Smokin' Aces - Took me a while to get to this movie, been after it for like a year. Jesus christ is it a gigantic cluster fuck of characters, alliances, snarkiness, and crazy ass violence. 2/3 of the movie is a plot setup for the retarded fragfest that is the last bit. It's kind of hard to keep track of, and not totally worth it. So it's ridiculously over the top, and yet kinda takes itself too seriously, but I guess it's a good time, if you try not to care as much as the movie does. PS, the ending is not Kaiser Soze. I'm pretty sure we are post-soze (and post- sixth sense, for that matter) and that can't be done again, so stop trying.
All The King's Men (2006) - This is a remake of a 40s movie, about 30s Louisiana politics. It's all about power, populism, and corruption. There is a funny resonance with Oil! which I am still reading. The movie is mostly an excuse to watch Sean Penn act, who is wonderful as a master orator and politician, Willie Stark. There are times when Stark seems almost lost while he is impassioned, and I hope that's on purpose. The rest of it, mostly about corruption, just makes you feel depressed and hopeless. But it's a good enough movie. Reading reviews now that I'm done (I alwayas want to write what I think before I let myself be influenced!) it seems there is a general attitude of disappointment, that this movie pales in comparison to the original and the book. I admit the plot was convoluted and didn't mean much to me. I discarded it as my lack of interest and the aforementioned despair. But the suggestion is that the previous incarnations made it interesting, so maybe this movie isn't so good after all. Penn is still great though.
Partition - Take equal parts romeo & juliet, west side story (I know, same thing), jungle fever, and a cheesy as romance movie, and put it all on the pakistan/india border, and if you have Partition. It's an interesting setting, the 40s/50s right after india & pakistan split and there were massacres, mass relocations, and all manner of badness. Unfortunately, take that away and it is the most basic boring, cliche, trite opposite sides of the track love story. The main guy does a pretty good job, but everyone else kinda sucks. Unfortunately it's just amateur in almost every way, I'm sorry to say.
Illegal Tender - This movie was remarkably adequate! I know that isn't exactly high praise, but I kind of expected it to be awful, and it wasn't. It's not fantastic at all, and there were certainly a number of times I just sighed and wished that one thing had been this other thing which would have been really great. Some stuff was kinda silly. I could feel myself rewriting the script in my head. But that being said, it is better than a lot of gangbanger movies out there. The actors do okay in Low-expectation Vision, too. It keeps up pretty well, i didn't get bored. Pretty good soundtrack too.
Teeth - Booooooooo. This movie was kinda awful. The idea is the vagina dentata myth thing. So I haven't seen anything dramatizing it before, could be interesting, right? Could be a this female power, feminist thing, right? OR it could be a horribly acted, mediocerly written, ridiculous excuse to show someone with his business all chopped off and bloody. multiple someone's, acutally. So bad, such a failure of an idea, really dissappointing.
Arsenic & Old Lace - Heh, this movie was pretty fun. The first half is actually really great. Over the top and weird, but fun. Cary Grant's acting is just silly, everything is huge eyes and shocked looks and moving his head back and forth like a stereotypical ghetto chick. But that's all perfectly okay, and it's fun. Second half gets kinda dumb. Trouble is when your movie has a ridiculous premise, is that you have nowhere to go but up on the ridiculous scale. I guess the argument is that these types of comedy are supposed to do that. And that you aren't supposed to even have disbelief to suspend if you have tuned in. But meh, at a certain point I rolled my eyes more than I laughed. But it's still thumbs up, just with a caveat!
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