I saw a French movie the other day called Cache. The premise is that a family is receiving surveillance video tapes of their house wrapped in violent, childish drawings.
If this were to happen to you, what would be your next course of action?
Call the police? Me too. Evidently, the screenwriter thought otherwise.
stupid
stupid
stupid
I kept expecting the story to reveal a reason why the cops weren’t called immediately, but no…
I live in the Niagara Region and it never even played in theatres, here. No way would a distributer or theatre owner risk that kind of kind of public outrage.
How the Hell did anyone think that would be a popular movie? If you wanted to explore the ideas behind it - choose someone who’s not still a factor in the news. And who’s been adequately punished in the public’s view. Egads…
Not by much. Ransom irritated me for it’s totally unnecessary audience-mollifying happy ending. Had the movie been about 15 minutes shorter, it’d’ve been far better.
Yes, but the fact remains; Once a movie had been made whereby part or all of the main character’s family is kidnapped and the main character then takes matters into his own hands, said movie never needs to be done again. Is the world so boring such that lame plots need to be recycled. Can’t original lame plots be devised for just about the same amount of work?
Yeah, but if it had ended…
With Sinise collecting the reward and leaving the country, a grateful but poorer Gibson in his wake, it would have been enough of a twist to make this move stand out over all those of similar theme. The final chase depends on Sinise doing something incredibly stupid; putting himself in the same room as the kidnap victim. He should have avoided the kid as much as possible and collected his reward at Gibson’s office, or by courier.
Everything up to that point had been reasonably satisfying.
I just want to second Sweet Home Alabama, but for another reason… Why is the main character sympathetic? She walked out of a marriage without a look back or a word (classic “I went out for cigarettes”) and then we are expected to believe she is the hero as she returns? Just switch the genders, then tell me she is the hero.
Another one - The Horse Whisperer. The number of horses I’ve broke to ride is easily in the triple digits, using techniques I learned from my father, his father and his father. The movie would have you believe that every other horse trainer is cruel and abusive - only this “horse whisperer” has developed non-abusive training techniques. BS, my family, and most ranchers I know have been using those techniques, and better, for over a hundred years.
Yeah, but the point is that it exists (regardless of the ending ) and we don’t need another one movie with the same plot.
Panic Room. To be fair, it seemed like some studio decisions rather than director or writer decisions were what annoyed the crap out of me. There’s one scene where a partially crippled Jodie Foster doesn’t take the opportunity to just kill the bad guy who she’s finally disabled. Seconds later, she’s on the floor, still holding the knife braced by her hip in plain sight, and the bad guy JUMPS on the damn thing. Oh no, we can’t have a good character do something “wrong,” even in the defense of her offspring. We have to have the bad character commit suicide through stupidity. The ending also was a cop out. Nope, can’t have crime rewarded in any way, gotta keep things black and white. This film is just one of the stand-out examples of the severe allergy Hollywood has to moral ambiguity.
In a similar way, Man on Fire copped out close to the end. In the original book, the little girl is raped several times and eventually is suffocated by accident in the trunk of the kidnappers’ car. Creasy is badly wounded, but lives. I think the ending of the film was changed because you couldn’t possibly reward someone who tortures and kills, no matter what the provocation, and you can’t possibly allow certain innocents to be hurt, even if that’s the most realistic outcome of the situation.
Re: Se7ven. People almost always see this as a violent and bloody movie, even though there is almost no on-screen violence. John Doe’s deeds are largely unseen. The viewer’s imagination fills in the gaps, which is why this movie is so effective. Like any well-written story, the reader/viewer is called in as an active participant. Most of what’s there is put there by you, they just provided a good outline for you.
Re: Lost in Translation. Kind of the point of the movie is that anyone can feel lonely and disconnected, even a guy who pulls down $2 million for a week of work. Having a “nice life” doesn’t actually mean that life is nice for you. Lots of people seem to have a, “There are children starving in Africa, blah, blah, stop your whining and get back to work,” excessively practical, success is all-important response to this movie.
Living in Japan can be a very surreal experience. You get over most of that after you’ve been here for a while, but for that first week or two, it’s supremely foreign. If you’ve lived here for a while, there are a few scenes in this movie that make you cringe because they’re unfortunately true-to-life. Like the fact that “translators” sometimes can’t speak English with any kind of fluency, and TV shows can be both incredibly bizzarre and so stupid that they’re actually more enjoyable if you can’t understand what anyone is saying. Sofia Coppola must have actually spent some time here to get those things right. It resonated with me.
Charlotte is not actually bored, as she says, she’s scared and feels isolated. Once she starts to break out of that mindset, with some encouragement from Bob, she starts to explore and finds those little spots of odd beauty Japan offers.
Re: The Incredibles. I can hardly believe people are missing the point here. The two quotes earlier in this thread sum it up. You guys are vilifiying the supers as wanting to preserve the status quo? Please. The supers are not allowed to use their abilities. They are encouraged to be average, to conform, to never actually do the things they know they can do. The movie was being critical of the way our society is increasingly trying to cram people into identical molds.
Buddy was a selfish, “Oh, of course I save the best stuff for myself,” megalomaniac who wanted to be adored by the public the same way he adored himself. If he were less self-absorbed, he could have been special in his own right, praised for his intellect and contributions to science and the welfare of the world. Instead, he uses his intelligence to create weapons, kidnap and murder superheroes (his rivals), and attempts to set himself up as a hero through terrorizing innocents.
??
Explanation for those of us who are clueless, please? I’m not familiar with this at all.
The movie is about Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, two of Canada’s most notorious sex killers. As a married couple, they kidnapped, raped and murdered two teenage schoolgirls in St. Catharines, ON (about 10 mins from where I live) and then dumped their dismembered bodies in Lake Gibson. Before this, Karla had drugged her sister and gave her as a “present” for Paul to use. Her sister died from an overdose of this drug. The death was ruled accidental at the time but, later, the body was exhumed and a full autopsy revealed the true nature of her death.
At the trial, Karla a truly chilling sociopath, portrayed herself as a victim and was able to plea-bargain a reduced sentence of 12 years in return for testimony against her husband. Home videos taped by the couple later emerged proving that she was, in fact, a fully complicit and willing particpant in the rape and murder of the girls. However, the terms of the plea bargain were set in stone and she has now been released with no conditions (Paul, OTOH, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement and will probably die in jail).
Understandably, the vast majority of Canadians believe that justice has not been served and there’s still a lot of anger and resentment in this community. Time has not healed these wounds and the release of this movie (timed to coincide with the release of Karla from jail) further rubbed salt in the wounds.
Hollywood movies about the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Horrid excuses about any Irish terrorist who is evil being an “exception” of some sort, painfully bad attempts at a Belfast accent (which is a bad enough accent as it is), portrayals of terrorists as ninjas of some sort…
…while the spoiler boxes are still malfunctioning. But I’m curious…
Okay, how does it change the premise for you? This is not a big deal to me, but since you brought it up, I would think that her carrying a torch would be less understandable if they’d never been romantically/sexually linked. As in, “He never thought about you That Way before, so why should he start now?” Whereas, their being ex-lovers leaves open the possibility that that “one. hot. month” hadn’t fully satisfied Roberts, so she was still looking for closure.
Well, no opposition there. In fact, he wasn’t really voiding the promise, even. They agreed to marry if neither of them found their soulmate before age 28. Mulroney met Diaz well before the deadline, so he was acting within the terms of the agreement. Sure, Roberts had been counting down for the last year or more, but it was still her choice to become “fungus”; Mulroney didn’t betray her.
Also, I like the bit towards the end where Rupert Everett’s character says to Roberts, “He’s chasing her. You’re chasing him. Who’s chasing you? No one. Get it?” I usually avoid rom-coms, so I don’t know how unusual this is, but based on others’ gripes about them, I gather that it is hardly commonplace: the lead’s sidekick telling them straight up “You’re just making an ass of yourself. Stop.”