Poofterama (poofterama) wrote, @ 2009-02-25 20:08:00

feb 09 movie log
Changeling Rating: B
Eastwood truly is one of our greatest living directors: throw period drama, women prison drama, psycho killer drama, courtroom drama, as well as Lara Croft at him, and he will still be able to blend and bend it all into a film unmistakably his own. What's even more impressive, 'Changeling' can work as an allegory of political detention in Singapore too!

Doubt Rating: C+
This should play powerfully on a bare stage (I like how every plot twist forces me to reassess the central moral mystery), but I can't tell if its inadequacy as a film is really due to the inhospitability of the medium to the material, as some critics have suggested. Many Bergman films, after all, are airless chamber pieces of theater.

The Reader Rating: C
Merchant and Ivory might approve, but this year's 'Atonement' has one serious liability: the female lead, on which the story pivots, is completely unbelieveable. Also, while it is so daring and provocative etc for the film to hint at the holier-than-thou attitude of some Holocaust survivors, the film itself could do with some self-interrogation: does it really believe, for one, that a Nazi could be redeemed by reading Chekhov?

The Wrestler Rating: A
Here's a performance that dug so deep and packed so much feeling, it shores up all the film's weaknesses (an overly symmetrical structure with clichéd situations and clichéd characters), stunning the narrative into truth.

Slumdog Millionaire Rating: C
The surfeit of movement and color must have distracted most critics from realizing the film is an empty vessel -- we never got to know the characters, or why the leads love one another, or where that gun came from, or why the characters, halfway through the film, switched to English without needing to learn it in school first, or why we should buy the conceit that every question in a game show could be connected to the lead's past. Very very shoddy.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Rating: C+
On the other extreme, you have a film with every detail so thoroughly worked out, it numbs. The only thing I find curious is what drew Fincher, an otherwise coolheaded and cool-obsessed director, to such kitsch.

	yeah! lankylee 2009-02-26 05:55 (link)
	I'm glad I'm not the only one around to not like slumdog. dunno le, maybe I was in a bad mood that day, but with the kids and all, I was relatively unmoved. even rahman's music seemed like something recycled from bombay dreams. dunno la, i think its just bad storytelling. (Reply to this) (Thread)