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Carl.MoviesToSee

i can't vouch for these, because obviously i haven't seen them yet. somebody recommended them to me, or I heard about them and they seemed interesting. if you have recommendations (or want to un-recommend one of these), tell me about it.

• Across The Universe
• Antonia's Line
• The Banger Sisters
• Bridge on the River Kwai
• Brokeback Mountain
• Capote
• Charlie Bartlett
• Charlie Wilson's War
• Children of Men
• Coffee & Cigarettes
• Cold Mountain
• The Constant Gardener
• Edge of America
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
• The Fog of War
• Fuerza
• Good Night, and Good Luck
• Hoop Dreams
• Howl's Moving Castle
• I'm Not There
• Into The Wild
• The Italian Job
• Jane Eyre
• Junebug
• King Corn
• The Kite Runner
• The Last King of Scotland
• Lone Star
• Michael Clayton
• Munich
• My Dinner With Andre
• My Name is Rachel Corrie
• The Namesake
• No Country for Old Men
• No End in Sight
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Pan's Labyrinth
• Penguins Under Siege
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
• The Pursuit of Happyness
• Ratatouille
• The Real Dirt on Farmer John
• The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
• The Royal Tenenbaums
• Saved
• Seven Samurai
• Sherrybaby
• Sicko
• The Sting
• Syriana
• Taxi to the Dark Side
• The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
• There Will Be Blood
• Three Kings
• Tortilla Soup
• V for Vendetta
• Waitress
• Water
• The Weather Underground
• What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire
• When the Levees Broke
• White Oleander
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Why We Fight

movies i saw recently

• Spirited Away - best animated film I have ever seen. Powerful.
• March of the Penguins - watched it two days before Emory was born. A strange sort of inspiration in preparing for a birth.
• Trois Couleurs: (Blue, White and Red) - loved them!
• The Fifth Element - weird and fun.
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - brilliant.
• Edge of America - a warm and fuzzy Chris Eyre film.
• Sense and Sensibility - Not as well-directed or acted as Pride and Prejudice. Otherwise, the same film. Good for mindless late-night zoning-out.
• Tsotsi - I thought it was alright, if a bit predictable. Haven't read the book. Eric has read the book, and he's no fan of the movie.
• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou - Stopped watching halfway through and wasn't the least bit tempted to finish it. For some reason everyone raves about this Christopher Guest comedic fake documentary stuff, but without exception I've found every single one I've watched to be excessively stupid and almost entirely unfunny. This applies equally to This is Spinal Tap and Waiting for Guffman. I don't think I'll even bother to see Best in Show or that recent one about folk music.
• Pride & Prejudice - The new one, with Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen?. We liked it a lot - watched it several times already. Partly that's because when life is overwhelming it's tempting to stick with the known (fun romantic Jane Austen) instead of delving into the intense unknown (Crash and Rosewood are both waiting on the shelf). But this film stands up to re-watching very well: most scenes have several layers, with interesting things happening in the foreground and background. Plus, you can go through the entire movie just admiring the acting.
• Mission Impossible 3 - Well-done in a number of ways, but just way too much gratuitous violence and pulse-pounding action, which squeezes out more interesting things, like plot development and cool spy toys. I liked the Vatican sequence and a few other scenes, but for most of the film I just wished they'd stop with all the shooting/beating/exploding for a minute and do something interesting. I didn't see Mission Impossible 2 (which I've mostly heard is terrible), but number three didn't come close to measuring up to the first one in my book. Which is disappointing, because I loved the first one and would really enjoy a good sequel.
• Ice Age: The Meltdown - Not nearly as good as the first Ice Age. Same characters, but fewer funny one-liners, a less interesting plot line, and more pointless musical scenes. Typical bad sequel.
• Eat Drink Man Woman - It's been a bit too long since I saw this. I remember that I enjoyed it and thought it was well done. The opening scene gave me a real hankering for some quality Chinese food, which was a little distracting throughout the rest of the film.
• The Red Violin - Gorgeous in every way. Well worth seeing just for the overwhelming visual and aural richness - landscapes, music, language, etc. On the other hand, I found it a bit emotionally detached - too many characters over too many hundred years, and none of them with enough screen time to get attached to. Has a bit of a whodunit twist to it as well (with tricks like repeating the same scene multiple times from different vantage points) but the whodunit aspect wasn't complex or subtle enough to draw me in either. By the climax of the plot I found myself not even particularly caring what happened, which I think is a bad sign. But go see it anyway - it really is visually and musically stunning.
• Trudell - Saw it at last year's Native Voice film festival in Rapid City. Excellent.
• Wag the Dog - I was falling asleep during it, so I'd like to see it again. Funny, cynical. Great cast (Dustin Hoffman is a genius), and a premise appropriate to our times (presidential PR advisor creates fictional media "war" to prop up president's ratings). Of course, in reality, while the pretexts for war are often faked, the wars themselves are plenty real - real people get killed and maimed and so on. Perhaps because of this, the film didn't ring true to me. It was entertaining and interesting, but I was disappointed that it went so "over the top" as a parody of our spin/media/TV-is-reality culture that it almost lets itself be dismissed as nothing more than a parody. Maybe I'm just too serious, but in a way I'd rather watch Fahrenheit 9/11 and see how it's actually done.
• Ray - Not bad, not great. Predictable "wealthy famous musician has drug and relationship problems" formula. Most of the film is Ray descending into junkie-dom and betraying all of his friends - then his "redemption" is tacked on as a quick afterthought with a couple captions at the end.
• Walk the Line - Really the same movie as Ray, except Johnny Cash is white. Odd that I happened to see these two practically-identical films within a week of each other.
• Well, they're not really movies, but thanks to my MeyerBros I finally grabbed some Firefly episodes off Netflix, and they were well worth the time. I've now got the whole collection and watched most of it two or three times. Now my MeyerBros tell me I need to check out Buffy, but I'm not convinced. I think I prefer spaceships to vampires - more Nerd than Goth, I guess.
• Serenity - Like Firefly, but more so. Good, though sometimes there's a bit too much 'more so'. More violence, more action and exposition packed into too-short spaces. I think it suffers a bit from the fact that Joss Whedon had several more years' worth of TV-episode plots cooked up and then had to pack a bunch of his ideas into the movie.