mess, and while it looked very nice, it didn't explore the relationship deeply enough, and the audience was left to assume that the relationship failed simply because they wanted different things and that the husband had some form of mental health problems. There was little development and the build up to the second half of the film is to be frank, quite boring. The problem with this film is that the story was simply not interesting enough to be made into a full length film. Maybe a short film, or an article in a crime magazine, but it just isn't that interesting. It feels way too long even though it is relatively short at a run time of 90 minutes. Gosling and Dunst do their best with a lousy script but it's not enough to save it. Not awful, it's watchable, but not recommended. The film also annoyed me by showing extreme bias by portraying an innocent man as guilty when he had been found not guilty by the US courts in real life.
5/10
More information on the real life case on which All Good Things is based here.
More information about the Stigmata phenomenon on which the film Stigmata is based here.
#CONTEXT
:)
Ollie x
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